Librarians create Arab book award
By: U- WIRE
Issue date: 10/17/07 Section: Campus

Crosetto, the acquisitions librarian and coordinator of collection development for Carlson Library at the University of Toledo, said she was reviewing a book about ethnic book awards and was struck by a glaring omission.

"There's no Arab-American book award -- where's the award for the Arab-American literature?" she said.

Crosetto shared her bemusement with two other faculty members, and soon, they created a national book award.

Mark Horan, librarian for the college of education, and Rajinder Garcha, former professor for library administration, helped Crosetto create the Arab-American National Museum Book Award.

"We contacted the library director at the Arab American National Museum [in Dearborn, Mich.] and they were interested [in helping us]," Crosetto said. "We had an initial meeting, and just talked about it."

It took a lot of work, Crosetto said.

"We met once a month and developed a vision, a vision statement, the guidelines, the parameters and everything," she said. "We were just hopeful of what this could be and a year and a half later, it finally was a reality."

Getting people to understand who Arab Americans are is complicated, Horan said.

"Just the turmoil of being the first, all the issues that arise from defining who an Arab American is to just what is the criteria ... in that category," he said. "It's difficult, especially that last issue: the issue of who is an Arab American."

"Mark and I attended our American Library Association conference in New Orleans over a year ago and we started advertising for this," Crosetto said. "The minute we said, 'Arab American,' people automatically assumed we were talking about Muslims, and the museum is not a religions museum. The museum is for Arab Americans from the 22 countries that share a basic language: Arabic."