My background is in education. I spent six years as a classroom educator of both regular and special ed students. By law, I was required to provide appropriate curriculum and accommodations for all my students, regardless of what their learning difference was. Because of this, when people talk about providing library programming for people with special needs or language differences, my response is always, "Well, why wouldn't we? Aren't we supposed to?"
This brings up an interesting question: what is the library's burden of responsibility in terms of serving the needs of minority populations in their community? By minority populations, I am not limiting the conversation to mere race or ethnicity. My question includes the visually impaired, deaf and hard of hearing, or (and this is a big one in public libraries) the mentally ill. Ethically and morally speaking, I doubt many disagree that we have an obligation to serve these patrons to the best our ability. After all, we all espouse the maxim "Every reader his book." But legally speaking, how far do we need to go? Obviously, libraries have to comply with ADA legislation, but are we required to shelve braille books and closed-caption versions of DVDs? What about materials in other languages?
My group mates and I are tackling this issue in our presentation and we all wonder if it would be possible to do some sort of class about interacting with diversity as part of the SLIS curriculum. One of our group members recently finished her portfolio and expressed concern that she had such a hard time meeting the indicator about diversity. Just a thought to pass on to the power that be.
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