StackMap Delivers for Spanish-speakers, Accessibility Needs, and Ethical Data Practices

Auraria Library serves three Denver-based colleges and wanted  mapping software that reflects the diversity of their institutions. In a recent phone call, Lorelle Gianelli, Serials & Stacks Manager, shared how StackMap’s team helped the library customize the software’s colors,buttons and translate text directions into Spanish to promote accessibility for their vast Spanish-speaking population. She also talked about how StackMap’s minimum data collection policy reflects their own ethical standards. 

I received funding to get a three-year StackMap subscription in February 2022, and we started implementation in June 2022. We worked with Troy, an Implementation Engineer on the StackMap team, and he was helpful and let us customize many things. We customized the colors so that they would be consistent with our brand colors, that was really cool. We customized the button itself. I think most libraries have it say ‘Map It’ but we got some feedback that ‘Find It’ would make more sense for us. We also added an “Ask Us Desk,” for anatomical models and technology (laptops, wifi hot spots, etc.). It was really easy to add that location..

Auraria serves the University of Colorado Denver, the Metropolitan State University, and the Community College of Denver. We have a lot of Spanish-speaking and international students. Troy helped us create maps with Spanish-language directions for our catalog. I worked with my Spanish-speaking colleagues to change the text to make sure that it was accurate.

I was just impressed by the responsiveness. Everything was always addressed really quickly. 

We create Vendor Ethics Profiles for most of the vendors we work with. We look at ethics, diversity, accessibility, and sustainability. We also want to protect our patron data. We don’t want details about our students shared without them knowing or shared by a third party for marketing purposes. When I looked into StackMap, I read the privacy policy and learned they only collect minimum data. I was happy with the policy because a lot of policies allow companies to collect a ton of data and share it with everyone and keep it forever. So, that was one thing where I was like, ‘oh this seems like a solid, ethical company to work with.’

Accessibility is a big priority for us, both in the physical space and online. StackMap was really helpful in providing an Accessibility Performance report; they’re very aware of accessibility and make it a priority, which is really positive. 

- Lorelle Gianelli, Serials & Stacks Manager, Auraria Library