Evaluating Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Описание: Libraries have long had a mission to serve all our users, going back to Ranganathan’s law that states “Every reader his book.” More recently libraries have understood this mission to include ensuring their collections reflect a variety of different life experiences. Diverse collections help teach users about those different from themselves and also allow people from minoritized groups to see parts of their identity reflected. In order to know if efforts to broaden representation are working and to spur continued action, it is useful to be able to measure diversity within the collection. A growing body of work in libraries, including the presenter’s forthcoming book, is developing and sharing methods for evaluating diversity in collections. In this webinar, the presenter will provide an overview of three main methods, explaining what each one can accomplish as well as its limitations.

Karen Kohn is Collections Analysis Librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA and the author of Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in July 2025. She has published articles in College & Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, Journal of Documentation, and Collection Management. She has an MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MA in Sociology from Temple University. At Library Juice Academy, she has taught Introduction to Collection Analysis since 2020 and began teaching Introduction to Collection Development in 2025.