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.
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Hitchhiker's guide to the universe 
Hey Yeonok – this is Erik from your class. I’m curious about this topic and I’d like to see you turn it into an interesting research piece. So, allow me to play devil’s advocate and ask some of the questions on my mind. Not because I disagree with your topic but because I don’t quite understand it fully.
First off, what is the major role of any library? Is it to serve everyone in the community? In what way? As a research center? A reading center? A check-out center? Is the idea to make everyone literate (be it in English, Spanish, Mandarin or other language)? Do libraries have many texts in many languages?
I ask because I guess I am used to seeing libraries with English only texts. As you know my wife is Micronesian and no library carries texts in her language. Should they? Or should she concentrate on learning English?
When you talk about serving minorities, what is the overall plan? To get them literate in English? Or to help them read in whatever language they want to read in (be it English, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Russian, etc). It would be hard to keep texts in all languages yes? Or maybe the virtual world could keep books of all languages ready for check-out and download?
Hi, Erik
Some of your questions are philosophical in nature, I am still pondering upon those questions myself. Let me answer the easy one first. Many libraries in the twin cities have a lot of books and videos in foreign languages. Somali, Hmong and Spanish books are most commonly found, and many branches carry materials in Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Russian, etc.
I think the role of library is to meet people’s information needs. Librarians like to emphasize that libraries are not only for books. They have huge collection of audio-video material and provide free internet access and computer literacy programs. They try hard to meet any kinds of information needs that people have. In principle, every member of the community is entitled library service. That’s not practically possible, but they try within the limits of resources they have.
Librarians are not supposed to lead people to a certain direction. They are supposed to be non-judgmental – there are no good books and bad books, and people have a right to read whatever they want to. So, the main direction of my research will be what information needs minority people have and what libraries can do to meet the needs.