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. 

Libraries and English Language Learners

Sullivan, Maureen

Libraries and English Language Learners

Lynch, G. (2015). Libraries and English language learners. School Library Journal. Retrieved from: http://www.slj.com/2015/04/diversity/libraries-and-english-language-learners/#_

Summary:

This article highlights a library in Hennepin County, Minnesota to illustrate the rich diversity of its patrons and their particular needs regarding language and culture. It also addresses the challenges involved in developing collections to meet the varied linguistic needs of its patrons. For example, the Hmong written language was only developed 50 years ago, making the availability of items in print very limited. Lynch plugs the need to hire librarians that are culturally and linguistically representative of its patrons, making recruitment of more diverse pool of MLIS students key.

Evaluation: I have experienced this challenge first hand last year, when I was trying to purchase books in Samoan for a small public school in San Francisco with a large Samoan population. I worked with the public children's librarian from the local branch as well, but their collection was also quite small. The fact that many publishers that do carry books in languages other than English are much more expensive, making meeting school library budgets match the language needs of the library especially challenging. However, that doesn't mean that librarians shouldn't strive to procure diverse materials. Our students depend on it.