Racial Equity in Collections: Building the Collections our Libraries Need

Author(s)

Amy Pham, University of San DiegoFollow
Glenn Johnson-Grau, Loyola Marymount UniversityFollow

Document Type

Presentation

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

Publication Date

5-23-2022

Disciplines

Library and Information Science

Description, Abstract, or Artist's Statement

Librarians are trying to meet the call for fundamental and radical change in collection development practices while struggling with challenges in time, money, and subject expertise, particularly at small institutions. It will take long-term, systemic change to address ingrained biases and limitations of selectors, publishers, and social systems. Prepackaged resources from library vendors provide a limited solution for collection gaps, with recent products newly pitched to address Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Do these products actually contribute value to library collections as claimed? If market-based systems do not meet libraries’ needs, what might the alternatives be? We propose to analyze selected resources for their claimed value of strengthening diversity in collections, with the goal of critically assessing standard collection development models. Our analysis will incorporate quantitative methods – including overlap analyses – and qualitative assessment methods. After sharing this analysis, we hope to engage attendees in discussion of methods for building and sharing practices related to diversifying collections, recognizing such collaborative systems could be used to incorporate more facets of diversity beyond our specific focus on race and ethnicity.

Notes

Presented at the 2022 Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge in Government Camp, Oregon.

Digital USD Citation

Pham, Amy and Johnson-Grau, Glenn, "Racial Equity in Collections: Building the Collections our Libraries Need" (2022). Copley Library: Faculty Scholarship. 37.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/library_facpub/37