Reflection

I don’t think people will be particularly interested in my search experience, but the topic – serving minority patrons – is a huge issue in the  library world.  If I want to share my findings with librarians and other want-to-be-librarians, I think keeping a blog will be the best way.   But for now this research is more important as a pursuit of my personal interest.  In fact, getting near to the end of this project, I feel as if  I completed a literature review for a bigger research project.  Since I found that the topic that I am most interested in had not been studied by any researchers, to me it is like finding a gap that needs to be filled up.   My future is very uncertain at this point, but if there is a chance, I believe it will be a very meaningful research topic.

My research found that the same issue is taken seriously in Australia and Canada, but somehow no records of the European countries.  I wonder how they are doing in those countries.   I think it is a part of a bigger question – how to live with people who look different from you.  I am pretty optimistic about it, and believe the U.S. is well geared for solving the problem with its long history of accepting immigrants.  I have heard that Korea now has more than a million migrant workers mostly from China, South and Southeast Asia, and as a country that used to have one of the world’s most homogeneous population until just ten years ago,  is having a very hard time in dealing with this abrupt change.

We generally believe that children and young adults go directly to a google search when given a research project.  For the main part of my research, I mostly used online database, but for the online translators, I used google too.  In library science classes, we had profuse discussions in information search behavior, and in many occasions, children and young adults’ (I think grown ups too)   almost exclusively resorting to  google was considered to be a problem.  However, it will be really hard to convince these people to use some other “more reliable, more authentic” search tools as long as we can not provide them with a search interface that is as simple and as attractive as goole’s.  I think the information search instruction should be more focused on how to evaluate the search results from google (or Bing), rather than trying  to convince them to use some other resources.

From the first, this project looked very interesting to me, but another fun part was following other classmates’ projects.  It was pleasant surprise to me finding each person’s topic so unique, and seeing them pursuing the topics with such enthusiasm and seriousness.  I think I learned a lot from everyone’s research as well as from my own.

How to keep it for future reference

I think I have found valuable information in my research topic.  I have found interesting ideas in serving minorities, informative narrations of the librarians’ experiences, and meaningful research results.  I wanted to keep it in a safe place for my future reference.  Initially, I saved all the articles in My Folder in EBSCO, but whenever I have been inactive for a while, it shows a warning message that says “Your session has timed out.  Any items in your folder have been cleared”.  It looks more like a technical glitch because the articles are always there, but it still makes me nervous.  So I exported the citations to Refworks so that it would be safer with the redundancy.  But eventually, I will have to copy and paste all the article to a folder in my computer because after I graduate from MNSU, I won’t have any access to my Refworks or EBSCO account.  It seems like a very primitive method, but I can’t think of any other way to keep them safe.

Where are their voices?

I was most interested in the minority people’s perceptions and responses about the library collections and services, but this kind of information was hard to find.   I could find only two research studies in this topic, but one of them was about the academic library, not the public  library which is the focus of my research.  I can imagine the difficult aspects of such a research project aiming minority patrons.  However, I still wonder how librarians can understand minority people’s true information needs without asking them.  In many articles, librarians assume that minority people are mainly interested in ESL classes, citizenship, job search, etc., and I know that kind of services are  being provided in most metropolitan area libraries, but I am not sure whether these services truly reflect their wants and needs.  Many articles are simply talking about the needs to have foreign language material in the library, but not a single article discusses about the topic or format of the material – what minority people really want to see in the library.  Maybe I should design a research project if I am  ever hired by a public library.

In one of the articles, the researcher said the existence of school age children in the minority family is the most decisive factor whether or not to use the library.   I got kind of emotional reading this because it reminded me of a Chinese mother’s painful monologue in the novel Joy Luck Club – “My daughter will speak perfect English, and nobody will tease her for her accents”