On August 17th, the fourth shipment of 10,000 new books arrived at the American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) headquarters. This recent shipment is part of a growing initiative to increase access to English reading material and provide Mongolian Universities with updated reference material. Half of the shipment contains elementary level reading material. The remainder are scientific, medical, and business textbooks for local universities to be incorporated into future curriculum.
Opening of the container.
ACMS has been running the BOOKS FOR MONGOLIA (BFM) program in partnership with The Asia Foundation since 2013. An offshoot of the TAF’s long standing Books for Asia initiative, the program donates various English books to kindergartens, schools, universities, pubic libraries, government agencies and non-government organizations throughout Mongolia. During the last two years they have donated and distributed over 50,000 books - the goal is to reach every corner of Mongolia and make a contribution to English learning and the education sector of Mongolia.
Sorting and stacking the shipment.
Besides donating books, ACMS organizes various educational activities and events like International Literacy Day, National Book Day, World Book Day, Holiday Book Day, Books For Mongolia Day and World Read Aloud Day to promote English reading and encourage children and student to read books. In order to improve children’s ability to read English books, ACMS runs a weekly read aloud club at Children’s Book Palace.
Through the BFM program the ACMS also organizes training workshops in Mongolia for librarians, researchers and English teachers to support their professional development. These include Open Access, Knowledge Sharing and Sustainable Scholarly Communication seminars and a workshop series “Public and Academic Libraries in the 21st century”. Through this program ACMS receives 3 shipments of books per year, developing the selection in partnership with the recipient organization.
Books will also be made available to Mongolian ESL teachers attending the English Language Teachers Association of Mongolia national teachers conference at the end of September.