Blog

As I mentioned in my recent Thanksgiving post, I plan to highlight the charitable efforts of ATR’s employees.  Our VTO, or Voluntary Time Off program, gives each internal ATR employee 5 paid days each year that they can use to work at a charitable organization(s) of their choosing.  This week we are focusing on Beethoven Sabar and her work with adult literacy.

VTO Spotlight
Beethoven Sabar is a regular at the library.  In fact, she has spent the last eighteen months working as a volunteer for the Fremont Main Library’s adult literacy program Write to Read. She began her volunteer work as a computer literacy tutor, who also pitched in with clerical work. However, she quickly discovered other ways to put her technological acumen to good use.

Write to Read possesses an exclusive collection of books for literacy classes, computer classes and reading clubs. Vital to the program as these books may be, the collection is not a part of the Alameda Library book loaning system, thus making the books highly difficult for Literary Coordinator Sally Ianiro to track.

As the number of books increased and more people used them, Ianiro’s tracking headache only grew larger. Luckily, Sabar created an elegant solution: “I proposed to create a simple Visual Basic interface where Sally can directly input all the book-borrowed transactions into an MS Access database. In this system, Sally can track books easily by managing the database and the inventory all together.”  Simple to Sabar, but surely her plan felt nothing short of miraculous to the people at Write to Read.

Write to Read implemented Sabar’s database last spring. Over the summer, she used her Volunteer Time Off to spend a day at the Fremont Main Library to see how things were going.

 

Organizing the books

 

Beethoven at work

 

Helping with the books

 

Time out for some fun and a picture

 

Fun with the library staff

 

If you want to learn more about the program you can visit Fremont Main Library website. You can also visit the Write to Read website.

You can also contact, Sally Ianiro, Literacy Specialist for Write to Read, Phone: 510-745-1573 and email at sianiro@aclibrary.org or Dr. Luis Kong, Write to Read Program Manager, with contact numbers at Information Hotline at (510) 745-1480 and Direct Number at (510) 745-1484 and email at lkong@aclibrary.org.