E.H. Little Library Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Goals

The College’s Commission on Race and Slavery report, released August 2020, asks the community to search for truth in “building a comprehensive understanding of the college’s own history, which is intertwined with the institution and legacies of slavery and enslaved person.” The role of library professionals as leaders and partners in this search for truth cannot be underestimated, whether through the development of research projects investigating and acknowledging the college’s history with slavery and race, the creation of educational exhibitions and websites, curation of public programs, development of collections, or work with community partners. The Commission report supports our mission to engage crucially with the past to understand our present and inform our future. Specifically, the following recommendations are directly aligned with the library’s mission and goals.: 

• Comprehensive research about the founding of the college, made public through the library archives and a public-facing website.

• Educational programming open to the campus and community.

• Liaison work with community organizations. 

• Support of faculty and student projects that transform key spaces into interactive sites for exploring the legacies of slavery, how ideas of race emerge, and why racism persists.

• Development of intellectual principles for ethical research and scholarship in the area of race of slavery.

In addition to the above recommendations, the following organizational goals have been identified for the coming academic year, as aligned to the library's strategic directions and the college's strategic priorities: 

Enhance the Student Experience 

• Lead a research group to develop recommendations for strategies that the library can employ to reduce costs of student course resources on campus. 

• Coordinate accessibility training in collaboration with AADR as part of student employee training. 

• Develop a new framework for student employee hiring that  incorporates best practices from the library’s Student Employee Hiring DEI toolkit.

• Expand the DEI student hiring guide to encompass best practices for mentoring and other feedback received from library colleagues. 

• Develop social media procedures to ensure DEI-focused posts. 

• Determine and remove barriers to inclusion by gathering student feedback to further develop a diverse and vibrant library experience.

Expand Access

• Define accessibility benchmarks for library systems and develop workflows for ensuring that databases and systems meet published accessibility requirements.

• Work with interns to update collection descriptions in ArchivesSpace, especially those having to do with race and enslavement, through an IDEA-informed lens to promote equitable access to collections.

• Participate in DEI focused training opportunities related to inclusive cataloging.

• Design a holistic collections assessment plan that combines our user-centered disposition with data-driven decision making to build diverse, well-curated, and sustainable collections.

• Develop and implement a plan for ongoing diversity audit of the library’s print collections. 

• Collaborate with faculty and students in the addition of diverse library collections.

• Develop and plan for collection development, donor, and preservation policies with a focus on increased clarity, diversity, and community input; create workflows for the implementation of these policies.

• Develop a foundation for identifying and documenting policies and procedures for the creation and use of conscious cataloging for collections uploaded to archival systems.

• Create an enhanced local history page that incorporates elements from the archived website, oral histories, and local and community records (including the Committee on Community Relations and Common Ground). 

• Develop a plan to digitize, preserve, and promote materials from the Music Library that reflect underrepresented communities and support research for the Commission on Race and Slavery. 

• Expand efforts to showcase student, staff, and faculty scholarship through programming and physical/virtual library spaces centering on marginalized voices at Davidson.

Support a Diverse Workforce

• Lead DEI sessions for faculty and staff. 

• In collaboration with the Student Workforce Committee, apply lessons learned from investigating DEI hiring practices for library employees and apply to the hiring process of student employees in order to expand our commitment to recruit, hire, and retain a diverse and engaged library staff. 

• Proactively seek out and participate in learning opportunities to increase understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  

• Participate in the college-sponsored, staff-centered Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) workshop. 

Collaborate & Connect

• Support internal planning and coordination of IDEA programs and training for staff and students.

• Participate in and provide leadership for the college’s Beaver Dam initiatives using IDEA practices as a framework for decision-making. 

• Develop knowledge of 19th century Davidson College and Town of Davidson history to support departmental efforts related to enslavement and Beaver Dam.

Strengthen Organizational Resilience 

• Foster a sense of belonging in the organization and model a culture of continuous assessment by participating in the Oberlin Group DEIA Audit Project as measured by co-project management of the Oberlin Group DEIA Audit Project. 

• Audit acquisitions and collection management practices through a DEI lens to assess the effectiveness of our current process.

• Develop inclusive practices for facilitating conversations, goal setting, and strategic planning.