Libraries, Colleges & Universities: Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, Allyship (IDEA)

Abstract Training culturally competent and socially responsible library and information science (LIS) professionals requires a blended approach that extends across curricula, professional practice, and research. Social justice can support these goals by serving as a topic of inquiry in LIS curricula as well as by providing a scholarly framework for understanding how power and privilege shape LIS institutions and professional practice. This article applies social justice as a topic and tool for transforming LIS curricula and culture by exploring the implementation of social justice–themed courses and an extracurricular reading group in one LIS department. Exploring curricular and extracurricular cases in a shared institutional setting contextualizes key challenges and conversations that can inform similar initiatives in other institutions. Transforming LIS culture to prioritize social justice values, epistemologies, and frameworks requires multivalent strategies, community buy-in, and shared responsibility in terms of the labor of leading and sustaining engagement with social justice.

In an increasingly globalized world, social justice issues dominate the news. Libraries are often viewed as places where social justice ideals are upheld and pr...

Automation is coming to HR. By automating the collection and analysis of large datasets, AI and other analytics tools offer the promise of improving every phase of the HR pipeline, from recruitment and compensation to promotion, training, and evaluation. These systems, however, can reflect historical biases and discriminate on the basis of race, gender, and class. Managers should consider that 1) models are likely to perform best with regard to individuals in majority demographic groups but worse with less well represented groups; 2) there is no such thing as a truly “race-blind” or “gender-blind” model, and omitting race or gender explicitly from a model can even make things worse; and 3) if demographic categories aren’t evenly distributed in your organization (and in most they aren’t), even carefully built models will not lead to equal outcomes across groups.

The university announced courses would resume “immediately online and asynchronously,” but questions about academic freedom, transparency, and more, remain.

For black conservationists, work can be a challenge: 'All you have to get is that one person who's going to call the cops and you're the next hashtag.'

The first of 1,000 planned ‘Freedom Libraries’ opens in the Massachusetts prison where the campaigner was incarcerated in the 1940s

Librarianship has remained overwhelmingly white for decades. Leaders say recruitment, retention and a change in policies and culture are needed.

Hispanic-Serving Institutions make up 17 percent of all U.S. public and nonprofit colleges—yet they enroll 67 percent of all Hispanic and Latino ...

Here’s how I’m going to tackle this issue in 2022.

The U.S. Department of Education has recognized the UA's success in the enrollment of Hispanic students and in providing educational opportunities to them.

Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the primary goal of integrating the workforce and eliminating arbitrary bias against minorities and other groups who had been historically excluded. Yet substantial research reveals that racial bias persists and continues to limit opportunities and outcomes for racial minorities in the workplace. Because these denials of opportunity result from myriad individual hiring and promotion decisions made by vast numbers of managers, finding effective strategies to reduce the impact of bias has proven challenging. Some have proposed that a sense of accountability, or “the implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, and actions to others,” can decrease bias. This Article examines the conditions under which accountability to a committee of peers reduces racial bias and discrimination. More specifically, this Article provides the first empirical test of whether an employment committee’s racial composition influences the decision-making process. My experimental results reveal that race does in fact matter. Accountability to a racially diverse committee leads to more hiring and promotion of underrepresented minorities than does accountability to a homogeneous committee. Members of diverse committees were more likely to value diversity, acknowledge structural discrimination, and favor inclusive promotion decisions. This suggests that accountability as a debiasing strategy is more nuanced than previously theorized. If simply changing the racial composition of a committee can indeed nudge less discriminatory behavior, we can encourage these changes through voluntary organizational policies like having an NFL “Rooney Rule” for hiring committees. In addition, Title VII can be interpreted to hold employers liable under a negligence theory to encourage the types of changes that yield inclusive hires and promotions.

To increase ACRL's visibility and influence in the arena of higher education policy development, legislation, and best practices, ACRL speaks out on important issues. Below are examples of ACRL's participation in activities geared towards creating change. ACRL is active in advocating for policy and legislation through the ALA Washington Office, as well as through coalition work with groups such as the Open Access Working Group and the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) for joint work with ALA and ARL on copyright issues such as fair use, trade agreements, and Google Book Search settlement.To increase ACRL's visibility and influence in the arena of higher education policy development and legislation and in support of its commitment to work towards reshaping the system of scholarly communications, ACRL speaks out on important issues. Below are examples of ACRL's participation in activities geared towards creating change.

The United States has been steadily growing more racially and ethnically diverse, especially over the past several decades. Yet, as a profession, law librarianship has been slow to reflect the country’s increased diversity. Taking the most recent U.S. Census statistics into account, this article evaluates the implications that a progressively diverse population poses for law librarianship. Reasons for low levels of diversity among law librarians, as well as past and suggested efforts within the profession to further increase diversity, are discussed.

This issue brief is published by the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a national network of government working to achieve racial equity and advance opportunities for all.

Analysis of anti-racism, equity, inclusion and social justice initiatives in library and information science literature - Author: Emily P. Jones, Nandita S. Mani, Rebecca B. Carlson, Carolyn G. Welker, Michelle Cawley, Fei Yu

In the debut of our Academic Insights column, academic librarians Twanna Hodge and Jamia Williams assert that BIPOC voices must be centered in every aspect of librarianship.

ACRL stands in solidarity with the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) and amplifies ALA’s Executive Board in recognizing and condemning anti-Asian hate crimes. ACRL affirms APALA’s March 3, 2021, statement which noted that the association “recognizes and strongly condemns the rise

A couple years ago, Book Riot posted an article by Katisha Smith titled, “13 Pioneering Black Librarians You Oughta Know.” Among others, Smith introduces us to Edward C. Williams, the f…

By Sue Silverman One of the first things that struck me when teaching international and foreign law research for the first time was how Western and Eurocentric international law is, from the princi…

From technology to teaching about how to use tech, libraries foster equity of access for everyone - regardless of their own means

The advances of extreme right-wing political forces in the United States, exemplified most recently by the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, highlight the importance of initiating a critical and thorough examination of the function and effectiveness of institutions long believed to serve as fundamental pillars for public education and the advancement of democratic ideals, including libraries. Despite a carefully managed and revered public image as nearly-sacred spaces for freedom in intellectual development and unobstructed democratic participation and engagement, libraries have long maintained a posture of obedience and unquestioning subordination to the needs of elite social power structures, including those historically defined by racial supremacy and oppression. Under the present conditions, and despite public proclamations about libraries being on the “frontlines” of the liberal anti-Trump “resistance”, as witnessed during 2017 American Library Association annual professional conference in Chicago, it is highly unlikely that mainstream libraries will be able or willing to spring into action and play an effective, credible role against the alarming rise of alt-right violence and proto-fascism in the United States. Such a role would have to be grounded in a progressive, alternative model for culturo-informational leadership and critical information and political literacy education in the United States. Developing this alternative in the short- to medium-term may prove a near impossibility as it would require radical changes in the way mainstream libraries are conceptualized, as well as in the ideological structure and delivery of library and information science education programs.

By Brooke Doyle You may have heard about Improving Access to Civil Legal Justice through Libraries, an initiative developed in partnership between OCLC’s WebJunction program and the Legal Serv…

Deep listening is a contemplative practice that assists us with dropping our habitual story lines so that we can genuinely engage with other people and the world around us.  It is a practice of listening with an open mind, suspending our tendency to immediately label, analyze, critique, or

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the fact that a master’s degree is required to be a librarian. For me, choosing to pursue a graduate degree in library science made perfect sense. I have …

The study found the presence and usage of public libraries and museums to be positively associated with community health, school effectiveness, institutional connection, and cultural opportunity.