Marginalized Groups and Libraries

After my rant late last week about Roma Harris's awful article, I progressively worked my way through the rest of this week's articles, which seemed much better researched, presented, and in general much better academically. I was particularly interested to find a reference to Hope Olson in Christine Pawley's article, which is not altogether surprising, as Hope Olson was a graduate of SLIS a few years ago and is now Interim Dean and Professor in UW-Milwaukee's School of Information Studies. Hope Olson was the main contributor to my project for 451 last year, about marginalized groups and their representation in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Hope became our standard go-to whenever we couldn't find any more articles on a given subject: we would look at one of her articles, find one of the keywords she used, and be off on a new search.

But anyway, enough about the wonderful Hope Olson. Another line in Pawley's article (on page 157) reminded me of something a friend of mine posted on facebook recently: "In the post-civil-rights era, despite the legislative gains of the 1960s, racism has persisted through continuing residential segregation..." A man named Bill Rankin took the 2000 US Census and made a map showing the racial distribution in Chicago. The results were either very surprising or very unsurprising, depending on how segregated you think Chicago really is. I won't post here the map of Chicago; but another man named Eric Fischer took up Rankin's original task and started making maps of various metropolitan areas and their racial distribution. I include here links to the maps for Madison and Milwaukee, as two examples that I assume most people in the class will be most interested to see. Madison is rather unsurprising in its distribution: largely white, with pockets of Asians in Eagle Heights and a racially-diverse neighborhood on the south end of town. Milwaukee was rather shocking to me, because I'm not terribly familiar with the area, but it is definitely very residentially segregated. This all calls back to racial segregation of libraries: people visit their local libraries, which means that certain branches of a library are going to have a more racially-diverse clientele than others. Does that mean that we should tailor our book selections to those particular races? I won't even attempt to answer that question here.

On a completely different subject, after reading the Radford and Radford article about Party Girl, I felt the need to watch the movie, which is partly why I'm posting this so much later than I'm supposed to (whoops). I was most fascinated with the aunt's character, who only portrayed a portion of the stereotype that we all know so well. When she was dealing with Mary (Parker Posey's character), she was always very unfriendly and unhelpful, characteristics that I would say we hope do not represent a librarian. I suppose I did have some experiences in my childhood with that kind of librarian, such as one library that I begged my parents not to take me to, partly because they had so few books that I was interested in (how can a public library operate without a good children's section!?!?) and partly because the librarian (the one male librarian I ever had real experience with) was SO unfriendly. That story follows with the librarian at my high school prior to my stint there, who my mom quotes as saying "But if the students check out my books, they won't be on my shelves!" I'm not sure where these two librarians got their ideas of patron-oriented service, but I at least have exemplars of what NOT to do once I become a librarian.

I'm not sure that I've really addressed any of the pertinent topics for this week's readings (I find that's often the case, that the things I want to talk about after reading don't match whatsoever with the popular opinion/intention behind the readings), but as I said in Friday's post, I'm really through with these discrimination articles. No matter how well they're written (which thankfully some of this week's articles were), there's only so many times you can hear the same thing before you become numb to the information. With that being said, I as always welcome comments.