U.S. Embassy commemorates National Library Week

The open house at the Embassys American Resource Center (ARC), will begin at 1 pm. ARC staff will be on hand to take visitors through its many resources and amenities. Speakers drawn from educational institutions and city council libraries in different parts of Zimbabwe will hold a panel discussion in the ARC auditorium at 3pm. Both events are free and open to interested members of the public.

National Library Week has been celebrated across the United States since 1958 in order to encourage a return to reading by the American Library Association (ALA) and the American Book Publishers, which joined together to form the National Book Committee in 1954. According to the ALA, the idea for National Library Week was based on the idea that once people were motivated to read, they would use and support libraries.

The ARC and its satellite American Corner in Bulawayo have a wide range of print and electronic resources. They provide current, authoritative and comprehensive information about the United States, its policies and its social, economic and political processes. These information resources are specifically intended to meet the needs of government officials, decision makers, opinion leaders, journalists, researchers and scholars interested in the United States.

Since 2008, the ARC has provided assistance to visually impaired users at its centers in Harare and Bulawayo through the world’s most popular screen reader software, JAWS for Windows. This application allows users with visual impairment–due to blindness or low vision to access modern software applications and the internet. JAWS provides users with access to a whole world of information, education, and job-related applications for browsing the Web, reading or writing e-mail messages, working with spreadsheets and accessing information in a database.