In 2016, the Collections Directorate of the MIT Libraries explored how to go beyond hiring and programming to manifest the values of diversity, inclusion, and social justice in our daily work. Staff from archives, technical services, preservation, scholarly communication, and collections strategy worked together on a Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (DISJ) Task Force that focused on operationalizing these values in our policies, routines, and processes. We look forward to discussing the report of the DISJ Task Force and how we have begun to implement its recommendations, with a focus on the work of the Scholarly Communication and Collections Strategy (SCCS) Department.

Presenters

Michelle Baildon, Collections Strategist for Arts & Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Rhonda Kauffman, Bibliographic Metadata Associate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/PDfqUdfrzfA
 

Description

Academic librarians are increasingly embracing diversity, inclusion, and social justice as values essential to our profession.  In 2016, the Collections Directorate of the MIT Libraries explored how we can go beyond hiring and programming to manifest these values in our daily work. Staff representing each area of our directorate—archives, technical services, preservation, scholarly communication, and collections strategy—worked together on a Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (DISJ) Task Force that focused on how we might operationalize these values in our departments’ policies, routines, and processes.  

Over the course of eight months, the task force explored diversity, inclusion, and social justice philosophically and pragmatically.  The group developed a shared conceptual understanding of academic libraries' overarching economic and social contexts and developed definitions of the terms "diversity," "inclusion," and "social justice." The final report emphasized issues of economic justice, as well as systems of oppression and privilege based on social and cultural categories such as race, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, class, and ability.  Inspired by a series of discussions involving every member of the directorate, as well as work done by other libraries and archives, the task force created a list of over 40 recommendations. 

The webinar will share task force definitions, a high-level overview of our process and recommendations, and a progress report on implementation, with a focus on the work of the Scholarly Communication and Collections Strategy (SCCS) department.

Works in Progress: An OCLC Research Occasional Webinar Series
These webinars are exclusively for OCLC Research Library Partners, but the recordings are publicly available to all.

What are we working on? What are you working on? OCLC Research Library Partners are invited to participate in Works in Progress: An OCLC Research Occasional Webinar Series to talk about work happening in OCLC Research – we'd like to present our work informally and get feedback from you, our Partners. We'd also like this to be a venue for Partner institutions. What are you working on that everyone should know about? What input would help you move forward? Let us know!