NASIG 2016

We participated in an Information master's program assigned to a project in Trivandrum, India. We were tasked with providing assistance on the management of a library in a college specifializing in teaching Deaf students as well as research in Audiology and Speech Language Pathology. They have a very small collection of about 2000 books and 24 journals, and no website prior to our arrival.

Our understanding was that it would be difficult to make correct assumptions about the academic and technological environment given lack of experience in the region and the culture, as well as working with students with disabilities in general. We were not prepared for the rudimentary or non-existent policies and infrastructure that we met once we actually arrived. This presentation would detail the strategies of assessment and decision-making we employed to work with their available resources as well as deal with the lack of buy-in from various stakeholders. Among these include user interviews in translation, collecting and incorporating examples from other library sites in building a new website, and above all trying to figure out ways to communicate the importance of working with library online resources upon a population that is relatively new to them.