Our profession seeks to overcome a history of centering cis white men and their experiences. Though we steward many diverse stories, we struggle to move beyond celebrating legacy collections. These celebrated collections often fail to demonstrate the true breadth and variety of perspectives found in our archives. There have been many discussions to reflect on DEI efforts in our field, but the energy and ability to create large-scale change can be challenging to sustain beyond these reflections due to staffing, budget, and time constraints.
Each of the chapters in this publication will demonstrate the ways that archival professionals center DEI in our everyday practice, outreach, conservation, and more, or can imagine doing so in the future. Although the focus of this volume will be archives, special collections, and conservation, we welcome relevant case studies from the mainstream academic library professions with commentary on how they could be applied to special collections and archives. For example, case studies based on instructional pedagogy, outreach initiatives, cataloging and descriptive practices, or curatorial approaches would be welcomed. The resulting edited volume will be published by ACRL Press.
We hope this book will empower archivists and librarians to become active agents of change in their home institutions regardless of size or staffing.