Technology

Racism & the Chinese-American Experience: A LibGuide

Project Description:

For this project, we were tasked (as a group) with identifying an information gap and using the LibGuide platform to address it. Our intended audience for this guide are undergraduate students doing research on the topics of racism, diaspora, and the Chinese-American experience both historical and contemporary. This Libguide was created to help students better contextualize how discriminatory policies and fear mongering produced widespread racism against Chinese-Americans that still exists today. In order to best represent such a multifaceted topic, we provided a range of relevant resources including data visualizations, documentary suggestions, fiction books, videos, scholarly articles, the Chinatown NYPL Oral History Archive and more.

Methods:

This project required us to collect and assess relevant resources related to our chosen topic and format them within the constraints of the LibGuide program. While some tasks related to the project were divided up and directly assigned we also engaged in collective brainstorming to generate content and decide certain style choices. We met up often to ensure that our guide was a collaborative effort rather than a piecemeal one. Each person contributed sources and materials but also offered feedback and proposed options we could pursue in order to make our LibGuide more well rounded.

My Role:

Having proposed the initial topic idea, I offered to take on the role of content organizer as well as content creator for our LibGuide topic. Knowing that our topic was broad I broke it down into five subcategories to help organize our content in a navigable way. It was my job to then determine where the resources we collectively gathered would best fit and format them into the LibGuide. Being unfamiliar with the LibGuide program, and there being no real guide on how to create one, I spent time looking up tutorials from other users, navigating other LibGuides, and working my way through each function and feature to get a better sense of what would work best with our resources and for our users.

As this guide was geared to both "scholars and the curious," I wanted each page to have diverse sources of information beyond the typical scholarly article. I found and incorporated YouTube videos, blogs, outside related resource lists, personal stories and newspaper articles to support our main topic. Knowing that people can glean a depth of information through visual imagery I created image galleries for the "Representations in Pop Culture" and the "Contemporary Issues" pages coupled with written explanations on how these examples related to the larger topic of racism and lived experience. I also found and embedded short videos on the "Stereotypes & Gender Bias" and "Food Culture and Chinatowns" to provide introductions and examples of the key themes of the pages. Both these embedded videos and image galleries provide an alternative access point to the main concept of our LibGuide and make it more interactive for our user.

Rationale:

This project required me to learn two completely new software programs, LibGuide and Camtasia, that will be relevant to my future profession as a librarian. By including multiple resource formats I had to use and troubleshoot advanced functions to ensure they were usable by our intended audience.

Racism and the Chinese American Experience: a LibGuide

Screen shots of principle pages I created.