According to SIL statistics, nearly one half the world's non-literate population are speakers of lesser-known languages. These people are scattered all over the globe.

For those interested in developing an effective literacy program in a developing region the LinguaLinks Literacy bookshelf is designed to help you plan and manage a literacy program. The Literacy bookshelf provides resources for

• getting ready to do literacy
• planning a literacy program
• reviewing reading research
• developing an instructional program
• making literacy materials, and
• training literacy personnel.

If you prefer visual "how-to-do-its" there are interactive demos . Here are just a few that are in the Literacy bookshelf:

• Using Big Books in your literacy program
• Printing T-shirts for your literacy program
• Eclectic method
• Theme webs
• Gudschinsky primer page sample
• Laubach primer page sample
• Literacy International primer page sample
• Multistrategy primer page sample
• Phonics primer page sample
• Whole language primer page sample

Published information: If you are looking for published information you can search through the entire series of "Notes on Literacy" all part of the Literacy bookshelf.

Personal literacy advisor: The Literacy bookshelf can even act as your own personal literacy advisor. Embedded in the Literacy library is an expert system designed to help you determine the best literacy program for a given situation. By answering a series of key questions, this expert system will provide a set of recommendations for the situation you describe.

With powerful search facilities, many on-line books, an index, and a large bibliography, the LinguaLinks Literacy library is an indispensable tool for anyone doing literacy work.

For a more extensive look at the on-line books and helps that are available in the LinguaLinks Literacy library check out the LinguaLinks Library contents page.

Or, you can access many of the other resources on the LinguaLinks Library CD-ROM at this web site, http://www.sil.org.

The Art of Reading.

A new companion resource to the Literacy bookshelf is "The Art of Reading" CD-ROM, a searchable database of black and white line art from several different countries and regions of the world that can be used in the preparation of primers. The database contains both "thumbnails" of the pictures and descriptive information about each picture.