The Challenge of Building Multilingual Collections in Canadian Public Libraries
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The Multiculturalism Policy of Canada, which "reflects a conviction that, by accepting and promoting
cultural diversity, Canadian society will develop a shared sense of Canadian identity that respects the
diversity of the country and its people"
Multilingual (ML)
Benefits of holding training sessions about the key role of ML newspapers were described, as
well as the advantages of workshops about "recent international publications . . . [so that] staff
could become familiar with the names of important fiction and non-fiction writers or titles from,
for example, Spain, Greece, the Indian sub-continent and China"
o Hmmm. This seems unrealistically optimistic. I wonder how it works out in practice.
The importance of training staff about crosscultural communication patterns insofar as "cultural
awareness can help staff to understand the impact of culture on behaviour"
"access to library materials for ethnic, cultural and linguistic groups should not be seen as
'additional' or 'extra' services, but as an integral part of every library's services"
o "The multilingual part of the library must be an oasis, not a ghetto"
o I’m confused. Are they suggesting that EVERY library cater to every ethnic group
or just to ethnic groups in the vicinity?
"to define reqnirements to build a more broadly based collection for all Canadians, including
collections in heritage languages"
o What is a heritage language? Do they mean ethnic languages?
Only the largest [libraries] are still able to maintain active resources and services in selected
heritage languages and that medium and small libraries have a very difficult time in developing
resources and providing services in languages represented by the new immigrants"
o Budget issue.
“Library collections are not diversified enough to meet the needs of swelling multicultural populations,"
One reason for the lack of collection diversity may be that budgetary constraints and staff shortages bring
about a situation where developing ML collections is viewed as an "extra" activity that does not have a high
priority level, given all the other expenditures that need to be made and low demand.
o "low demand could be the result of situations where inadequate or no service has been previously
provided, or, because of low expectations or unfamiliarity with library services on the part of
potential users"
In addition, it inquired about the presence or absence of character encoding software (e.g.,
Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic) that allows people to read materials in languages written in nonRomanized scripts.
o Sounds expensive...Also when these items are being uploaded into the library
database, what is the title? Are they using an English translation or the actual title
as it appears on the book? If they are using the actual title, cna anyone in the staff
read it? Will they know where to put it? Or do they have one section where they
lump all the Arabic books together, whether they be fiction, nonfiction, or
periodicals? In the Robarts, there are shelves of books in Urdu that cannot be
placed in circulation because there is no one on staff who can translate the Urdu so
that staff knows where that particular book belongs, who is the author, what is the
subject matter, etc. Apparently they just wait until some other academic library
finally posts the information about the book on their website and then the Robarts
staff swoops in and uses the exact same description.
Identifying demographic trends in the United States whereby Hispanic and Asian populations will account
for the major portion of population growth in the next 20 years, Nance-Mitchell (1996) called for a rapid
increase in the number of minority librarians recruited and retained in LIS programs.
Community problem-solving framed as a distributed information use environment
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Information researchers know little about either the use of information to solve community
problems
o Scholars have theorized for decades that libraries and librarians can play a vital role in
democracy
o Archives are the arsenal of public memory.
Many of Hartford's community problem-solving efforts are citizen driven and neighbourhood
based.
1) its sets of people—often those who share work or organizational settings—who share
assumptions, preferences for various media and channels, social networks, and attitudes about
certain phenomena;
2) its realization that the problems (and, importantly, their various dimensions) focused on by
these sets of people profoundly affect the kinds of information they think will be useful;
3) its recognition that the constraints and opportunities provided by the setting—most
commonly a work setting—influence information use; and
4) its understanding that attitudes and approaches to problem resolution influence information
seeking and use.
Problem-solving situations with an explicit resolution in mind, which led to fairly specific
information needs: factual, confirmational and projective data
o Focus only on information pertaining to their situation. Discard anything that does not
relate.
Organizing groups that convene neighbourhood-level groups often see themselves as playing a
significant role in helping to tailor and contextualize information.
o They are there at the ground level. They will know what works and what won’t. They
will know what information can help and what is just useless or can’t be manipulated
to fill their needs. If you’re going to build a school, ask the people in the
neighbourhood if they need one.
Hartford Public Library's neighbourhood team model, on the other hand, acknowledges that
problem solving takes place in the neighbourhood.
o This brings the library INTO the community. It is part of the community and part of the
communal decision making process.
o One librarian noted, 'I have a little phrase, we weave ourselves into the fabric of
neighbourhood life'.
 An integral part. It can become the community meeting hall and a great way
to install a love of libraries and what they stand for in neighbourhood
children.
Library staff reported that they regularly provide information, including statistics, research
reports, and best practice examples, as part of their role as participants in community meetings.
With one foot in the world of the problem-solving groups and one foot in their information
practice, library staff can effect a weak tie or a bridge to the best practices of other communities
and groups, allowing for transfer of innovation
Stretching Conceptual Structures in Classifications Across Languages and Cultures
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Traditional classifications, originally designed in a particular country (such as the Dewey Decimal
Classification), or even for a particular collection (such as the Library of Congress Classification), are
now being stretched, in Hudon’s words, to cover cultural and linguistic artefacts and concepts quite
different from those originally intended.
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Thus, in harmonizing classification schemes across languages and cultures, we must address not only
the issues of the terms, but also the way in which these terms are bound up in knowledge
representations.
First of all, we might consider the basic purpose of classification schemes, which is to provide
pointers and access to a body of works, as well as to the ideas and knowledge recorded in those works.
To do this effectively, a classification must reflect concepts in such a way that a searcher can make
use of several strategies
o known-item search
o or to be able to find what one hopes or suspects is there, but which one is perhaps unable to
articulate.
It is necessary that searchers know what the ideas and concepts are to begin with, and then how they
might be grouped.
Making classifications culturally hospitable by including provisions for specific aspects of different
cultures will enhance their appropriateness and utility for the purposes of worldwide information flow.
o But how? We can’t do this for every culture, and each culture may use a different icon
for what a Westerner might take for granted. i.e. post box for email, but post boxes
might not exist in another culture. Perhaps to just be open about the possibility it might
not work out?
o For a classification designed from one perspective and for one culture to be hospitable to a
different culture and language, it must take into account other possible relationships and other
possible ways of identifying and labeling.
 Again, how? Good in theory, how do we translate it to practice?
We did want to start with the English term uncle, and ask what the equivalent is in their language.
Doing so would assume that there is in fact a term for uncle in their language, that the notion of uncle
is more or less the same as ours, and that the term uncle extends to the same sorts of people as it does
in our culture.
o An uncle does not always mean the brother of a parent. In some Asian cultures, it is a
term of respect, given to anyone older than you, but younger than your parents. To be
more complex, in families, an uncle is a term of respect that can also be given to
someone of the same GENERATION as your parents, but they may be younger. My
‘cousin’ is technically my ‘niece,’ as my great grandmother is her great great
grandmother, so she is technically a generation younger. Her parents are the same age
as mine, but her parents address me as ‘sister’ and my parents as ‘aunt and uncle.’
o Why not start with inanimate objects, or something that can be translated into all
languages? i.e. chair, cat, school
Put another way, the challenge was to avoid “putting words into our informants’ mouths.” We also
wanted to collect information about the contextual nuances of the various terms and relationships.
Chinese and Malay, have elaborate schemes with distinctions made among relatives along several
dimensions: age, birth order, gender, mother’s or father’s side, and so on, with a separate term for
each.
Some languages have terms for concepts that we do not bother to name separately.
o The addition of the word ‘bother’ in this sentence makes it sound like the concepts the
other languages have are annoying, irritating or useless to a Western point of view and
should be removed.
We suggest that not only terms themselves but also inter-term relationships need to be preserved in
cross-cultural cross-lingual classification translations.
The domain of kinship terms provides a good example because even though it is universal in some
ways, there are large differences in how people view family and kinship.
Our study is limited by the fact that we had only one informant representing each language, and that
person was well aware of English cultural terms.
Sameness and difference
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Classification that groups similar things together seems to be an almost natural or innate way of
organizing things.
Classifications embody the biases most common in our culture.
I would like to build on the idea of diversity rather than universality as a way of accommodating
our diverse users and collections and, thus, decreasing levels of bias.
To do so requires a variety of approaches-not only can we not have a universal solution, we
cannot even have a universal method for achieving solutions.