Special Populations and Issues Interest Group - Colorado Association of Libraries

Special Populations and Issues Interest Group - Colorado Association of Libraries

Are
Public Libraries Meeting the Information Needs of English-speaking African
Immigrants?

Padma
Polepeddi – padma.polepeddi@jeffcolibary.org

Presentations sponsored by CAL Special Populations and Issues Interest Group

Highlights from the June 6th, 2016 and June 20th, 2016 presentations-

My own immigrant experience
and how I’ve used and continue to use public libraries for my success,
empowerment and growth, my 20 years of public library experience in Chicago and
Colorado in several front-line and leadership roles working with diverse
populations fueled my passion to continue to research for ways libraries can
continue to impact lives of immigrants.

I received my Ph.D.
degree in Library and Information Science from Emporia State University
(Kansas) in December 2015 and my doctoral dissertation was on library hesitancy and the information
seeking behavior of English speaking African immigrants using public library
spaces. The findings from my study seek to fill gaps in the area of public
library services to English-speaking African immigrants by addressing their
information needs.

Issues
discussed:

·        
How can public library resources and/or
services meet the information literacy needs of new English-speaking African
immigrants (arrived in U. S. after 2000)?

·        
How can new African immigrants become
information literate as it is understood in the U.S.?

Why
should you be interested?

• African-born population in the U.S. doubled
  from 881,300 in 2000 to 1.6 million in 2012 (from U.S. Census Bureau –
  Oct, 2014).  Number of African
  immigrants in Colorado nearly tripled from 9,763 in 2000 to 28,731 in
  2011(from Migration Policy Institute - 2013).
• Seven-in-ten Africans speak English very well
  and two-fifths of African immigrants have at least a Bachelor’s
  degree(from American Immigration Council report - 2007)

·        
Growing
trend in English-speaking immigrants entering the U.S. prompts libraries to
look more closely at how information needs of English-speaking immigrants are
being met.

These
are the recommendations I bring to library professionals from my research
study-

·        
Public librarians must recognize that the new
immigrants experience library hesitancy - Individuals exhibit a type of
disinclination that manifests itself as a sense of false confidence based in a
belief that one has everything they need to be successful.  Findings in this study suggest that this type
of disinclination is due to a feeling of self-assurance and strength.

·        
Public librarians may be making a big
leap in their estimation of the abilities of the English speaking Ethiopian
immigrants to understand English language and to use it to identify, or convey,
an information need. 

·        
The reality is that the learning
abilities of the participants in my study was based on their early learning
situations in Ethiopia, which are not very effective for developing
communication tactics necessary for productive participation in jobs or careers
in a democratic society. 

·        
The reality also is that the
communication abilities of the participants in the study were at very
elementary levels that results in linguistic isolation from those who can
assist them in the library.

·        
Public librarians must assume the
responsibilities of knowing when to stop pushing library resources and programs
to new immigrants that are designed for high functioning English speakers.

·        
Public librarians could make use of this
study’s new description of cultural competency that addresses disparities
including: 1) varying language acquisition abilities; 2) varying educational
and cultural backgrounds; and, 3) economic stability and instability.

·        
 Public
libraries should strive to meet information literacy needs of new immigrants
once library services are re-set to correspond to the findings in this study
and to what is ahead for libraries as society becomes more diverse.

Comments
from library professionals who attended this presentation

Did you find the
information relevant and useful? Most of
the information was new to me. Even with conducting the Usage study at May in
2012, the information you presented was a very different look at the way immigrants
use a library.  Your personal story of
discovering libraries in Chicago, and how you interacted with retail store
staff, illustrated how revolutionary libraries are too many newcomers to the U.
S.  We take libraries for granted and
assume it is our right to have them!

I also liked the discussion of expectations by
immigrants.  Storytime was frivolous to
them as they had no frame of reference on different learning styles!  What an eye opener for me.  I hope I can phrase my questions and
information when helping patrons to improve their understanding of our
services.

I was upstairs floating for part of the
afternoon after your presentation, Padma. 
I was asked by a black man what he had to do to leave the library.  Evidently, he thought we had to check his
bags or something.  Of course I said if
he had nothing to check out he merely needed to walk out the door.  This question would have surprised me much
more if I had not just attended your talk! 
Thank you!

PAMELA
BAGBY

LIBRARIAN

A R A P A H O E  L I B R A R I E S 

303-792-8999 ext. 12103

direct line 303-391-3171

pbagby@ald.lib.co.us

What specifically
did the presenter do well?

I really appreciated the emphasis on personal connections in
researching and coming up with solutions for serving this group and other
populations.

peg hooper

public services manager

adult services

Jefferson County Public Library

8485 Kipling

Arvada, co 80005

p 303.403.5100

f  303.403.5115

peg.hooper@jeffcolibrary.org

A Great Year of Tech News

Thank you to everyone who contributed by reading or posting to Tech Talk this last year.  It was quite an adventure for our Neighborhood Libraries team!  We have reached almost 10,000 page views on our blog. We will be no longer be actively posting to this site, but please feel free to continue to use the information provided.  We are now into full swing into Summer Reading on Pinterest. 

WeTransfer for sending big files

Sometimes you need to send a really big file to someone. Often times it is too big to send in an email. However; you don't want to sign up for a program and have to remember your username and password every time. With WeTransfer, you can send a file up to 2G in size, no sign up necessary. You just need to have an email address (no password needed) and of course you need to know who to send it to. 
Here are the steps:
-Go to: www.wetransfer.com
-Pick the file you want to send (If you want to send multiple files, create a zipfile)
-Enter your email address
-Enter recipient's email address
-Send!
The other person gets an email that says they can download the file. It stays on a 3rd party server for 2 weeks, then disappears.

This is a good website if you just need to send something that is a one-time deal. :)
 

ifttt: If this, then that

I came across an article about "ifttt: If This Then That". This is a web-based service that you an use with your various online identities, services, and places for storing and recording info. In the channels feature it describes numerous items, such as Evernote, Zootool, foursquare, and many more. Several of them I was not acquainted with, so this helped me.

10 ways to re-use your old gadgets

Sometimes technology moves so fast that we don't know what we can do with our old gadgets!
(You may need to get some help though!)


Here's a link to some interesting ways to find another use for your older items.
http://lifehacker.com/5901650/top-10-awesome-things-you-can-do-with-the-underused-gadgets-you-already-own?tag=lifehacker-top-10

Facebook's Biggest Privacy Threat May Be You

According to an article posted in the Techlicious Blog, Facebook's Biggest Privacy Threat May Be You. 
There are also several ideas in the blog to help you with setting and protecting your privacy.

Diigo

I always loved the idea of bookmarking sites, where you can store bookmarks to sites you visit in the cloud, but I never wound up using a service consistently. I tried delicious, but never got used to how it organized your sites, and when it looked like they were going to be sold and shut down, I shifted over to Google Bookmarks. I loved their "list" feature because it was similar to using folders instead of having to tag every link like on delicious. But then, Google shut down their list feature--just turned it off! All my beautifully curated lists were thrown into one big pile with one tag. Needless to say I was frustrated and looked again for another alternative. After surfing, reading, and researching, at the beginning of February I started up on Diigo.

Like delicious, Diigo is a web-based social bookmarking site. So far I think it's the best of the 3 sites I've used! Here are some of the reasons I like it:

• The toolbar is easy to use. If I highlight text on a webpage before I click "Bookmark this page," the highlighted text is automatically saved to the "Description" box. Very handy!
• I can mark everything private, or allow others to see what I've saved.
• I can highlight sentences on the website, and Diigo saves them for me! When I go back and visit a bookmarked site, my highlights are still there. (No more wondering why exactly I thought this site was worth bookmarking!)
• I can also post "sticky notes" on a page, too, with my own comments about it. Kind of like writing in the margins of a book!
• You can email your highlighted, sticky-noted site to a friend, and THEY can see your highlights and notes, too.
• When I go back and look at my bookmarks, the sentences I've highlighted show up in the annotated list...which means I can see the pieces I thought were valuable without clicking through to the site itself.
• Diigo runs on tags, just like delicious and Google, but it also supports a list feature. The cool thing is you can turn your lists into handouts of links, and Diigo does all the formatting for you. 
• I haven't used the social features of Diigo yet, but I could follow other people on Diigo, just like on Twitter, and see what they bookmark. Or I could be part of a group that collects bookmarks together.

The other reason Diigo is working better for me than the other services doesn't have anything to do with them! I noticed when using Google that I had a hard time remembering what tags I used to save a site with. I knew something was there, but couldn't figure out how to get at it easily.

So before I saved a single site on Diigo, I wrote down a starter taxonomy for myself. I tried to think of the ways I remembered sites, and then came up with a brief list of tags to use consistently. For instance, I will remember if something was a slide set, or a pdf, or a video. So now I always tag each site with a format tag. I also tend to remember what type of content it was--like was it a research study, or  blog post, or a news article. So I tag everything that way too. Then I also tag something by what project I'm researching at the time. So I might tag a site with "Storytime Newsletter," or "Spark Activity Cards" or the name of a training class I'm working on. And then last but not least I also tag by subject words.

The other technique I'm using is to bookmark everything I land on while I'm researching. In the past, I would remember visiting a site, but at the time I didn't think it was worth bookmarking, and then I had a hard time finding it again! Now I try to bookmark everything I read most of the way through. Now when something I've read is nagging at me, I can be pretty sure it's in my Diigo list somewhere, and my new combination of tags helps me find it.