Competency 3: Diversity

Regional and county-level variation in pre-tax income inequality using Gini index, 2010.

COMPETENCY STATEMENT

Each graduate of the Master of Library and Information Science program is able to…

…recognize and describe cultural and economic diversity in the clientele of libraries or information organizations

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Page Contents

• Importance of the competency to me
• What work prepared me to understand and perform this competency
• Evidence
• Conclusion
• References

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IMPORTANCE OF THE COMPETENCY TO ME

It has taken me seven years to reach this point of applying for my MLIS. As (will be) discussed in the introduction, many things have changed over those seven years, which is the peril of taking a long time to get a degree in a highly volatile technical field.

One thing that changed was the definition of this competency itself. When I began classes, this competency was phrased:

“recognize the social, cultural and economic dimensions of information use;”

…which I understand to mean that the same information can be used in multiple ways with varying impacts on our human condition.

The focus of this competency has shifted from diversity in information use to diversity in information users. I am sure that this was done for specific reasons by wise minds of the university; however, I propose to respond to both the original and the current competency phrasings, because I think they are both important.

Diversity of users

Recognizing the diversity of the information user base, which theoretically includes all humans (and possibly, in the future, artificial intelligence beings), is critical. In fact, a focus on the user is the first step in trying to fulfill any information request, be it a request for a book in a library or the attempt to present data in an understandable visual display that can be investigated and learned from. Thinking about the user’s perspective is something that has been emphasized in most of my classes and in fact is well-known as proper practice in computer engineering and user interface design, the focus of my original undergraduate and graduate studies and of the early part of my career.

I cannot hope to come up with a fit for the information a user needs if I do not first try to understand the user and appreciate that the user almost certainly is coming from a  different set of experiences and needs than my own. Accepting and understanding that most people have different backgrounds and cultures from mine is key to trying to understand how to effectively communicate with them, and communication is the only way to learn what information needs they have. Rigorous instruction in reference interviews in “Reference and Information Services” (LIBR210) taught me more about how to listen for the unsaid and how to try to elicit a user’s true need when they themselves have difficulty articulating it.

I am not the norm when it comes to the stereotype of the American middle-class.

J. Davis in electric chair at ALA Conference, Chicago, IL, 11 July 2009

Sub-groups that I belong to include being female in a predominantly male profession (computer technology and science); being disabled, both physically and emotionally; being older; being polyamorous; and being pansexual. Being disabled is the experience that most separates me from the mainstream, in that I have “lost” years of my career to being bedridden. None of these anomalies have stopped my mind from working, and hopefully being on the edge of the norm has given me a deeper respect for looking past any superficial characteristics a person may have and trying to understand who they are from within. In particular, working and studying online have helped me interact with people in a more pure sense of listening to their words and actions without knowing anything about what they look like.

Diversity of use

The original competency definition is more interesting to me than simply understanding the diversity of my clients, however important that may be. Information can be used in so many different ways. My final class, “Information Technology Tools and Applications–Advanced: Information Visualization” (LIBR246–13) is an excellent lesson in exactly that; when paired with How to Lie with Statistics (Huff & Geis, 1982) it is so easy to see how the same data can be presented to guide users to come to completely opposite conclusions. This is simultaneously fascinating and is a frightening responsibility.

The implications of the variety of information use are vast. Is censorship warranted when it comes to instructions for how to build a bomb (Wikipedia, 2015)? What if someone is using that information to disarm bombs, or perhaps to build a bomb to try to protect their village from being captured by terrorists? Is censorship warranted when it leads to teenage women being unable to do research on breast cancer (American Civil Liberties Union, 2002)? Perhaps it is obvious that my personal opinion of those leading questions is that censorship is rarely warranted. As mentioned in “Competency 1: Principles”, however, there is absolutely a balance. In working with geoscience datasets, this balance will come up with wanting international scientists to have access to as much data as possible in order to make the best possible research conclusions, while at the same time understanding that there will be datasets that countries want to restrict for security reasons. As in my current job at Cytobank, some scientists will be creating and actively analyzing datasets that they want to keep private while they are coming to conclusions and getting ready to publish; their rights to privacy have to be protected. It will always be a balancing act between keeping private that which needs to be private and making information “free” so that everyone has a chance to do good works with it.

These two issues–diversity of the users and of the uses–come together in the field of information access. Taking “Information Visualization” (LIBR246–13) is very important to me, because most people do access information visually. But not everyone can do this, whether because of color-blindness (as with a friend and colleague), or because of visual issues such as macular degeneration (as with my grandfather) or simple aging (my father and I, who both need larger print now), or because they have little ability to take in visual information (as in my long-term partner, who has had multiple eye surgeries and whose memory function was significantly changed by visual impairment as a child due to Duane’s syndrome) or who are completely blind. This has sparked my interest in audio and tactile display of information. And this issue can be more subtle and go much deeper; if someone is from a different cultural or intellectual background, they may not be able to understand something that I may think is presented in an obvious way. For example: some previously isolated South Pacific islanders misinterpreted the cause and effect of military airports built during WWII, and they set to building airplanes out of twigs and branches in the hopes that this would result in shipments of goods (“Cargo cult”, n.d.). There is a limit to how many user perspectives one can accommodate, but with the aforementioned focus on target audience, information presentation can be customized to help the most likely user base.

In my own experience, I have approached this several times. I did an extensive study of effective graphic user interfaces (GUIs) at University of Houston, Clear Lake, working with astronauts as study participants at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) (Davis, 1991). At Cytobank, as a test manager, I design tests to ensure that people with color-blindness will still be able to use the many visual analysis tools of the application–including having our color-blind employee check them out. I have recorded books for the visually impaired as a volunteer in multiple places, including Learning Ally (formerly Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic). I intend to continue to try to make information as accessible as possible for my future clients.
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WHAT WORK PREPARED ME TO UNDERSTAND AND PERFORM THIS COMPETENCY?

Diversity of users

Cultural and economic diversity of users was emphasized in “Information and Society” (LIBR200), “Information Organizations and Management” (LIBR204), and “Reference and Information Services” (LIBR210), among other classes. We had discussions on how to work with patrons that come from different backgrounds and read papers describing how to deal with and advocate for people who are on the fringes of society.

Since I was 14, I have worked in many different environments. Most of them have been government agencies, where employee diversity is mandated, and I have been exposed to multiple cultural backgrounds and viewpoints. My personal acquaintances, throughout my life, have also included folks from different backgrounds and abilities, including some severe physical disabilities. I am comfortable working with many different types of people.

Diversity of use

My work in information environments has included: creating GUIs for space station crewmember use at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC); writing newsletters for an entire community of health providers and patients (Mad River Community Hospital, Arcata, CA); testing software that would process and provide a terrabyte a day of earth-observing data to users (NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center); testing updated, multi-color displays for air traffic controllers (Center TRACON Automation System); testing software that preserved and provided web pages for 3 million users (Furl); and testing software for scientists storing, analyzing and sharing flow cytometry datasets (Cytobank). These were very different information users with different needs, and I have had experience working with data that can be used in multiple ways. “Seminar in Contemporary Issues: Metadata” (LIBR281), “Seminar in Archives and Records Management: Electronic Records” (LIBR284), “Information Technology Tools and Applications–Advanced: Big Data Analytics and Management” (LIBR246–15) and “Information Visualization” (LIBR246–13) have had an especial emphasis on preparing data for multiple potential uses.
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EVIDENCE

Diversity of users

San Jose State University’s American Library Association Student Chapter (ALASC) 2012 Banned Books Reading

On 30 September, 2012, I participated in the ALASC’s annual banned books reading online. I chose And Tango Makes Three because my long-term partner had just had twins with his other long-term girlfriend and her other long-term boyfriend. They had been trying for 10 years and it had been a harrowing period for all of us involved. We are a polyamorous family; I live with my spouse, to whom I have been married 21 years, while my partner, his other girlfriend, and her other boyfriend live 15 minutes away with their now-three-year-old children. And Tango Makes Three is a children’s book about a real-life gay penguin couple that raised a baby in a zoo, and it spoke to me and my situation. I was there for the second twin’s birth (the first popped out, unexpectedly, at their home); I rocked her to sleep that first day in the hospital while the three exhausted parents slept. We are a real family, but we are an unusual one. During the years that they were trying for a baby, they considered adoption and were not even given an interview by the San Francisco adoption agency because the family was too “unusual”.

This reading was difficult for me, emotionally, as you will hear if you listen to the full eight minutes. It touched the leader of the event, who tells her own story of family difficulty having children, with the ultimate lesson that as long as a child has a loving family, the specific romantic relationships between the adults in that family just aren’t important. The penguin Tango, the event’s niece, and my own two “nieces” were so very wanted, and are so loved, that I have no doubt they will have the best start in life that is possible.

Paper: “San Bruno Public Library: One Card, One Community”

As part of “Information Organizations and Management” (LIBR204), we were instructed to do visits to libraries and perform guided analyses of the libraries. In this paper, I visit the San Bruno Public Library (CA) and find that it has limited facilities for the disabled, which is actually a barrier for me, personally. Allocation of funds is always controversial in an organization that does not have a lot of money, but it is unfortunate that facilities are not always made available to the disabled–especially when an organization might be more important than most to disabled folks. The services and reference material available in a public library, along with free computer access, can mean the difference for a physically disabled person trying to become independent.

Discussion Post: “Serving Disadvantaged Patrons”

In “Reference and Information Services” (LIBR210), we were given a thought experiment on how to provide mandated help filling out government forms on the computer to patrons that include non-English speakers and people with mental or physical disabilities. I proposed creating sessions in a dedicated room with computers to lead people through the forms with individual assistance available; I also proposed recruiting volunteers for translation needs. Reaching out to the agencies in question would also be helpful, so that the library could host an expert on site once a month, with reciprocal research assistance provided to the agencies if they needed it. This was a good experience thinking about how to serve a broad, diverse group of clients in an environment of restricted budgets.

Discussion Post: “Being a Member of a Special Population”

In another discussion for “Reference and Information Services” (LIBR210), we were asked to think about serving special populations, and I shared some of my own experiences as a physically disabled person with physical barriers at libraries, even in the age of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Diversity of use

Paper: “An Informal Study of Map and GIS Use by Non-Geographers”

One assignment that helped me understand how information can be used in a variety of ways was from “Resources and Information Services in the Disciplines and Professions: Maps and Geographic Information Systems” (LIBR220), where I interviewed three people about their use of maps and GIS. Their backgrounds and current situations led to varied results; while all three interviewees were white, middle-class males with technical/computer backgrounds, their use of the same basic information components, maps and GIS, were quite different. This was an interesting insight into how information is simply a jumping-off point for what people make of it.

Paper: “Visualization with Many Eyes”

In “Big Data Analytics and Management” (LIBR246–15) we were challenged to work with a dataset within the IBM tool Many Eyes and come up with visual analyses of the data in order to make conclusions about the meaning within the dataset. This was an excellent exercise in the other side of the varied use of information, as some visualizations were murky and led to little understanding, whereas others revealed patterns within the data. This demonstrates a larger issue that information can be used to come to multiple conclusions, and information users have to take care to find the most truthful analyses.
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CONCLUSION

I have always been interested in people outside the norm, since I have always been outside the norm myself. My experiences working with multiple types of people with varying information needs, and the philosophical discussions I’ve participated in throughout my iSchool career, will help me to continue to try to serve the needs of all my potential clients whenever possible.

I hope to continue to explore various ways that information can be presented and used, from the basics of interfaces through to making sure data are as unbiased, as well-documented with metadata, and of as high quality as possible so that their uses are limited only by the imaginations of their users.
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REFERENCES

American Civil Liberties Union. (2002, September 16). _Censorship in a box: Why blocking software is wrong for public libraries. _Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/censorship-box-why-blocking-software-wrong-public-libraries#what

Bomb-making instructions on the internet. (2015, February 15). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb-making_instructions_on_the_internet

Cargo cult. (2015, March 16). Retrieved from RationalWiki: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

Davis, J. L. (1991, December 4). A comparison of graphics and text coding for control moment gyro status for guidance, navigation & control on-board space station displays. Unpublished manuscript.

Huff, D., & Geis, I. (1982). How to Lie with Statistics [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Powell, R. L. (2009, July 11). Jennifer at the ALA conference [Digital photograph].

Richardson, J., & Parnell, P. (2005). And Tango Makes Three. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

U. S. Census Bureau. (2012, March 8). Gini index US counties 2010 [Online image]. Retrieved from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Index_US_Counties_2010.jpg

Last updated: Friday, April 17, 2015

Last updated: Friday, April 17, 2015

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REFERENCES

Last updated: Friday, April 17, 2015