Today I will be reviewing the lecture from Choice Media called “Creating an Inclusive Collection—Selecting and Evaluating Diverse Resources” from 21 May 2019 which I will look at with regards with topic for Diversity.
. The lecture had three speakers including Anne Doherty who was an RCL Project Editor at Choice/ACRL. The second speaker was Timothy V. Johnson, editor of American Communist History and RCL subject editor for African American Studies. The third speaker was Ellen Bosman, head of Technical services, New Mexico State University RCL subject editor for GLBTQ studies. I found that the lecture was generally interesting with its content aimed at university and academic libraries. Before I get into what I found good about the lecture, I do want to mention some issues that I had with it.
Firstly, from about the 3:00 minute mark to about 6:04 it is a sales pitch for RCL databases, which makes sense as they are one of the sponsors of the lecture. The second issue that I noticed was that Timothy V. Johnson mentioned at least two concepts and fields without giving them a definition or explaining what he meant by them. The first concept was Diasporic studies which I had to look up the meaning of. The second one was historical Revisionism which I knew already and think a person may be able to work out what it means by context clues. These two are part of a set of three of which he only defined the first one which was Intersectionality. With negatives out of the way, there were lots of positives in these speeches. Anne Doherty talks mainly about issues with biases and that it is impossible for any system or person to be truly neutral. That means that any collection that a library has will have some biases within it. Anne Doherty also talks about the need to create and diversify the subject headings and language within the classification system that the library is using to make the system more inclusive.
Doherty also makes it clear that we do not need to reinvent the wheel but instead need to adapt and modify to make it more inclusive for the different groups which the library wishes to highlight in its community. The second speaker, Timothy V. Johnson, talks about how African American studies is multi-discipline and a relatively new subject and how this affects the way people view it. The fact that it is still developing its core text and ideas has meant that a library classification system has to be able to adapt and change to how a discipline is forming. There is also the issue that many people in the subject come from one discipline and may not be aware of changes that are developing in one of the other disciplines that form the subject. Johnson also talks about how they have developed methods and ways to keep track of the important ideas and resources, and the methods they use to track them. The last speaker, Ellen Bosman, talked with reference to the GLBTQ issues that the community representation has developed at different rates and that with marginalised communities there may be voices within it that are not heard for various reasons. This includes biases within the community, whether it is through social repression of that individual or because of what type of stories that community is telling. Bosman also mentions possible reasons why this may be a systematic problem.
These lecturers do a good job of conveying the difficulty of maintaining a library that has diverse representation in the material that it holds. The lecture also highlights that diversity is changing and that to keep the library collection up to date and inclusive the library staff will have to maintain and adapt the way they do things to accept the new fields that arise, as well as accommodating how the old ones change.