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”

Translators

I was curious about the usability of online translating programs in the library, but I realized that it could be another research project.  I briefly looked at the three most frequently mentioned online translators, which are Google Translate, Babel Fish, and Bing Translator.  Google seems to have more languages supported than the other two.  My main concern is that people who don’t use the alphabet in their languages such as Chinese or Arabic can not use these programs unless the library provide special keyboards for each language.  According to Wikipedia, Google Translate launched a new service that allows the use of romanization of some languages including East Asian languages, but I couldn’t figure out what it really means.  At first I thought it would work with the romanized pronunciation system of the language, and tried typing in “Ni hao ma?”  but it didn’t work as I expected.  As I said, it will need another new research project.  However, I think the library can consider embedding Google Translate in its website.  Even though many libraries have their websites in multiple languages, it helps only the speakers of a few dominant languages in the area.  The library website can be accessible to a lot more non-English, non-dominant foreign language speakers by embedding Google Translate.  

a little more progress

Today I received the articles from the MNSU library that I requested through inter-library loan, and I am glad that I requested them.  I found one of them particularly useful because it was about a library in Australia where the librarians had very similar questions as I have for this inquiry project, and showed how they approached to the problem.  Again, I was assured that this year’s census would be a wonderful chance for the libraries to acquire valuable information in the demography of the community the library is located in.  The census will show not only the percentage of minority people in the community but also what languages they speak, their income and education level, and their ability to speak English.  I believe this kind of information will be pivotal in fine tuning the direction of library services.  Once you grasp the characteristics of your community members, it will be much easier to understand their information needs.

Another interesting thing that I found is that the library in Australia implemented a multicultural portal called “My Language Portal” which supports more than 60 languages. I got very interested in this portal because the article says it will bridge “the inevitable gap in collections caused by an inability to immediately provide in-house appropriate resources for recently arrived and diverse migrant communities”  I will need to further investigate how it works or if there are other multicultural portals.

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.

EBSCO

I started my research using EBSCO through MNSU library.  The search terms I could think of at first were library, minority, and diversity.  I went to the advanced search page, and in the first box typed in “library” and in the second box typed in “minority or diversity”.  Unlike a few years ago, it brought up a lot of articles.  Even though it still couldn’t filter out articles about bio-diversity or crop diversity, I thought the search results were pretty good.  Skimming through the articles, I noticed that the subjects of them include “multicultural” and “immigrants”.  Those two seemed to be very good subject terms.  So I started a new search adding these two terms in the second box and connecting all of them with “OR”s.  This time it brought up even more articles than the first search.  I believe there were more than 300 of them.

The next step was to sort out the articles and to save relevant ones separately in My Folder in EBSCO. Sometimes, looking at the title was sufficient to figure out what the article was about, but often they had very obscure titles.  In this case, I had to check the abstract.  I found that EBSCO had a very convenient feature for this purpose.  At the end of every title, you can see a picture of a magnifying glass on a document.  If you place your mouse on it, it opens a pop-up window that shows all the useful information about the article such as date, subjects, and abstract.

In the end, I could save about 80 articles in My Folder.  But now I have to figure out how many of them are available in full text through the library.  That will be my next task – finding out their availability, and if not available, deciding on whether or not to request them through inter-library loan.

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.