20B - AA - LIBRARY GRANT - Laserfiche WebLink

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EXIBIT C Organizationa8 Profile In 1891 the City of Santa Ana established its public library. The system expanded over the years to include a 1903 Carnegie library and 3 branch locations. In 1961 the Carnegie library was replaced with by a larger central library at 26 Civic Center Plaza. This location has served as the central library ever since. The library informally adopted its mission statement in the mid - nineties: to respond to our community's informational, educational, and personal interest needs using books, materials, technology, and professional expertise. Most recently, the Santa Ana Public Library became a division of the Parks and Recreation Department and began to bring library programming services into recreation centers around the city. The City of Santa Ana has a population of 329,915, residing in an area of 27.2 square miles in the center of Orange County, California. Despite being the county seat and the home of Orange County's State, Federal and County government venues, its population is largely composed of immigrants and children of immigrants. Most are from Spanish speaking countries (78.2 %), or from Asia (8.7 %), and 60 percent of their children enrolled in Santa Ana schools are English learners. It is also among the youngest large cities in the nation, with a median age of 29.1. Our programming is divided into four functional areas: Youth, Young Adult, and Adult Services, and Technology and Support. Technology and Support, in addition to its traditional library functions, is responsible for management of and creating content for the City TV Channel 3. Young Adult Services provides an average of 45 specialized programs on a weekly basis during the school -year and an average of 100 programs during the summer months, all aimed at the overall development of Middle School, High School, and Transition Age/ College students. Young Adult Services also maintains the Santa Ana History Room, which collects and makes available to the public materials on Santa Ana history. It has pursued this goal since its founding in 1975. In 2001, an evaluation of the collection revealed a lack of materials on the growing Latino and Asian populations of the City. Since that time, the SAHR has pursued such information aggressively. In 2011, the SAHR began to cultivate the interest in and knowledge of history in young adults, creating the Teen Community Historians, who became the first Santa Ana teens in a decade to participate in the National History Day competition, and have since been instrumental in collecting oral histories for innovative CalHum and LSTA grants. The library received and successfully completed a 3 -year, $636,000 Laura Bush 21" Century Librarian Grant. Additionally, it has received for three successive years a WIA grant providing $160,00 each year for training and employing at -risk teens in digital media. These reflect one of the library's ongoing concerns: the process of bringing to our community the benefits of the technological revolution. This process began in earnest in 2001, when the History Room received an IMLS Digitization Grant that enabled staff to digitize, index, and make available online some 2000 historical photos from its extensive collection. This process has continued with the assistance of the Teen Community Historians, who have been digitizing photos from the History Room's most important collections, including nearly 2000 from the archive of a pioneering Latino family, and several hundred from the collection of the Santa Ana Zoo. 20B -108