Equity in Action: Doing a Diversity Audit

 

Jensen, Karen.  (2018).  Library Journal’s Equity in Action: Doing a Diversity Audit.  https://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2018/10/library-journals-equity-in-action-doing-a-diversity-audit/

 

This web posting is by Karen Jensen who has learned from her own experience of working in libraries, research, and then finally presenting to others what she has learned about diversity in collections and the  process of auditing a library collection to gather data on our collection and to look for weak areas of the collection.  Our first attempt at a diversity audit is likely not going to yield the results that we want or expect.  It may take several tries, and the more research we do about effective audits and working with others who have completed audits successfully will help ease the learning curve and be a more productive use of our limited time.  The experience of those such as Ms. Jensen can save us the trouble and nuisance of re-inventing the wheel, so to speak, and ease us into a process that might feel completely overwhelming, especially to a new librarian.

 A diversity audit helps us to answer the question, “what percentage of my collection is written by something other than the traditionally dominant voice?”   She includes slides from a recent presentation that she gave, and talks about the types of diversity to consider, how we can accomplish an effective diversity audit, collecting and analyzing our data.  How we can organize our audit in “chunks”  rather than tackling the entire collection at once to avoid becoming overwhelmed.  She also shares other resources that are helpful in learning more about diversity in library collections as well as how to complete a successful audit.