Below are charts gathered from a search of the library catalogs of Torrance Public Library and the County of Los Angeles Public Library. The Torrance Public Library search was not broken down by branches, since they were all contained within the city limits of my study. The County of Los Angeles Public Library was broken up in a few different ways. First, the catalog was analyzed by library within the city limits of the case study. What this means is I essentially looked at the four libraries contained within the city limits of Gardena and Carson: Mayme Dear Gardena Library, Masao W. Satow Library (Gardena), Carson Library, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (Carson Library and formerly the Victoria Park Library). I also included the collection from the County’s Asian Pacific Resource Center as I figured they would have the most information available as well as taking a survey of the County as a whole. It was important to differentiate between branch and the County system as a whole, due to the ready availability of inter-branch requests, which essentially make the whole County collection available to the patron. However, to fulfill immediate needs, the patron would only have those materials available within the library’s walls at hand. I also chose not to do pie chart representations of the individual collections for MLK, Jr. and Satow because these library’s holdings were very small and held under 50 books combined.
The search conducted was a fairly simple one in order to maximize results and was the same procedure for both catalogs. The search was for: subject, hawaii and NOT subject, fiction. I chose this because it maximized the amount of literature available by including everything and anything regarding the state of Hawaii, the ancestral homeland of Native Hawaiians, which I would assume would be a required subject heading for anything dealing with Hawaii, Hawaiians, or Hawaiian culture. I chose not to include fiction, as there are so many novels, adult and juvenile, which may take place in Hawai’i but have nothing to do with Native Hawaiians or Native Hawaiian culture that it would be difficult to determine what aids in the preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage and what does not.
The Hawaiian culture section of the pie chart is a combination of various topics which will be available in the appendix of my thesis and include the following subjects: Arts & Crafts (i.e. Lei Making, Quilt Making), Folktales/Myths/Legends, Food, Language, Literature/Poetry (Non-Fic), Medicine, Music and dance, Religion, Surfing. Although I feel like these are all distinct parts of the Hawaiian culture and cultural heritage is not limited to these topics, it was more visually appealing in graph form to combine them. In my analysis of the library collection, I would also take into account the collection of Hawaiian history and politics, as these greatly influence modern Hawaiian cultural heritage and some scholars claim that a tie that binds off-island hawaiians to on-island hawaiians is this shared collective memory of annexation and overthrow.
