In my understanding of SLO 3, information resources must be created, organized, managed, and/or discovered in ways that align with their intended communities. I identify the most with the Native Hawaiian community and its smaller sub-communities. However, there are still areas of my community with which I am unfamiliar, and this includes the Hawaiian Language Immersion Program (HLIP) within the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education (HIDOE). While I did attend Waiau Elementary School, I was not a part of the school’s HLIP. Therefore, I saw the proposed Distance-Learning Portal (PDL) artifact project in LIS 615 as an opportunity not only to synthesize the skills I’ve gained in both LIS 630 and LIS 615, but also to apply them to an unfamiliar section of my community in order to gain a greater understanding of the general needs of my people—Native Hawaiians. I also chose this audience and topic for my artifact because of the long history of oppression Hawaiian students have endured in the HIDOE, which has resulted in higher rates of “chronic absenteeism, dropping out, and grade retention” among Native Hawaiian students and a strong lag in Hawaiian student levels of achievement in comparison to other groups by up “30 percentile points” (Kanaʻiaupuni & Ledward, 2013, p. 159).

 

This portal entitled “Nā Waihona Haumāna” (roughly translated as “student repositories”) presents more than 100 resources that were constructed primarily in the Hawaiian language. This includes dictionaries, glossaries, audio files, videos, books, websites, databases, newspapers, maps, stories, social media accounts, study lessons, language learning resources, corona virus-related resources, and more. I gathered a lot of useful information from my former classmates in the Hawaiian studies program, and they highlighted new resources from the Hawaiian language program at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Hilo campus. Although I conversed with community members, I would have liked to engage more with my target audience—HLIP students—in order to better understand their distinct needs, especially in these COVID-19 times. Dialogue with this audience would have helped quell my anxiety towards making this portal as informative and all-encompassing as possible. This self-inflicted expectation was unrealistic for one person as it requires input and assistance from the community. And I constantly needed to remind myself that I am not my entire community but a part of it. When thinking about collaboration in collection management, I reflected back on Collection Management Basics’ Chapter 10 “Cooperation, Collaboration, and Consortia Issues,” which explores collaborative efforts in the form of cooperative projects, shared projects, reciprocal projects, consortia, and resource-sharing. Saponaro and Evans describe cooperation as an “exchange of something [work, money, etc.] between the partners with each gaining something from the cooperative effort [but not necessarily equal] benefits” (2019, p. 226). These benefits include resource-sharing, diversifying staff specializations, better stewardship of funding, more focused costs, enhanced visibility, and improved relations among collaborators. On the other hand, collaborative efforts can be time-consuming because of the differing needs, capabilities, personalities, and availability of the participants. And for that reason, Harvard professor Rosabeth Kanter identifies eight elements necessary for successful partnerships: “Individual excellence, importance, interdependence, investment, information, integration, institutionalization, integrity” (p. 222). Saponaro and Evans also cite “concessions, consideration, consensus, and trust” as other important factors (p. 222).

 

While Chapter 10 explores collaborative efforts between institutions, I am more interested in the efforts made between these institutions and their patron communities, and the structures and values that would make such a partnership successful. Because of this, my artifact aligns with the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials (PNAAM) to guide me ethically through the complex processes of creating, discovering, evaluating, organizing, and managing the information resources included in the artifact. For example, in alignment with PNAAM’s section “Striving for Balance in Content and Perspectives,” I intentionally excluded resources whose capacity to harm Kānaka Maoli outweighed their potential research value. This includes materials affiliated with secret and/or sacred societies like the Hale Nauā Society. 

 

When considering resources for the portal, I reflected on Collection Management Basics’s second chapter “Intellectual Freedom and Ethics,” which focuses on ethics in collection management and describes the selection process as continuous choice-making. These choices empower librarians with the authority to include and exclude resources. Because every person carries his/her/their own belief systems and values, this privileges certain ideas, knowledge systems, and biases over others, and ultimately controls the type of information users can access. Saponaro and Evans cite political beliefs, stress, and mood as examples of biases that often conflict with the integrity and values of an institution, its staff, its collections, and the patron community. In this way, Collection Managers are often seen as “gatekeepers” of information. Indigenous peoples are especially impacted by this gatekeeping and the ethical dilemmas it produces (which shift and adapt with society and the current social climate). Because knowledge has the power to perpetuate problematic and harmful myths, we need to investigate the context of sources. Throughout the artifact’s development, I constantly questioned my selected sources: Who is the intended audience? Who created it? What is their political and/or cultural background? Do they acknowledge their biases?

 

After questioning and mulling over platforms, I selected Padlet because it allows for quick and easy updates and changes, and it mirrors the dynamic nature of the Hawaiian culture and the ever-evolving needs of the community. Padlet’s upload and commenting features also invites interaction and input from others. When creating an information resource and evaluating appropriate systems and technologies to utilize in the process, those selected systems and tools should align with how that community educates and learns in order to avoid causing any harm. The possible enforcement of problematic preservation practices, binaries, standardizations, controlled vocabularies, and other descriptive practices that defile the integrity of Indigenous materials and disrupt Indigenous connectivity must also be considered during the selection process. We avoid this harm by utilizing multiple systems and sources that align with how that community organizes, retrieves, evaluates and/or synthesizes information. Western systems do not adequately serve Indigenous and marginalized communities because they address needs that contend with our own. In his book Classical Hawaiian Education: Generations of Hawaiian Culture, Professor John Charlot (2005) notes how every Hawaiian word implies a set of ideologies through which Kānaka Maoli have attempted to understand and know the world (p. 6). This artifact understands and upholds the vital need for the Hawaiian language to be embedded in the education of Kānaka Maoli students. When Kānaka engage with systems that deprive us of our language, we disconnect from our worldviews, our ideologies, and—ultimately—our own voice. Working on this artifact has contributed to my effectiveness as an information professional by demonstrating my ability not only to create, organize, manage, and discover resources in ways that align with my community but also to reclaim my voice amidst colonial silencing. As an information professional, I create and seek systems and sources that speak the languages of the communities I serve.

 

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References

 

First Archivists Circle. (2017, April 9). Protocols for Native American archival materials. http://bit.ly/2MdRA7t.

 

Kanaʻiaupuni, S. M., & Ledward, B. C. (2013). Hoʻopilina: The call for cultural relevance in education. Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being 9, 153-204.

 

Saponaro, M. Z., & Evans, G. E.. (2019). Collection management basics, 7th Edition. Libraries Unlimited.