Change believing before needs assessment?

10^th May is Mother’s day, my daughter bought me a pair of hair clips. The shape and the color matches my hair style, hair color, my skin color and my age and my personality. The type of the hair clips is what I have been longing for. I was so excited. Do you know how much are they? They are less than USD1. This tells me one thing. Anything once satisfy the needs of users are good thing even the price is cheap. When we start the course, the textbook <Collection Development using the Collection Mapping Technique: a Guide for Librarians > (Loertscher, & Crompton, 2018, p.121) told us needs assessment is one of initial steps to start a collection development. What are the needs of our users? The textbook gives us some tips e.g. demographic, social status, population, age and history of the community and etc. I would say that what people’s believing should be on of initial facts to consider when decide the materials selection criterial. I remember when our school promoted graphic novels to our Chinese student 2 years ago, the promotion was complained by many parents as they believed the graphic novels are childish and nothing to do with English study. What those parents believed is that their children should read classic books in English. The believing is from years of education they received in Chinese education system. The result is our Grade 9 students lost interest in reading those classic books after read them for few chapters as the language of those books are difficult for them to understand and there are many culture background information are new to our Chinese students. As a result of bad reading experience, they lost interest and confident to read other English novels in the following school year. Therefore, at the beginning of school year from last school year, English department and I will discuss with parents why we allow students to choose English novels by themselves, why graphic novels are necessary for their children to read as a start point to reading English novels at more complex level later on. This is why I argued the starting point of collection development could start from changing believing and perception of parents if schools like mine, has vast students who are weak in English literature.

Reference:

Loertscher, D.V., & Crompton, M. (2018). Collection Development using the Collection Mapping Technique: a Guide for Librarians. (3rd ed. PP.121).  Salt Lake City, Utah: Hi Willow Research and Publishing