Libraries and the deaf community

The Deaf community is a supremely complex world, made up of people with varying degrees of hearing loss. Deaf people, specifically people who were born Deaf or who lost their hearing at a very early age and learned American Sign Language as their primary language, “may consider themselves not as disabled, but part of the cultural linguistic minority Deaf community and describe themselves as Deaf with a capital D” (Playforth, 2004). Other kinds of deafness include deafened people (people who lost their hearing at some point after they learned and spoke English) and the hard of hearing (people who are deaf to a degree, but still retain some hearing with the use of a hearing aid). Deaf with a lowercase “d” is usually considered in the Deaf community to refer to the medical condition of deafness. Other people included in the Deaf community are people who are connected to and interact with the Deaf people in their lives, either through family, work, or interest (Playforth, 2004).

Libraries and the Deaf Community

Deaf people at the library have the same needs as every other person visiting the library and often have more difficulty accessing materials and services. Over the last few decades, libraries in the United States have begun to implement services and collections for Deaf patrons and are working harder every year to make more of their collections, services, their communities, and even the world more accessible to this group of underserved people.

The history of the role of libraries in the Deaf community is a sordid one at best. The American Library Association readily admits that disabled people belong to a minority that is often overlooked and underrepresented by people in the library, and the Deaf community belongs in this minority group (American Library Association, 2012). However, in the last few decades, libraries across the United States have made great strides in the mission of making libraries more accessible to disabilities in general and to the Deaf community specifically.

One of the first activists in the library community working toward accessibility for the Deaf was Alice Hagemeyer. When disabled communities began demanding equality in the 1970s, Hagemeyer decided to go back to school for her master’s degree in library science. While she was studying there, she realized that there was not very much information about the Deaf community at her library or at the libraries of any of her classmates. She soon became an activist for Deaf awareness at her library, and she became the first “Librarian for the Deaf Community” from any public library in the nation. Hagemeyer also constructed a manual of resources for Deaf people and those associated with them called The Red Notebook. This notebook is now on online resource, which is available at the website of the Friends of Libraries for Deaf Action. Hagemeyer was one of the first library activists to make strides for the Deaf community (Hagemeyer, 2001, p 2-3).

Australian librarian Karen McQuigg states that “even ten years ago, when I was involved in a project looking at what public libraries could offer the deaf, it seemed as if the gap between the requirements of this group and what public libraries could offer was too great for public libraries to be able to serve them effectively” (McQuigg, 2003). Clearly, not even so long ago, there was quite a dearth of information for or about the Deaf community available in libraries across the nation and around the globe.
New guidelines from library organizations such as International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the ALA were written in order to help libraries make their information more accessible to people with disabilities, and in some cases, specifically the Deaf community. IFLA’s Guidelines for Library Services to Deaf People is one such set of guidelines, and it was published to inform libraries of the services that should be provided for Deaf patrons. Most of the guidelines pertain to ensuring that Deaf patrons have equal access to all available library services. Other guidelines include training library staff to provide services for the Deaf community, availability of text telephones or TTYs not only to assist patrons with reference questions but also for making outside calls, using the most recent technology in order to communicate more effectively with Deaf patrons, including closed captioning services for any television services, and developing a collection that would interest the members of the Deaf community (Day, 2000, p. 12-22).

Over the years, library services have begun to evolve in order to accommodate the needs and desires of local Deaf communities. At the Queen Borough Public Library (QBPL) in New York, the staff implemented new and innovative ideas in order to involve the community and library staff with the Deaf people in their community. The QBPL hired a deaf librarian, Lori Stambler, to train the library staff about Deaf culture, to teach sign language classes for family members and people who are involved with deaf people, and to teach literacy classes for Deaf patrons. In working with the library, Stambler was able to help the community reach out to its deaf neighbors, and helped other deaf people become more active in their outside community (Hollander, 1995).

Deaf Libraries

The library at Gallaudet University, the only Deaf liberal arts university in the United States, was founded in 1876. The library’s collection has grown from a small number of reference books to the world’s largest collection of deaf-related materials with over 234,000 books and thousands of other materials in different formats. The collection is so large that the library had to create a hybrid classification system based on the Dewey Decimal Classification System in order to make cataloging and location within the library much easier for both library staff and users. The library also houses the university’s archives, which holds some of the oldest deaf-related books and documents in the world (Harrington, 1998, par. 11-14).
In Nashville, Tennessee, Sandy Cohen is managing the Library Services for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (LSDHH). The program was created in 1979 in response to information accessibility issues for the Deaf in the Nashville area. Originally, the only service provided was the news via a teletypewriter or TTY, but today, the program has expanded to serving the entire state of Tennessee by providing all different types of information and material on deafness, Deaf culture, and information for family members of Deaf people, as well as a historical and reference collection (Cohen, 2006, p. 51-52).

References

American Library Association. (2012). Library services for people with disabilities policy. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/ascla/asclaissues/libraryservices

Cohen, S. (2006). Have you heard about the Library Services for the Deaf & Hard of Hearing? Tennessee Libraries, 56(1), 51–56.

Day, J. M. (2000). Guidelines for library services to deaf people (Report no. 62). The Hague: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

Hagemeyer, A. L. (2001). Achievement: From a lack of knowledge to an appreciation of Deaf history. IFLA Conference Proceedings, 1–3.

Harrington, T.R. (1998). The Deaf collection at the Gallaudet University Library. Education Libraries, 22(3), 5-12.

Hollander, P. (1995). Deaf-advocacy at Queens Borough PL. American Libraries, 26(6), 560–562.

McQuigg, K. (2003). Are the deaf a disabled group, or a linguistic minority? Issues for librarians in Victoria’s public libraries. Australian Library Journal, 52(4). Retrieved from http://alia.org.au/publishing/alj/52.4/full.text/mcquigg.html

Playforth, S. (2004). Inclusive library services for deaf people: an overview from the social model perspective. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 21, 54-57.