SLO #4: The Student designs services to meet the information needs of all users in the community.

Community is a funny word. All it really means is “a group of people.” Librarians are to
serve their communities, but (and this question sounds almost biblical) who is my community?
As a graduate student working in an academic library, I thought my community was the students,
faculty, and staff who used our resources. However, after taking several courses in which
community outreach was emphasized (especially LIS 662 Diverse Client Groups), I learned that
community can and should be much broader and more complex.
In LIS 600 Foundations of Library Science, we were charged with completing a research
assignment on community engagement. At the time, I was volunteering with an organization
called FROG, a tutoring outreach of a local Baptist church. The students served there were
mostly latino/a children below the age of 13. I elected to use this organization as a subject group,
and investigate what a community like theirs would need from a library. My interview with the
director yielded interesting data regarding the lack of bilingual and technical skills, however the
most helpful outcome of this assignment for me personally was a broadened definition of
community. As librarians, our definition of community is not complete if it does not include
those least able to use the library, those least welcome in most public spaces, and those most
often left out and forgotten.
It was this newfound definition of community, as well as a conviction that librarians have a
sacred duty to those to whom education is least accessible, that led me to the Charlotte-
Mecklenburg Jail (North) Library. I completed a semester-long independent study there entitled
Librarianship and the Penal System. It has been the most enriching experience of my LIS
education. It was not an easy transition at first. I worked mostly with juvenile male offenders
and experienced what today’s social climate would probably call sexual harassment to some
extent. The patrons were all nice to me, but inappropriate at times with their remarks and
advances. These experiences were noted by my supervisor and the boys were reprimanded, but
this was jail. Jail is a different and more hostile environment by nature, and part of the reason I
chose to do my independent study there was see if I could “hack it” (so to speak) as a profession.
I came to the conclusion that my patrons shouldn’t miss out on access to information simply
because I was uncomfortable – that was the anthem I clung too. If I may quote a passage from
the reflection paper I wrote for my Diverse Clients class:

“Becoming culturally competent isn’t meant to be easy. It’s meant to grow you
as a person, force you out of your comfort zone, and teach you the joys and
hardships of other people groups, and if you are going to attempt to familiarize
yourself with another culture, you’d better be okay with that.”
The community comes first, no matter what. That is what I learned in my time at the jail. I got
to know my community, and more importantly I got to know the needs of my community, and
there are many with our penal system. (That knowledge will be demonstrated in the marketing
and outreach plan discussed in SLO #7, which I designed for the specific needs of my jail
library). If a library, or a librarian, doesn’t know their community, they cannot serve that
community. That is our purpose as information professionals and should always be our highest
priority. If each community member (regardless of how diverse their set of needs may be) is not
being served to the best of our ability we are not doing our jobs.