Notes on "Use of Public Libraries by Immigrants" article

I'll admit, I wasn't originally bouncing around in my chair for this assignment, but I'm the type that when it's time to get down to business, I throw myself in 100%. This first article turned out to be interesting material and I can tell that I will enjoy the learning process of this assignment.

Burke, S.K. (2008). Use of public libraries by immigrants. Reference & User Services Quarterly, (48)2, 164-174.

Key Points:

• data used for this research paper comes from the U.S. Current Population Survey from 2002
• comparison of households of immigrants from different world regions
• tries to find correlations b/t use and various socioeconomic factors
• two models of thought: service model (includes nice summary discussion of different services) and sociological model (this paper bases its research on that model)

Common Service Strategies:

• foreign lang materials
• bilingual and bi-cultural staff
• literacy instruction
• ESL courses

NOTE: the paper is clear to differentiate the information needs of newly arrived immigrants to that of established immigrants which would therefore result in different service strategies.

Immigrant Groups Surveyed:

• Canada, 
• Latin America broken into: Central Am. & Mexico, Caribbean, South Am.
• Europe
• E. Europe
• Asia broken into: E. Asia, S.E. Asia, S. Asia 
• Middle East
• Africa

Predictors of Use:

• the higher the level of education, the more use
• except when there are children in the household, then it's anything goes.
• influencer of use- confidence in speaking/writing English

Application of Research:
Best way to apply findings is to do a community profile to determine the ethnic make up of local immigrant groups in order to tailor outreach to community leaders in the specific groups that have been identified. The most insightful thing that I learned from this article was the conflict that can be created between a lack of culture training for staff and the barriers to library use that immigrants may have. For example, Asian groups are reported in the literature as being quiet users of the libraries, but that may be because culturally, Asians are more publicly quiet, so without knowing it, they are obeying library noise level rules. However other groups which may be culturally louder in public (think in Vieques where Reggaeton is loudly played on the beach), and which are also unfamiliar with libraries in their home country, may unknowingly break library noise level rules and incur the wrath of the shushing librarian. This is turn may exacerbate another barrier- a lack of trust of government agencies.