The Need for Diversity Audits

 

Amanda Lawrence

Brilliant, B., Guessford, M.R., Snieg, A.L., Jones, J.J., Keeler, T., & Stephenson, P.L. (2002). Assessing diversity in hospital library collections. Medical Reference Services Quarterly. 41(4), 424-438. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763869.2022.2131185

For Project 6 and my additional reading assignment, I chose to focus my research on diversity audits and why they are an important step in all collection management policies. At a minimum, collection development is the act of selecting new materials and weeding out old ones for your students or patrons. However, without specific collection management policies that are inclusive of diversity, equity, and inclusion standards, a library's collection runs the risk of excluding underrepresented people, their voices, and their experiences.

The article above focused on the need for diversity audits in a library hospital. My coursework and experience has primarily been with public libraries, so it was interesting to see how the idea of collection management works in a different setting. Unsurprisingly, a lack of diverse materials seems to be a common thread amongst most libraries; out of the libraries studied, 3% of collections referred to disability, 8% referred to ethnicity, and 0.37% had any cross-cultural references. This is particularly startling in a medical setting, since patients need medical professionals who are sensitive to their diverse needs and who understand how different backgrounds can affect a person's physical or mental health. On a more basic level, diseases present themselves differently on different bodies, so without diverse representation in medical books, patients may go undiagnosed. This article shows the need to conduct diversity audits on hospital collections; even though it is a long, costly, and imperfect system, it is essential for the library and hospital in order to function and provide proper evidence-based care.