Waiting for the new census results

I was reading some of the articles in My Folder.  I found one of them showed how many non-English speaking people were living in the U.S.  I had probably seen it before, but the numbers still seemed significant.  According to the last census (in 2000), there were 47 million people who spoke a language other than English at home.  That means English is a second language to almost one out of five people (18%) who are older than 5 years old in this country.  It also explains that it was 47% increase since the 1990 census.

This year is a census year.  I don’t know how long it will take to collect the information and analyze the result, but it will be very interesting to see.  I have heard people saying that the Caucasians will be a minority within 50 years from now.  The census will show the trend vividly.  It might portray a very different image of America than we have thought.  I am so curious about what it will look like.

By the way, I found about two thirds of the articles I saved were available in full text, and the rest of them weren’t.  I am probably not going to read all of them because there are so many, but have started reading seemingly interesting ones.  Another important finding was that I need to think about how to help minority people with their creating the information.  When I was originally thinking about library services for minorities, I was mainly thinking how to facilitate their information access.  But one article was talking about providing minority people with alternate keyboards and facilitating the downloading of software programs in their native languages. This idea reminded me of something that I learned in the classes – the library is not only a place for consuming the information but also a place for creating the information.