Jeng: Community-Based Librarianship

By SLIS Director Ling Hwey Jeng, PhD

Anyone who is around a midsize city in the U.S. would know that there are many social service agencies in most cities to help residents in need. In Denton, for example, there are the Salvation Army to help with emergency shelter, Our Daily Bread to help with hunger, Health Services of North Texas to help with healthcare, and Friends of the Family to assist with victims of domestic violence, just to name a few.

Every city has gaps in the quality of living, whether they are related to financial insecurity, hunger, homelessness, inadequate healthcare, or lack of affordable quality child care. The common practice of the society is to identify the specific need of a resident and refer them to the particular service agency specialized in the area of need for timely assistance.  

This common model of social services assumes a system of professional service entities, each with its own specialty to address a specific, narrowly focused area of societal deficit. These service agencies provide emergency resources to fill the immediate needs and do so with high efficiency. A case is closed once the assistance is given, and the agency moves on to the next case to fill the next gap faced by the next client. 

This traditional model of community services utilizes a need-based approach to social intervention; that is, to identify community problems, to secure funding and resources often through donations and grants, and to dispense the resources where the needs are. Most agencies regularly use an increase in cases served to demonstrate their success as benefits to the local community. 

This need-based approach is, however, transactional by nature and does not recognize the complexity of the real world where aspects of family living are intertwined horizontally and chronologically, and one crisis may very well trigger other crises to the surface, prolonging the family misery over time.

A family experiencing homelessness is most likely also experiencing many other difficulties such as food insecurity, physical or mental health issues, unemployment or underemployment, transportation needs, and lack of child care. Consequentially, even if a person receives emergency food service, there are still multiple interrelated obstacles keeping the family trapped in the cycle of crises, preventing them from going forward and improving their life in a meaningful way.

Given the shortcomings of the need-based community services, social science scholars began to explore a different approach to community development since the late 1980s. The new approach takes as a premise, which is reaffirmed in a recent study by Gustina and others (2022), that most people have a strong positive affiliation with the place where they live and love their own community.

In most places, there is pride and a strong desire among residents to contribute to the self-sufficiency of their own community. At the basis for this new approach is the concept of appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005), which takes a positive worldview to uncover the best among ourselves in the community. When resources in the community are identified and recognized, its residents can utilize these assets to build their own local support network to solve problems of their own community. This asset-based community development approach (Kretzman & McKnight, 1993) highlights the community pride in self-empowerment and therefore is resilient and sustainable for the long term.

This new line of positive thinking and seeing library community engagement has been the passion in my scholarship, teaching, and service since 2011, when for the first time I was exposed to the use of Asset-Based Community Development as a new tool in my volunteering work conducting community needs assessment at the United Way of Denton County.

It was highlighted as the presidential theme during my term as President of the Texas Library Association in 2017-2018. Conceptually, I follow the line of scholars preceding me in this area, especially sociologist Michael Gustein (2000) and R. David Lankes (2011) in our own field.

In addition to numerous writings, grant projects, presentations, workshops, and keynotes I have done over the decade in the area of community-based librarianship (e.g., Perryman & Jeng, 2020; Jeng, 2022), including my semester-long research sabbatical in Fall 2022, I am glad to see two particularly meaningful outputs with direct impact on our own SLIS programs here at TWU: 

1. the addition of several new courses to address community information in our SLIS curriculum (LS 5163 Assessment in Practice, LS 5173 Community-Based Project Design, LS 5183 Grant Writing and Management, and LS 5193 Data Communications), and 
2. the establishment of an area of focus in community information for the MLS degree program. 

These two curricular additions would not have been possible without the passion and collaborative efforts from several SLIS faculty members, including:

• Carol Perryman, PhD
• Slava Zavalin, PhD
• Meti Tmava, PhD
• Kerol Harrod

If you are a current student looking for a path to make significant community impact in your future library career, I strongly encourage you to consider these courses for your program of study.

As the next step, I am looking forward to continuing faculty collaborations to establish a formal certificate program in community information, which will focus on training and education for community-based librarianship, and continuing education activities for library workers in Texas and elsewhere.

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Page last updated 6:04 PM, March 6, 2023