Library Technical Services

Adapting to a Changing Environment

Stacey Marien

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781442238633
• eBook ISBN: 9781612495859
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Libraries are experiencing major changes concerning the role of technical services. Technical services librarians also are being challenged about their relevance and role, sometimes revealed by a lack of understanding of the contribution technical services librarians make to building and curating library and archival collections. The threats are real: relocation from central facilities, the dramatic shift to electronic resources, budgetary constraints, and outsourced processing. As a result, technical services departments are reinventing themselves to respond to these and similar challenges while embracing innovative methods and opportunities to advance librarianship in the twenty-first century.

Library Technical Services provides case studies that highlight difficult realities, yet embrace exciting opportunities, such as space reclamation, evolving vendor partnerships, metadata, retraining and managing personnel, special collections, and distance education. Written for catalog and metadata librarians and managers of technical services units, this book will inspire and provide practical advice and examples for solving issues many libraries are facing today.

CHALLENGE FOUR

Staffing Technical Services

CHAPTER 13

Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice in Library Technical Services

Rhonda Y. Kauffman and Martina S. Anderson

ABSTRACT

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries recently embraced a large-scale initiative to incorporate the values of diversity, inclusion, and social justice (DISJ) into library practices. In early 2017, the MIT collections directorate task force on DISJ released a report with recommendations for embedding DISJ values into the daily work of archives, technical services, preservation, scholarly communications, and collections strategy staff. This chapter focuses on the challenges and opportunities in undertaking a sustained effort to achieve DISJ specifically within technical services. The authors highlight how technical services staff can use their unique position within libraries to dismantle existing structures of inequity and privilege by providing access to information and shifting resources to underrepresented groups. This chapter presents the historical context of DISJ within the library profession and the MIT Libraries, discusses implications of this paradigm shift for library technical services departments, and presents cataloging and acquisitions job profiles to help readers envision the practical significance for library staff of the imperative to incorporate DISJ values into the regular practice of their work.

INTRODUCTION

The values of DISJ are widely embraced among members of the library profession. Indeed, in our current context, it is not particularly controversial among library professionals to assert that libraries should play a role among other social institutions in ensuring that all members of our communities have opportunities for full participation in society.¹ At the same time, it can be challenging for some people working in libraries to envision precisely how their daily work activities within libraries must change if these values are to be fully realized. That challenge is especially acute for technical services professionals, for whom job competence is generally measured through the lens of values such as productivity and efficiency.

The purpose of this chapter is to address this challenge directly by discussing in concrete terms how the jobs of technical services library staff can be described and undertaken to ensure that DISJ values are consistently advanced by libraries and library staff of all kinds. We begin by providing accounts of two contexts that together create the backdrop for this conversation: how the library profession has responded to questions of DISJ in a society long characterized by inequality and discrimination and how one library, the MIT Libraries, is seeking to remake itself to support DISJ. We then turn to a specific discussion of the role of technical services library staff in advancing DISJ. We lay the foundation for that discussion by presenting three job descriptions for standard technical services roles and then offering suggestions for how these staff members can support the library’s DISJ mission through their job activities. Our central purpose is to enable library workers to engage in focused, practical discussions of how to move DISJ forward by enlisting the capacities of everyone working in libraries.

BACKGROUND

Discussions of DISJ in libraries are often met with confusion. Libraries are often considered sites of intellectual freedom in which the equal dignity of all is recognized and in which the right of all people to find the information they want and need according to their own judgment is enabled by library workers. After all, the mission of the American Library Association (ALA) is “to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all,”² and ALA articulates the core values of librarianship as “access, confidentiality/privacy, democracy, diversity, education and lifelong learning, intellectual freedom, preservation, the public good, professionalism, service, social responsibility, and sustainability.”³ Like so many institutions in the United States, however, libraries and the library profession have a complex history with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion.⁴ Idealized visions of the library profession’s altruism⁵ tend to mask the library’s role in reproducing and perpetuating dominant social structures that affect people in unequal ways based on their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender expression, class, and ability.⁶ As ShinJoung Yeo and James R. Jacobs argue, “Despite the dominant notion that librarianship at its core is neutral … the library as a social, educational and cultural institution has never been isolated from its political and social climate or historical context.”⁷

As in so many contexts, moving the library profession forward requires looking back in order to participate fully in a trajectory of change. That backward look reveals that while attention to issues of equity and inclusion is on the rise in the library profession (as evidenced by the recent adoption and/or reaffirmation of diversity and inclusion statements by many library professional organizations⁸), we are nonetheless still engaged in a process of overcoming systemic inequities. It is no secret that “[the] librarian profession suffers from a persistent lack of racial and ethnic diversity that shows few signs of abating.”⁹ In 2017, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 86.3%¹⁰ of librarians were not Hispanic or Latino whites (compared with 60.7% of the U.S. population¹¹), with 6.4% of librarians black or African American, 10.4% Hispanic or Latino, and 5.2% Asian.¹² In 2019, the percentage of librarians who were not Hispanic or Latino whites increased to 87.8%, with 6% of librarians black or African American, 9.8 % Hispanic or Latino, and 3.2% Asian.¹³ The reasons for this persistence of whiteness in the library profession are myriad and not straightforward, but reckoning with the present necessitates honest accounting of the past. For example, ALA tolerated segregated state associations that denied membership to African American librarians until 1964.¹⁴ Consider, also, that in 1977, the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee recommended rescinding a resolution to combat racism and sexism in the profession, which had passed unanimously during the 1976 centennial conference, because, in the view of committee members, it conflicted with the Library Bill of Rights. (It was not withdrawn.)¹⁵ Much more recently, differing opinions and reactions from libraries regarding the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrate a continued struggle with issues of racial injustice within librarianship.¹⁶

How does the library profession’s history affect day-to-day activities in the present? Although it may be difficult to attribute specific phenomena in the present to legacies of the past, those legacies shine through as reminders that they have always been there. For example, Library of Congress classification reflects historical and socially embedded structures of privilege and power.¹⁷ In the D class for World History in the LC Classification Outline, Western history consists of classes D through DR, with entire subclasses of DA, DD, and DF allotted to Great Britain, Germany, and Greece, respectively, while the entire continents of Africa and Asia (more than 100 countries altogether) are represented only by DS and DT, respectively. The way library resources are categorized communicates biases—or those of our predecessors that we continue to tolerate—to users, and it limits the accessibility of information. Similar unconscious or unrecognized biases affect how vendors categorize books, how selectors evaluate new resources, and how library staff decide to acquire or retain specific materials.¹⁸ Challenging such embedded inequality requires actively reenvisioning our work in the present and future.

LOCAL CONTEXT

The following section provides a closer look at the MIT community and the MIT Libraries. The MIT student population is made up of 11,520 students (4,530 or 39% undergraduates and 6,990 or 61% graduate students). Forty-seven percent (47%) of undergraduate students are women, and 51% are members of U.S. minority groups. Thirty-six percent (36%) of graduate students are women, and 19% are members of U.S. minority groups. Of international students, 3,331 are enrolled in degree programs, including 10% of undergraduate students and 41% of graduate students, with 53% of international students coming from Asia.¹⁹

More than 12,800 faculty and staff support the MIT community, including 2,015 teaching staff.²⁰ The MIT Libraries employs 91 FTE (full-time equivalent) professional staff, 66 FTE support staff, and 15 student assistants.

The MIT Libraries holds 2.2 million print volumes across five libraries (humanities and sciences, engineering, architecture and planning, management and social sciences, and music), the archives and special collections, and off-site storage facilities. The MIT Libraries’ structure consists of three directorates: research and learning, digital library services, and collections. The MIT Libraries’ technical services department is part of the collections directorate.

The MIT Libraries recently refocused its vision and mission toward one committed to the values of DISJ. At the forefront of this initiative was the work of MIT Libraries associate director for collections Gregory Eow in his sponsorship of the MIT collections directorate DISJ task force in 2016.²¹ The task force, comprising members from all departments (acquisitions, cataloging, preservation, digital collections and reformatting, archives, scholarly communications, and collections strategy) and professional levels within the collections directorate, authored a 30-page white paper examining themes related to and making recommendations for incorporating DISJ values into the daily work of library staff.²² Eow initiated the task force shortly after his arrival at the MIT Libraries to foreground his leadership priorities. He stated, “By structuring the task force the way we did—including many functional areas, bringing together librarians and archivists, administrative and support staff, my intention was to signal that we as an entire collections directorate would work together to advance DISJ values.”²³ The intentional inclusion of social justice within the framework of the report is particularly worth noting. Whereas previous discussions within the MIT Libraries and more broadly at MIT had focused on issues of diversity and inclusion, the task force saw a necessity in identifying, confronting, and working to dismantle the systemic structures of inequity within which libraries and archives and librarians and archivists operate, while still embracing the values upon which the profession is built. Eow said, “I believe the term ‘social justice’ emboldens librarians and archivists to revisit their professional first principles and values (democracy, access, public good) and to fight for them.”²⁴

The MIT Libraries’ director, Chris Bourg, is also a strong advocate for the advancement of social justice values. The task force used the following quotation from an article co-written by Bourg to guide its work: “[The] future of academic libraries [is] where librarians confront and creatively address the lack of racial and ethnic diversity within our profession and actively pursue a social justice agenda within our libraries and in the communities we serve. This future requires that we acknowledge that many of our current practices reinforce existing structures of inequity and privilege, and that we leverage our services and resources to support, document, and encourage diversity and social justice efforts within librarianship and society.”²⁵

To inform their work, task force members conducted literature reviews, interviewed staff, and held forums for all collections directorate staff. With an understanding of the issues in the contexts of both the global scholarly realm and the local community, the task force developed the following definitions. Each definition builds on and sharpens the previous one; they should be considered always in relation to one another; focusing on any one of them without considering the others does not fully account for the societal and institutional dimensions of these issues.

• Diversity simply means difference. It is the heterogeneity found in the composition of the workforce, our collections, and community.

• Inclusion means creating and actively sustaining an organization and community in which all can participate fully, be respected, and be treated in an equitable manner.

• Social justice is a commitment to recognizing, addressing, and correcting systemic power imbalances that privilege one group at the expense of another. It is based on the premise that all people are of equal and incalculable value. The work of social justice includes individual and collective action to disrupt the patterns and structures of power in our community, organization, culture, and society.²⁶

These definitions were subsequently adopted by an MIT Libraries-wide task force that created a resource manual to support a new required component of the annual performance review that sets staff goals that demonstrate organizational values of diversity and inclusion. The DISJ Resource Manual for MIT Libraries Staff acknowledges historical, systemic imbalances and urges staff to work to dismantle these structures, empowering s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Challenges Facing Library Technical Services: A Dialogue
• Challenge One: The Evolution of Library Cataloging and Metadata
• Challenge Two: Improving Collection Evaluation and Management
• Challenge Three: Rethinking Library Space Usage
• Challenge Four: Staffing Technical Services
• Challenge Five: Government Documents Collections in a Digital Era
• Challenge Six: Adapting for the Future
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index