CHiLES began when the developer, Amanda Sharpe, was in graduate school at UCLA getting her degree in MLIS. As the final project for a class on multilingual information resources, Amanda, who had been a dual-language, bilingual, and Spanish immersion teacher for 6 years, decided to create an online Spanish-English vocabulary guide for children's librarians. In the course of researching the project, however, she realized that there was very little out there for librarians who wanted to know more specifically about working with Latino and/or Spanish-speaking children and youth.

A small project quickly morphed into a much larger one. After surveying the members of REFORMA about what they would like to see in a website for Children's librarians serving Latinos, it become clear that the website needed to have more than just vocabulary. Librarians wanted programming ideas, collection development tips, outreach ideas -- but most importantly, they wanted a connection to the community of other librarians doing the same thing. With that purpose in mind, CHiLES was developed in late 2008 and early 2009, and was launched in July of 2009 in a beta version, with only content, but little user interaction.

The site is constantly undergoing revision, but with this latest iteration, the community has finally arrived. The CHiLES 2.0 upgrade includes the ability to register and create a user profile, comment on articles, post your own articles and attachments, post weblinks, or participate in the community forum. So get involved, and become a part of the Chiles community.