APALA President’s Program: The Things We Do Make A Difference
Saturday, June 22, 2019
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Location: Washington Convention Center, 154A-B
In 2020, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) will celebrate its 40th anniversary in serving and advocating for APA librarians and communities. Throughout the years, APALA has been involved in providing library services such as programming and diverse collections to libraries. In addition, the organization has been in the forefront of discussions on larger issues in the profession and library services such as equity, diversity, and inclusion. As APALA reaches another milestone, its members are continuing essential and innovative work in and out of libraries.
This Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) President’s Program highlights the work of its members across different organizations. In this session, APALA members will share their experiences and the impact of their work to the profession and the communities they served.
Speakers:
John Hickok, International Outreach Librarian, California State University Fullerton
Serving Asian Library Users: Lessons Learned from Visiting Over 1,000 Libraries Throughout Asia
This presentation will feature a 20 year project on studying libraries of Asia and researching how to best serve library users from Asia. The presenter has visited over 1,000 libraries throughout East, Southeast, & South Asia (of all types: national, public, school, academic) and chronicled amazing Best Practices examples. The information needs of different Asian library users are as diverse as the different cultures in Asia, from a student in a school library in South Korea, to senior citizen in a public library in Singapore, to a farmer in a rural library in Bangladesh. The culmination of this project is now in a new book on serving Asian library users, published this month.
Sarah Nguyen, MLIS candidate & Project Coordinator, University of Washington & Metropolitan New York Library Council
Preserve This Podcast
Preserve This Podcast is a Mellon-grant funded project hosted by the Metropolitan New York Library Council. This project launched me into the library, archives, and information world after being a quiet #libraryTwitter follower for many years. I will cover what the Preserve This Project is about and how the nature of the project fusing libraries, archives, and podcasts gave me space to represent my own Vietnamese-American upbringing, as well as integrate equity, diversity, and inclusion into all situations.
Binh P. Le, Librarian, Pennsylvania State University
Promoting Diversity: Library Poetry Reading Program
This presentation discusses a poetry reading program organized by the Abington College Library of the Pennsylvania State University. The poetry reading program aims to introduce international and American poetry to Penn State students, most of whom are from other countries and the underrepresented groups in the U.S. It also tries to expose contemporary issues (e.g., gender, identity, immigration, race, ethnicity, and war) and diverse voices though the poets’ eyes. Lastly, it attempts to introduce some of the award winning poets including Asian an Asian American poets, whose voices have yet been heard broadly.
Hannah Lee Park, Education and School of Professional & Extended Studies Librarian, American University
The American University Experience (AUx): Creating a Foundation for Inclusive Excellence
American University (AU) is in the process of revamping its general education requirements, and all incoming freshmen are required to take AUx2, which is a course that looks at issues of diversity, identity, and inclusion and structures of power, privilege, and inequality. A diverse group of faculty and staff were convened to form the AUx2 Council, which provides curricular review, program oversight, and participation in ongoing AUx2 instructor training and mentorship. As a member of the AUx2 Council, I worked on revising the learning goals and objectives of the course and creating lesson plans for specific weeks in the curriculum. Notions of critical information literacy are interwoven throughout. At the end of the course, students will recognize how structural inequality manifests itself in all areas of the world around them– in education, technology, information, art, popular culture, and policy. With each passing semester, the work of the AUx2 Council will have a compounding impact on making sure that American University achieves its goal of inclusive excellence.