Williams Libraries Diversity and Inclusion Activity 2024

Every year we publish a summary of our diversity and inclusion activities around the time of the National Day of Racial Healing (January 21st, 2025.) This has become an annual tradition and a way to fulfill one of our planning objectives, “Report annually on our DEIA activities.” You can find our prior summary here. We are aware that what is listed here is not enough. We need to continue to do more. Each item here is necessarily brief. If you want to know more about any of the items listed here, please reach out to me or to your liaison librarian. We are also interested in ideas you have about how we, as your library, can tackle systemic racism in our librarianship, on campus, and in our society.

Engagement & Empowerment

  • Our programs of exhibits and events in Sawyer, Schow, and in Special Collections continue to pay particular attention to foregrounding historically marginalized voices on campus, including, 
    • The annual July 4th reading featured Shannon Holsey, President of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community.
    • Research Services’ workshop series went beyond  tool-based subjects to include topics on citational justice during Claiming Williams Day (and these continued throughout the year.)
    • Expressions of Resilience: A Tapestry of Black Joy – Black History Month 
    • Celebrating Black joy, resilience, creativity, and achievement – Black History Month
    • Skip this, read instead – Womens’ History Month
    • Belated Acknowledgement – Womens’ History Month
    • Trans Day of Visibility
    • “Like mint in a wall crack” Arab American Poets at Work
    • From Everywhere: Jewish American Heritage in the stacks
    •  “What Came Before Us: Celebrating Thirty Years of WAAAAN, Williams Asian and Asian American Alumni Network.” 
    • Capstone project from ENGL 418 featuring material from the Sterling A. Brown papers.

Staff Success

  • Hiring a diverse staff that reflects the diversity of campus is a top priority for us. We have a long way to go in this regard, but we rigorously review and rewrite our positions descriptions and job ads, actively recruit diverse applicants, and seek to limit bias in our searches. Unfortunately, by the self reported measures of racial and ethnic identities used in the contemporary United States, we are at best only staying steady. 
  • We are pleased to welcome Julia Rossi as our inaugural Community Engagement Archivist, who amongst other things is helping the College community engage with our institutional histories in more inclusive ways. 
  • The Lowe Fellowship, now in its sixth year, continues to introduce special collections librarianship as a profession to Williams graduates from groups historically and currently under-represented in the profession. Several participants are either pursuing graduate education relating to cultural heritage or are working in the field.

Collections

  • Expanding the number of titles we purchase via bookshop.org specifically supporting the Black owned  bookstore Olive Tree Books n Voices in Springfield
  • Our university press book approval plan continues to focus on subjects that ensure diverse and marginalized voices are regularly added to our collections.
  • Special Collections has paid particular attention to collecting in the areas of global book history, oral history, and underrepresented networks. In the past year, amongst other purchases and donations, we are grateful to have acquired a series of illustrations by the Japanese artist Hokusai, rubbings of the inscriptions on the Tang-dynasty Xi’an Stele (also called the Jing jiao Stele or the Nestorian Stele), and two Ottoman firman (decrees). 

Description and Discovery

  • We formed an Inclusive Description Group: a new library group focused on making the descriptive practices used throughout our library systems more inclusive and recommending ways to mitigate the impact of pejorative, discriminatory, or harmful terms currently used in our systems, and additional vocabularies for inclusion in our ongoing descriptive practices
  • Special Collections staff continue reparative description of archival collections including materials that include offensive and harmful nomenclature, and how to work with researchers who may need to engage with such materials.
  • Catalogers in Williams Libraries have so far assigned new call numbers to 592 items in 2024, with plans to reclassify the remaining 400 items that use N Cutter numbers, which have been in use since the mid 20th Century when the Library of Congress established cutters beginning with N to classify materials about African Americans.
  • Catalogers completed the description and classification of the remaining 260 Arabic language books gifted to the Williams Libraries by the University of Washington.
  • Physical processing & Access Services staff continued culturally appropriate relabeling of Arabic language right to left script books in the general collections.

Library Spaces

  • In May we added four individual study pods, three in Sawyer and one in Schow. While these pods serve all students they are particularly important for neurodivergent students who benefit from distraction free study spaces, and for any student seeking a bit more privacy. 

 Assessment

  • In the fall of 2023 library staff participated in an Oberlin Group pilot of DR. Kawanna Bright’s Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Self-Assessment Audit. The results of this audit helped us revise our diversity & inclusion plan and coordinate it with our strategic plan. In 2024 we began to implement that plan, which runs through 2028.
  • We also included a diversity statement into our DEIA Plan.

Some of these are small, some will only bear fruit in the future, and many should have been done a long time ago. We are interested in your ideas about what we in your libraries can do to advance racial healing in our society and on our campus. Don’t hesitate to reach out.