In August 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California Assembly Bill 1460, requiring all students in the 23-campus California State University system to take a three-unit ethnic studies class—in Native American studies, African American and Black studies, Asian Pacific American studies, or Chicanx and Latinx studies. During the 2021–2022 academic year, thousands of students enrolled in … Continue reading Prioritizing Ethnic Studies
The state climate can be openly hostile to queer people: The nonprofit Movement Advancement Project has ranked Texas “low” when it comes to policies relating to sexual orientation and “negative” on policies related to gender identity. How, then, has the lived experience of queer librarians and library workers compared with expectations? Arro Smith, technical services … Continue reading How to Be Queer in Texas
Sangwand’s monthly show on nonprofit internet station dublab features curated sets that often highlight albums from countries she has visited; she started her record collection while studying in Brazil in 2007. One of her favorite sets kicks off with “A Dream of Los Angeles with Clear Blue Skies” by the Life Force Trio—a quintessential local … Continue reading Bookend: The Right Track
I am a health science librarian at University of Arizona’s Phoenix Biomedical Campus. I am also Akimel O’odham (Pima) from the Gila River Indian Community. From a Native perspective, the needs of the community are greater than the wishes of the individual. Mask mandates are in place on tribal lands, and colleges and universities occupy … Continue reading Fighting Medical Racism
In the aftermath, American Libraries tried to make sense of the tragedy and our nation’s response, and consider their implications for libraries and American Library Association members. Our 2001 and 2002 reporting covered topics related to collections destroyed in the attacks, communities dealing with Islamophobia, restrictions imposed on civil liberties, and what librarian eyewitnesses remembered … Continue reading Special Report: The Legacy of 9/11
God gave Noah the rainbow sign No more water, the fire next time! (“Mary Don’t You Weep,” Black American spiritual) I will never forget Friday, March 13, 2020, the last day we worked in our building. It was also our admitted-student day, and several attendees had already arrived. Our staff quickly arranged a socially distanced … Continue reading LIS and the Next Crisis
What’s striking to me in hindsight is how homogeneous the magazine’s contributors and staff were back in 2007. It has been encouraging to see the efforts AL staffers have made to include writers of diverse backgrounds and points of view, and with that in mind, I’ve decided to end this column. There are so many … Continue reading All Good Things …
My study aimed to determine whether sampled policies had manifest messages of diversity and the degree of congruence between these policies and ALA’s “Diversity in Collection Development: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights,” adopted in 1982 and last amended in 2019. Given that diversity is one of the core values of librarianship and … Continue reading What Does Diversity Mean?
Charts all have the same visual language—lines, bars, pies—but Chalabi said she tries to marry her illustrations with their subject matter to retain her viewers’ attention. A chart about candy sales uses bars of chocolate, for example, so that the meaning is clear even if the labels are removed. Chalabi described her two criteria for … Continue reading ACRL Day Four: Humanizing Information
Jenny Ferretti, We Here founder and digital initiatives librarian at Maryland Institute College of Art, opened the session “Systemic Oppression Requires Systemic Change: Recasting the Roles of Academic Libraries in Contemporary Contexts” by providing background on the racial past and present of libraries. Libraries, she said, are traditionally white-serving institutions, citing Todd Honma’s “Trippin’ over … Continue reading ACRL Day Three: Recasting the Roles of Academic Libraries
She began her talk by laying out the challenges facing the field—such as rising tuition costs, student retention, competition, and the pandemic—and their corresponding opportunities, including attracting nontraditional students, expanding degree programs, tapping alumni resources for networking, and rethinking what the campus experience could mean to students after the pandemic. Kendrick spelled out her theory … Continue reading ACRL Day Two: Getting to Welcome
Cottom, associate professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, spoke about how these discussions inform the courses she teaches as well as her current thinking about the role of the academic library. One course, “Networks of Racial Capitalism,” examines the effects of information capitalism and structural inequality. … Continue reading Ascending into an Open Future
