Creating and Building Effective Multilingual Library Collections

Shabeena Mathiruban

Hill, J. (2018). Building for Diversity: How Public Libraries Can Create Great  Multilingual Collections. Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management, 14. https://doi.org/10.5931/djim.v14i0.7854

This article discusses how to build multilingual collections in public libraries through community consultations, collaborating with other libraries, working with vendors, cataloging and maintaining the collection, marketing, and providing staff training. When creating a multilingual collection, the first step is understanding the demographics of the community which can be obtained from community data found online or from your own research. Next, to understand the needs and interests of the community, libraries can do community consultations with library patrons. Librarians can do studies with patrons through paper surveys or observations to obtain this crucial information. They also need to determine how broad they want to create their multilingual collection by looking at the demographic data, as communities with large immigrant populations may need a more comprehensive multilingual collection. Moreover, hiring bilingual staff that can communicate with library patrons in their non-English language is beneficial. Overall, this article provides numerous ways libraries can create an effective multilingual collection for patrons to meet their information needs.  

From the article, I liked the idea of doing community consultations to understand the needs and interests of multilingual library patrons. The library system I work at primarily uses demographic data to determine which languages to include in their multilingual collections, however community consultations are usually not conducted. I have seen many multilingual books that are not circulating at my library and have been discarded, because they do not meet the interests of the patrons. I think community consultations can be very beneficial in creating a relevant collection that meets the needs and interests of diverse communities. Moroever, I liked that this article mentions the importance of hiring bilingual library staff as this greatly assists patrons with language barriers.