DEI in Libraries

Relatively recently, a colleague ( Peggy Griesinger) distributed a bibliography on the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and I decided to spend some time analyzing the content of the bibliography. Below are a couple of visualizations from the analysis, albiet out of context:

Along the way, I learned about "slow librarianship" -- an antiracist, responsive, and values-driven practice. I was also able to programatically extract and enumerate quite a number of interesting question/answer pairs elaborating on DEI. A sampling follows:

• What is a core value in libraries? - social justice
• What is a core value in libraries? - diversity, equity, and inclusion principles
• Where can you find the Diversity Style Guide? - https://www.diversitystyleguide.com/
• How are librarians' skill sets honed? - through ongoing interaction with diverse groups

From the analysis's summary:

It goes without saying, DEI is a thing in libraries and librarianship; the articles in the given bibliography discuss DEI, and many of the extracted sentences elaborate on the how's and why's of DEI in libraries, specificaly in cataloging practice.

What is interesting to me is an apparent shift of librarianship in the past few decades. For a long time, libraries seemed to be about books, but with the advent of computers, library schools evolved into "i" (information) schools, but now-a-days, especially in practice, librarianship seems to be less about data, information, and knowledge and more about social justice. I suppose such is a sign of the times.

For more detail, see the entire analysis.