No photos today, just some reflections and lots of words.
I spent a very full 2 days visiting all the libraries in St. Lucia, which honestly left me exhausted. The roads here are very windy and rough. Imagine driving through the Rimutakas all day, but with heaps of potholes, that’s almost what it was like!
The libraries are doing their best with limited resources. They haven’t had funding in 20 years for new materials so everything is donations. Kids use the libraries quite a lot as most school don’t really have libraries, but the public library branches don’t really have very big collections and some kids have read everything in the library! Obviously e books would be be a good option but I’m not sure if that’s suitable for kids, who I think benefit from the tactile experience of print books. Most adults do have smart phones, and most libraries have at least one computer or laptop for use, but the Internet is not very reliable and sometimes there are power outages as well, or long term connectivity issues. One library had their computer stolen and hadn’t had Internet access for several months. A number of others did not have computers or Internet when we visited, and appeared not to have had for several months. However in theory all the libraries should have at least 1 computer and provide wi-fi internet to the public for free. This was the case in about 2/3rd of the libraries.
In the communities outside the capital the libraries are not widely used by adults. There doesn’t seem to be much of a reading culture here, and even if they did want to read the library’s adult fiction collections are tiny and ancient! Unemployment is around 30%, so when people leave school a lot of them just do nothing all day. So there are lots of homeless people, beggars etc., but they don’t seem to use the libraries very much.
We are going to do phone surveys of non-users next week so maybe I will have more insight then! I think part of the issue might be language. Most people speak Kweyol (Creole) at home, but schools are only taught in English. I imagine it’s kind of like Te Reo at native schools in NZ – the local language is banned, and of course people who’s language of instruction is different form their first language have more difficulty acquiring higher literacy levels. So many of those people who left school may not even be able to read or write English. Recently Kweyol has become accepted as an official language and they are starting to publish materials in Kweyol but it’s still considered “broken French” and the language of poor people and the streets. So there is another barrier to literacy, library use, and education.
I wonder if the status of Kweyol here is similar to how Te Reo was viewed before the language revitalisation initiatives?
There also seems tone little support in the way of accommodating students with special needs such as dyslexia. In my 3 weeks here I have encountered a number of people with rather pronounced stutters, which leads me to conclude there is also little support in the way of speech therapy or support for learning disabilities or autism., and those people may well also end up unemployed without any literacy or skills.
As far as library staff go, most of the branches are sole-charges, and open 6 days a week, with a half day on Friday and half day on Saturday. Exhausting! If a sole-charge library wants to take leave the library will usually close unless some one from another branch that has 2 staff is able to cover.
One main issue I see is a lack of professionalism. Apparently what happens in St. Lucia is you take your secondary school final exams and apply for a government job and they just place you wherever there is an opening… so there are a lot of people in the library that have been here 15 or 20 years with no interest in librarianship and no formal study/qualification. I asked them if they like their job and the ones I talked to said they like working with the public. But I know they spend a fair amount of their day on Facebook and YouTube and have little theoretical background in librarianship or information science.
Generally I sense a lack of professionalism, and while everyone complains that the library doesn’t get enough money from the MOE, but part of me suspects it’s because no one here takes their jobs seriously or has much pride in being a librarian. If you don’t take yourself and your role seriously, how can you expect other people to? If they did, maybe then the MOE would respect the library more and give us better funding. None of the libraries actually even have a card catalogue, you just have to browse the shelves, and rely on the knowledge of the collection of the staff. Considering there are resources to put in air conditioning in the Central Library, but not actually prioritise improving access to information resources, I feel a little bewildered.
There is a national library & information professionals association but it is not very active, they only meet once a year. So I am thinking maybe what they need is some kind of librarianship boot-camp and a stronger library association to advocate for the profession? I’ve been here 2 weeks and I’m already trying to fix the whole library system!
That is one idea I have had thus far.
The library director has me transcribing paper-based survey data that they collected in all the branch libraries last year. Unfortunately however the survey was so badly designed it all feels like a waste of time. They asked 5 year old kids to rank on a scale of 1-10 how good the lighting and temperature of the libraries were! And then the scale switches from 1 being the best to 10 being the best halfway through the survey! *sigh* Also I can tell with certainty that at least 8 of the last 10 surveys I transcribed were all in the same handwriting the the same comments verbatim, which I can only assume means the staff at the branch just filled them in! And next week we will work on doing phone interviews with non-users (which of course the individual would have to have a phone so we can call them, so automatically there is a bias in the responses we will get!). I haven’t even seen the questions for that yet, I hope I get a chance to give feedback before we start using them!
So much fun over here!! (As I’m tearing my hair out!)
Thus far my two weeks in the library have left me reflecting on what it means to be a librarian, and professional identity. I’m also working on developing a course for my final paper in my e-learning certificate, so it’s a good opportunity to think about what I would teach, and how. Unfortunately the assignment requires me to develop my course in Moodle which means it won’t be available to a wider audience, like the actual people I am designing it for. So, I am going to explore other options for free platforms for hosting online courses…. so stay tuned for the librarianship bootcamp online course! Coming soon!
People like to play dominoes here.
Hello, Saint Lucia 