Fascinating contrast to "neutrality" discourse in US librarianship.

I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve heard the term “safe space,” but it’s clear to me that it has fallen out of favor among educators and academics. I remember when I started interacting with…

Useful example for the Unit 2 group assignment.

This post was written by Laurier Cress. Laurier Cress is a graduate student at the University of Denver studying Library Science with an emphasis on digital collections, rare books and manuscripts, and social justice in librarianship and archives. In addition to LIS topics, she is also interested in Medieval and Early Modern European History. Laurier … Continue reading An Intern’s Investigation on Decolonizing Archival Descriptions and Legacy Metadata →

Library staff members have been fighting for racial justice for years. This training, they say, was just the latest misstep.

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

Excellent instructions for de-race-izing language.

A children’s book editor and a writer look at what’s changed, and what hasn’t, since the 1995 publication of a groundbreaking 'Village Voice' article on the lack of diversity in book publishing.

If you have ever attended any session where I have presented and the topic of diversity has come up, you know I am quick to tell attendees that I do not give out  diverse  book lists. Here is my reason why: there are no diverse texts. It is in the transaction (Rosenblatt, 1986) between the reader an

Processing Note: Titles and descriptions were provided by creators of the collection. Some of these original titles and descriptions contain harmful language. In 2020, archivists removed transcriptions of the harmful portions of the titles from the finding aid and replaced them with [racist slur]. The original titles remain on the physical documents and digitized access copies. We have not removed racial terms "Negro" or "Colored" because we feel they provide important historical context about the materials and who created them and they facilitate the research process. We recognize that these terms also may cause harm and will periodically revisit our decision to include them. We recognize the complexity of this issue and welcome feedback on this decision at wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.

Acknowledgements The future of scholarly communications will be positively impacted by attracting and retaining a pool of highly talented and creative professionals from diverse and/or historically…

This is the prepared transcript of ‘Knowledge is power: an introduction to critical librarianship’, a talk I was invited to give at a professional development day for the NSW branch of …