Research & Academic Scholarship

This column shares the experience of one minority Collection Development Librarian throughout their career and their lessons learned. Also sharing pra…

Academic librarians, like so many others in the higher education and library sectors, have discussed equity, diversity, and inclusion for many years. A number of prominent initiatives have worked to address these issues across the profession and within individual institutions. Yet, libraries have struggled to make progress on these stated values, especially in meeting their goals of employee diversification. The organizing led by Black Lives Matter activists in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd sparked an increase in demands for racial justice across the higher education sector. Many leaders called for an end to police violence and pledged to address their institutions’ history of racism. Academic libraries in turn have grappled with renewed attention to increasing the diversity of their employees, addressing retention issues, and fostering equity and inclusion for both internal and external constituents. Some have also focused their efforts on library practices such as increasing the diversity of their collections. To better understand the impact of these national events and long-standing challenges on academic libraries, we surveyed 638 library directors in fall 2020 to examine how perspectives and strategies relevant to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism evolved over the last year

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.

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.

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

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.

Diversity is a cornerstone of the library profession and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has recently announced a renewed emp…

AALL Spectrum - AALL Spectrum / July/August 2022 / Volume 26, Number 6

Diversity initiatives are designed to help workers from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes in organizations. However, these programs are often ineffective. To bett...

The intent of this report is to provide meaningful data and analysis to the Canadian Association of Research Libraries for the purposes of informing future decisions on issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility in the workplace. The data we provide and the insights we derive from the data are based on proven statistical methods to determine significant associations between certain identities and workplace opportunities, in terms of hiring and advancement and other talent management processes. Unfortunately, the data does not tell us why a particular trend is happening or not happening. We can only use our experience and expertise combined with relevant research to provide insights, to the best of our ability, on what the potential reasons might be for one trend or another. Based on these potentialities, we also provide recommendations for next steps to address the key findings presented by the data.

Author(s): Pho, Annie; Chou, Rose L.

Seventy percent of female minority lawyers report leaving or considering leaving the legal profession, according to an ABA report on the challenges that they face.

"By 2050, more than half of Americans will be people of color – and today, nearly every indicator of well-being shows disturbing disparities according to race. Yet the LGBT movement’s lack of substantive work on issues most relevant to people of color leaves the movement vulnerable to irrelevance and division—and leaves fully one-third of the members of the LGBT community underserved. This primer aims to inform and motivate LGBT-movement funders to work explicitly on issues of racial justice and inclusion. The primer illuminates general issues of race and ethnicity in American society, discusses why funders aiming for LGBT equality should work explicitly on matters of race, offers recommended philanthropic approaches to racial justice and inclusion (including language recommendations from the Aspen Institute and a model organizational self-assessment from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Race Matters Toolkit), and provides recommendations specific to LGBT movement work on racial equity and inclusion. Also included in the primer’s appendix is information on nearly 50 nonprofit and philanthropic organizations working on race, which can serve as a starting point for learning more about existing resources related to this work. Note that this report does not reflect original research into LGBT-specific racial matters. Sources were limited to secondary research and a small number of interviews."

This report builds on data from Building Movement Project’s Race to Lead survey, conducted with more than 4,000 respondents across the nonprofit sector. This report, the second in the Race to Lead series, analyzes experiences of respondents who identified as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Queer (LGBTQ).

By: Lourdes Pereira

Gender Transition and Transgender Inclusion in the Museum Workplace: A Toolkit for Trans Individuals, Institutions, and Coworkers is the result of three teams of trans and allied museum professionals working across the country to create resources that are approachable even to those without any prior knowledge about the trans community. The Toolkit comes at a time when the transgender community is constantly under attack. The education and knowledge it provides can create a path for those interested in becoming allies and can foster a more inclusive atmosphere within the museum field. We hope that the Toolkit will prove useful to those who are transitioning or those who wish to improve the diversity and inclusion policies around them.

Institutional Assessment Worksheet Take a Closer Look: How Inclusive Is Your Library to Transgender and Non Binary Folks? Your Library Challenges for transgender folks Possibilities for change Policies -What do nondiscrimination policies include? -What do harassment and disruptions pol...