Supporting Diversity Through Collection Evaluation, Development, and Weeding

The College Library Information on Policy and Practice (CLIPP) book series from ACRL provides college and small university libraries analysis and examples of library practices and procedures.

Supporting Diversity through Collection Evaluation, Development, and Weeding: CLIPP #48
contains a thorough literature review and bibliography, analysis and discussion of survey results, and sample library collection development policies; diversity, equity, and justice statements; and a harmful content policy.

There are emerging practices for evaluating collection diversity and for diversifying collections via acquisitions, but the question of how collection diversity factors into weeding--either in theory or in practice--has not been thoroughly explored. CLIPP #48 provides a comprehensive survey of how diversity-enhancing collection management practices have filtered into the day-to-day work of average small and medium-sized academic libraries, and offers models for library workers who want to incorporate diversity concerns and policies into collection management practices.

Erika Barber, MLIS, is the library systems associate at Grinnell College. In this role, she participates in collection development from a library and digital systems perspective. She received her MLIS in 2008 from the University of Iowa. She has published a co-authored chapter in the Handbook of Research on Library Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Erika has worked in corporate, academic, and nonprofit technology positions for much of her career, including graduate level work study and employment that focused on digital literacy training and technology accessibility for both incarcerated and recently released individuals across the state of Iowa.

Julia Bauder, MLIS, is the social studies and data services librarian at the Grinnell College Libraries. She is the author of The Reference Guide to Data Sources (2014) and the editor of the books Data Literacy in Academic Libraries: Teaching Critical Thinking with Numbers (2021) and Teaching Research Data Management (2022), all published by ALA Editions. She has also published and presented about information literacy, data literacy, and data visualization in venues including Information Technology and Libraries, College & Undergraduate Libraries, and the LITA National Forum. Before becoming a librarian she spent four years as a full-time freelance writer and editor.

Prior to joining Grinnell College Libraries as the manager of access services in 2013, Micki Behounek, MLIS, spent 15 years working in public education as a high school and middle school teacher librarian. She has experience managing collections through her years as a school librarian and though many weeding projects, retention projects, and major shifts of the collection at the Grinnell College Libraries, where she is a member of the library's Collection Management Cluster. Serving on the Grinnell College's committees for Diversity and Inclusion and Accessibility Services and as a User Expert Group Leader has given her many opportunities to learn to examine situations through diverse perspectives.

Chris Jones, MLIS, is the special collections librarian and archivist of the college at Grinnell College. He earned a bachelor's degree in French from the University of Northern Iowa and a master's degree in information and library science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has worked closely with student groups to acquire more materials created by minoritized students for the Grinnell College Archives, and he is currently working on a project to diversify Grinnell's special collections.

Kayla Reed, MLIS, has worked in the library field since 2007. Working in several areas of the library including cataloging, circulation, and systems, she has a thorough knowledge of library practices. During her time at Missouri Southern State University, she assisted and later ran the institutional Safe Zone Training Program, which introduced LGBTQ+ information to faculty and staff to create a more inclusive campus. Reed continues her work in LGBTQ+ and libraries at Grinnell College as the discovery, systems and digital strategy librarian. She has published about library collections in the Journal of Library Administration and the Proceedings of the Brick & Click Conference.

Elizabeth Rodrigues, MLIS, PhD, is associate professor, humanities and digital scholarship librarian at Grinnell College. In this role, she is consulting librarian for several humanities departments and participates in collection development for their teaching and research needs. She received her MLIS in 2008 and her PhD in English in 2015. She has published co-authored works in the Journal of Library Metadata and the edited collection Motivating Students on a Time Budget: Pedagogical Frames and Lesson Plans for In-Person and Online Information Literacy Instruction published by ACRL.