[Music] the national medal for Museum and
Library Services is the nation's highest honor for libraries and museums that are
serving their communities in exceptional ways Marshall Town Public Library
director Sarah Rosen Bloom and Community member Veronica Gua traveled to
Washington from Marshall toown Iowa to receive the national medal and spoke to
imls about how the library impacts the community well the Marshal Public
Library is in um nestled in the fields of central Iowa and it's an amazing
community of 27,500 people and it's seen a huge change a huge shift in the the
Dem the demographics in our community and I think the library has really risen
to the challenge of kind of bridging our um our older community and then our
newer Community which about 20 years ago um really started to change dramatically
we're almost 25% Latino and now we have a growing Burmese community and really
the library is one of the first places that these new immigrants seem to come
to and we welcome that we're we're thrilled that we're able to help them a
number of our residents you know did not complete high school and so we've
recognized that and so we offer uh an online database that can help them study
with that we work with the training Education and Training Center um we want
people to be able to come to the library better themselves so they they can you
know they can do better and we see a lot of that in our community the public
library has an immense ability to change people's lives and improve their lives
but I think in a smaller Community Library we are very invested in our
community and our community members um we we very my staff knows most of our
users by name they know their children and their family and I think that um we
we take a real interest and we want to help all the members of our community my
parents are originally from the state of met Tran in Mexico so um I'm first
generation and uh I grew up in a household where Spanish was the primary
language and actually still is I started working at the public library my
sophomore year of high school I believe so I was
15 um and um so I would I worked at the library so I spent quite a bit of time
there and even if I didn't work I found it just a nice place to go and study or
read and be peaceful um so I I would go to the library for that and um as I got
older and uh started going to college I would also
study there and it became kind of a my study
place the emerge program at the Marshal toown Public Library was started about
10 or 11 years ago and it's a wonderful program in conjunction with the public
school and each sixth grader um comes to the library every month during the sixth
grade year and they work with our youth services department um we do special
programs we teach them about all the resources we have lots of fun but we
also also want to get them at sixth grade so that they we can lay that
foundation so as they move into junior high and high school that they know that
there's these wonderful resources that can help them be
successful this kind of dovetails in with lots of other projects in our
community we have a where if kids um we we know that there's there's scholarship
assistance available for them to go to our community college and so these are
all things that we want to help them or prepare them for the library helped me
many different ways um and in my college career um I attended the community
college in Marshall toown for two years and close to the end of my career there
I was uh very nervous about finding resources and scholarships for uh the
university and um I asked I remember asking just how to even go about
searching for things I wasn't really sure how to even start looking for
scholarships and they introduced me to different scholarship books and um I
applied for a lot of them um one that I remember remember then I can't really
forget is um the Congressional Hispanic caucus Institute scholarship I applied
for that I think um in 2011 and I received the scholarship and that kind
of uh opened the doors to um being uh becoming aware of the internship and I
wasn't I wasn't so sure about um the chances of actually getting this
internship since it was a competition on on the national level and uh surely
enough I ended up getting that um internship that I completed last fall
actually and I really don't think my um I would have been able to obtain that
without the library and with the without the library's resources and um the help
of the staff so it's that classic American story of people came over here
in that first generation and they worked hard um so that their children can go to
college just like Veronica and and the library plays a part in that and like
and Veronica talked about her experience of finding resources there there are so
many res sources out there but so many people don't know where to turn and I
think the library we do I think a very good job of helping people um get in
touch with these resources um the Congressional Hispanic caucus Institute
um what they do is they bring you into Washington and they help you find a
placement on the hill whether mostly it is um with the house but um a few people
end up um in the Senate side and they bring you they pay for your
transportation and your housing and it's a paid internship and they just really
help you network and um see what DC life is about so really for me the metal is
showcasing the work that we've done in the past and the ongoing work and
getting the recognition we are a small Library we're we're not a large Library
we don't have a a a big staff but we do amazing programs we just work really
hard um and it's great though to get the recognition it's great for Iowa we're
very much part of the community and I and I I really love that that