My topic

I recently visited San Francisco.  Before the trip I almost decided to study about information literacy instruction in the academic library for this project.  I wanted to study how librarians can help students with information search beyond the traditional library instruction.  But after visiting San Francisco, I changed my topic to how to serve minority population in the library.  I think it will be a serious issue in a city like San Francisco that has huge Chinese and Hispanic population.  Actually I tried to research in the same topic a few years ago, but at that time, I had to give up because there had been so little research done in this topic.  I hope I can find a lot more discussions in this issue this time.

First I want to identify what issues librarians encounter in serving minority patrons.  I also want to look at the issue from the minority people’s perspective – how often they use the library, what they think about the library services.  The language barrier will be another big issue in serving these people.  I want to look at some free online translation services to see if they can be of any help in communicating with non-English speaking patrons.  I will also investigate how to develop library collections to meet their needs and how to design library programs/events so that minority people can feel the programs are relevant to them.