Karen Kohn, "Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network — Karen Kohn, "Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion"
Host: Michael Lamagna
Guest: Karen Kohn
Episode Date: March 8, 2026
Topic: A deep-dive into Karen Kohn's book, Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025), exploring actionable strategies and philosophical underpinnings for conducting DEI audits in academic libraries.

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Episode Overview

The episode explores the central question of how academic libraries can assess and develop their collections with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Host Michael Lamagna interviews Karen Kohn, Collection Analysis Librarian at Temple University, about her new book, which provides a practical guide for library professionals navigating the complexities of DEI audits. The conversation highlights definitions, motivations, best practices, and real-world challenges associated with evaluating and enhancing library collections for representation and inclusion.

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Guest Introduction & Background [00:43–05:51]

• Karen’s Journey
  • Began in academic libraries >20 years ago, with various roles in collection development and reference at institutions in and around Philadelphia.
  • Notable for a data-focused approach and unexpected career opportunities that others saw in her before she saw in herself.
  • Authored a previous book on collection evaluation in 2015, teaching related courses since 2020.
• Road to DEI Assessment
  • Involved in Temple University’s DEI and Collections Committee from 2021, initially focused more on actions than assessment.
  • Spurred to explore DEI audits by student questions in her collection analysis class and collaborations with colleagues like Emily Hopkins.
  • Community efforts included open calls, surveys, and resource-sharing platforms to build a practice-based network.

Quote:
“Throughout my career, I think there have been things that it didn’t necessarily occur to me that I could do or that seemed like a stretch, but it occurred to somebody else, which has been really fortunate for me.” — Karen Kohn [03:24]

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Defining Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Library Collections [10:55–17:11]

• Diversity: Traditionally encompassed difference itself. Now, more specifically applies to marginalized or underrepresented identity groups in libraries.
• Equity: Focuses on systems and structures that have led to exclusion—moving beyond mere difference to addressing systemic barriers.
• Inclusion: Involves authentically involving and considering marginalized voices in all levels—from book selection to student involvement.
• Why It Matters: Supports curricula, helps students see themselves reflected, and exposes all users to different perspectives. Motivations for assessment may impact methodologies.

Quote:
“When we talk about diversity, that usually we do mean diversity in terms of identity categories that are underrepresented or marginalized, not just difference.” — Karen Kohn [13:01]

Memorable Moment:
On buying from Black-owned bookstores as an inclusion practice:
“We feel like at least the people who own this bookstore are choosing which books they want to highlight…and that is a way for us to include the voices of Black people or other people of color in our selection.” — Karen Kohn [15:48]

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Navigating Political Climate & Institutional Challenges [22:17–26:11]

• Regional Pressures: Recognition that certain states or institutions may face political pushback against DEI initiatives. One case study from Florida acknowledges increased difficulty.
• Framing External Communications: Suggests aligning DEI work with curriculum support or ‘preparing students for a global workforce’ as less controversial rationales.
• Visibility vs. Safety: Balancing the need to advertise DEI initiatives (for student belonging) with institutional constraints.
• Practical Advice: Projects can sometimes proceed "under the radar," though lack of publicity reduces impact.

Quote:
“We often talk about how we feel like part of doing the work is advertising that we’re doing it...especially for that belonging aspect.” — Karen Kohn [24:30]

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Planning a DEI Audit: Components and Key Steps [26:55–32:39]

• Core Elements:

  • Clarify motivation (justice, curriculum support, reflecting student body, etc).
  • Define scope (subject area vs. broad, single vs. multiple identities).
  • Choose method (see section below).
  • Assess resources (number of staff, available time, repeatability).

• Project Examples:

  • Large-scale assessments with staff and interns vs. “solo audits” with a narrowly tailored scope.
  • Frequency & repeatability: Simpler, repeatable methods may be preferable for ongoing progress tracking.

• Decision Interdependence:
  “There’s thinking about your motivation, there’s the scope of the project, there’s choosing a method…they’re very connected.” — Karen Kohn [27:19]

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Lenses for Assessing Collection Diversity [33:01–41:53]

• Subject Matter: What topics or identity groups are covered? Easiest to assess using existing catalog data.
• Authorship: Who is writing the books? More complicated, requiring careful, respectful approaches and transparency about limitations (e.g., “unmarked” identities).
• Institutional Efforts: Evaluating not just what’s on the shelves, but what actions, policies, and professional development support DEI goals.

Quote:
“Having a minority identity inherently affects your perspective on the world…so I think that just getting perspectives of authors of varied identities…we also are assuming that it’s going to affect students’ ability to either feel that they belong in the academy or see themselves reflected in the collection.” — Karen Kohn [36:36]

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Methods for DEI Collection Assessment [41:58–54:34]

1. Authoritative Lists (“List Checking”) [42:22–45:11]

• Compare collection holdings to vetted lists (e.g., award winners, resources for college libraries).
• Pros: Actionable, can quickly identify gaps, easy to repeat if lists are updated.
• Cons: May set a higher bar for certain groups, lists may be limited in size or scope.

2. Metadata Searching [45:11–47:54]

• Use catalog subject headings, keywords, or classification to quantify topics/identities represented.
• Pros: Scalable to any collection size, easily repeatable, good for statistical comparisons.
• Cons: Quality/content of books not assessed; may include outdated/offensive materials.

3. Diversity Coding (“Book Inspection”) [48:00–51:15]

• Sample books and record detailed data about author and/or subject identity categories.
• Pros: Most nuanced and flexible; allows “intersectional” analysis.
• Cons: Labor intensive; only feasible using sampling at large libraries.

Quote:
“If it takes you more than 10 minutes to figure out that this person is in a same-sex relationship, does it really count to your students as representation? No, they’re not going to spend more than 10 minutes trying to figure that out.” — Karen Kohn [50:22]

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Benchmarking, Progress, and Targets [51:15–55:10]

• Institutional Benchmarking: Comparing with other libraries may be misleading; instead, compare to past performance to demonstrate progress and impact.
• Target Ambiguity: No consensus on ideal “percentage” of representative books; using the student body as a benchmark often doesn’t make sense, depending on library mission.
• Positive Impact Example:
  “The fact that we were measuring this made us think about it more. And that changed our purchasing, which I thought was really cool…” — Karen Kohn [54:01]

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Future Directions & Closing [55:10–56:51]

• Karen’s Current Work: Has shifted into systematic review services (helping researchers develop comprehensive search terms for literature reviews), drawing on skills honed through DEI assessment methodologies.
• Skills Transfer: Analytical, evaluative, and metadata competencies continue to play a role across different library services.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Everyone feels like they should be doing something and they don’t know what to do.” [09:05]
• “I do want to specify that when we talk about diversity, that usually we do mean diversity in terms of identity categories that are underrepresented or marginalized, not just difference.” [13:01]
• “It just is a very surface-level understanding of what you have…but…I think it is the least used.” — on metadata searching [47:50]
• “The fact that we were measuring this made us think about it more, and that changed our purchasing…” [54:01]

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Episode Takeaways

• DEI assessment in academic libraries is complex but addressable using practical frameworks and methods.
• Define your “why” and let it guide method, scope, and resource allocation.
• Ethical and practical considerations are intertwined—respect, context, and community engagement amplify results.
• Benchmark progress against your library’s own history rather than arbitrary external targets.
• Visibility matters: Advertise DEI work when possible, but navigate political realities thoughtfully.

For deeper guidance, case studies, and practical tools, consult Karen Kohn’s book, which features detailed methodologies and guest chapters from practitioners in the field.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books and Library Science podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael lamagna. Central to a library's mission is building a collection that is reflective of the community they serve. As communities become more diverse, it's important that collections diversify. To better understand how to achieve this goal, libraries will need to conduct a diversity audit. Today, I'm joined by the author of Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and inclusion, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury. Karen Kuhn is the collections analysis Librarian at Temple University. Welcome to the podcast, Karen.

[B]

Hi.

[A]

So before we dive into your book, Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, could you share a little bit about yourself, your background, and what led you into academic librarianship?

[B]

It's funny, I made notes on this as if I don't know this by heart. So I'm a collections analysis librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, and I've been in academic libraries for just over 20 years. I was in library school at University of Illinois in Champaign, Urbana, and when I was there, I worked at the Slavic Library, which I think I pursued that initially because it was something that would distinguish me from other librarians. But I ended up feeling like if I stuck with that, it would limit me geographically or not limit, I would have to be willing to go wherever there was a job. And I wanted to be able to have more freedom to say I want to be on the east coast somewhere

[C]

and need my family.

[B]

So my first job ended up being it was just outside of Philadelphia, and it was at a gerontology research institute. And for various reasons that didn't end up being right for me. I mean, it's certainly a topic that matters, but it wasn't my passion. And so then I ended up going back to what had probably been my

[C]

original plan, which was working in an academic library.

[B]

And my first job at a university was at Arcadia, and I was the social sciences reference librarian, which was a little bit unexpected that I ended up in social sciences because my undergraduate degree

[C]

had been in English, but the gerontology

[B]

place had been social sciences focused. So that that kind of steered me in that direction. And then I was in that role for, I think, maybe two years or two and a half years. And they ended up needing a new head of collection development. And I had been doing collection development as a piece of my job as a reference librarian. And the search kept failing. Like, the search failed twice. And I it was so funny because I was on the search committee and I was like, I Don't understand what's happening. Like the search has failed. And I don't know what has come back to me and said, when are we going to regroup and decide, you know, to reopen the search? And then one day, two people at a higher level than me walked into my office and said, would you like to be our new head of collection development? So that was their strategy, was we can't just keep running the search and having it fail. And so I think throughout, you'll see this when I talk about my publications as well. Throughout my career, I think there have been things that it didn't necessarily occur to me that I could do or that seemed like a stretch, but it occurred to somebody else, which has been

[C]

really fortunate for me.

[B]

So I became head of collection development and I had a very data focused approach. And I don't remember for sure how much of that was just my nature and how much of that was other people asking me. I mean, I think it was both. But I started publishing articles on projects that I had done in the library. And then I was contacted by an editor from Roman and Littlefield. She was the editor of the Practical

[C]

Guides for Librarians series, which is now very long. I don't know how many books are

[B]

in that series, but she asked if I wanted to write a book about collection evaluation.

[C]

She had read an article I published

[B]

in college and research libraries, and I was really excited. I don't think it had even occurred

[C]

to me that I might someday write a book.

[B]

When I was little, I always said

[C]

I wanted to be a writer through all of elementary school. School. That was my career goal.

[B]

And I thought, wow, I think I could write that book. And so I, I did that. I enjoyed working on that. It came out in 2015. And I had always thought I would like to write another book someday. But I was sort of waiting to see, like, what else might. Well, but might be another area of expertise. I figured it might take a while

[C]

to feel like I knew enough about a second topic to write a book about it.

[B]

And that book was published in July of 2015. And right around that time, a job opened up at Temple University. And it was the title Collections Analysis Librarian. And I really wanted the job. And I did try very hard to prepare for the interview. But sort of in the back of my mind, I thought, like, how would

[C]

I not get this job?

[B]

I just published a book called Collection Evaluation in Academic Libraries. It came out the week of my interview and I was like waiting for it to come in the mail so

[C]

I could Bring it. But I hadn't gotten it yet.

[B]

So I did get that job. I started there in 2015.

[C]

So it's been just over 10 years.

[B]

And another piece of my work is that about five years ago I started teaching for Library Juice Academy. I was at ala and I stopped by the booth and Rory Lewin, who's the founder, was there. And I've never asked him whether he knew who I was or if he just read my name and job title off of my badge. But he looked at my badge and said, we've been looking for someone to teach a class on collection analysis. Would you be interested in teaching that class? So I started teaching that in 2020. I'm going to be teaching it again this April, so might as well put in a plug for that because the tenants has been a little bit down. And I like teaching it when there

[C]

are more students better than when are fewer students.

[B]

And that class is then what eventually led to me writing this book. So should I. Should I go into that piece of it?

[A]

Yeah, sure. So really we can see what kind of sparked your interest in collection, assessment and evaluation. So what brought you into this to bring in the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion?

[B]

So I had been on a committee, a DEI and collections committee at my workplace, and that started in 2021. And we at the time, we did not start with assessment. We didn't do any assessment for the first several years. And I think we all felt like the most important thing was figuring out how to take action. And this is a common view that I talk about a bit in the book as well, that some people feel

[C]

like, well, we know our collections aren't that diverse.

[B]

I think it can make sense to start with a project that's going to change what you're purchasing. But in my class, which is called Introduction to Collections Analysis, so it's mostly

[C]

my job title in course form, the

[B]

students had been asked me if I had ever done analysis with a diversity focused. And I hadn't. And I was feeling some responsibility to

[C]

be able to answer their questions.

[B]

I thought I had multiple students asking me this question. And I knew that I think it was maybe the second time that I taught the course. I had had a student who shared with me a plan she had written for assessing her collections, a diversity focus. I'm not sure if she was ever able to do the assessment, but I remember I had been impressed with her plan. And so I reached out to her, I said, but remember me, I taught your class a couple of years ago. Would you be interested in helping me. I'm not sure what form this would take, but I think it would be good to try to build some sort

[C]

of community of practice around assessment for diversity.

[B]

I don't feel like I have the answers, but I think I'm in a position to start bringing people together to

[C]

share what we know.

[B]

And so she was eager to work with me and it was nice to get to know her better. I mean, library juice classes are all asynchronous. So I never really talked to any

[C]

of my students before.

[B]

And so we set up in June of 2022. We did an open call on Zoom and I promoted it to my past students and some people I knew and coworkers, and she promoted it. And we also invited Lauren Lehman and Maria Emerson, who I wanted to make sure to mention because I had seen a great presentation they did about an assessment project that, that they did at

[C]

Augustana College and they have published, I think, two articles about it and they also have a toolkit online.

[B]

And that had been, it was just very thoughtfully done and ended up influencing me. And you see them cited fairly often

[C]

in certain types of diversity audits.

[B]

So we invited them and we did a pre meeting survey and we asked people, do you have a project that you're going to want to talk about or are you just here to listen? And I mean, it was good that we had invited Lauren and Maria because more than half the people checked off. I'm just here to listen. And so it just was giving us both a strong sense that this is something that a lot of people feel like they should be doing and have questions about, but don't really know what to do. And that actually ended up being like

[C]

the first paragraph of my book.

[B]

I said, everyone feels like they should

[C]

be doing something and they don't know what to do.

[B]

So we had this open call and then Emily and I continued to meet and talk about what our next steps could be. And we created a listserv. We created the Zotero Group where we've

[C]

been adding, or mostly we've been adding citations.

[B]

And then we were kind of unsure, how do we really build a community? And one day, and I don't think

[C]

we've really succeeded in building a community.

[B]

But one day she said, I was thinking we should write a book. You know, you wrote that other book, you could write another book. And again, like this hadn't occurred to me. And I was like, I guess I could, you know, And I, I went and wrote myself a draft table of contents. And she at the time she had told me that she knew her boss was retiring soon and there was a chance that she might end up becoming a department head. And so what ended up happening was that we submitted the proposal and they. Right around when we were submitting it, she ended up getting promoted to be department head. And so when we got the contract,

[C]

she said, I, I can't actually do this. I can't sign this contract. I really don't have time to write a book.

[B]

And so I always want to credit her because I wouldn't have thought, I wouldn't have thought of it. She was so certain, like, I know you can write this book. I know you can do it on your own. I wish I could work with you,

[C]

but I don't have any doubts that

[B]

you can do this. And so it was the idea and the confidence and also that it was her idea to include guest chapters in the book, which I think is really one of the. The strengths of it is that I know that I've had a little bit of involvement with diversity assessments at my own institution, but these are people. I was able to have these three guest chapters from people who have done more significant projects. And I think that that really strengthens

[C]

it to have examples of people doing the work.

[A]

Oh, absolutely. Those three chapters were a great way to highlight everything that you were talking about in your book. Now, I was thinking that it's important to develop a shared definition around terminology, especially a term like diversity, equity and inclusion. So how would you define diversity, equity and inclusion? And why does it matter?

[B]

So I think it's important to define each of the terms separately. And one thing that I noted early in the book is that people use the word diversity and they use the word dei and they don't always think about how those are slightly different things, that DEI is a kind of broader, more integrated concept. And diversity just means difference. And in my book, I talk about, because I love Ranganathan, I talk about how we have always valued difference. What we were taught in library school was to present different points of view in our libraries. And that Ranganathan talks about books for people with low literacy levels or the stray specialist in any subject, tradespeople. He does talk about serving different people within your library. And that's every reader.

[C]

It's every reader his book, or every reader their book.

[B]

That was always there as a principle. But I think that what's changing now when we use the word diversity is that it's specifically about people who are marginalized or non dominant. And that's where equity and inclusion Comes in particularly equity, I think, because the question is about people who have been excluded due to systems. You know, there are reasons that there are fewer, you know, black professors publishing academic books and. Or fewer people with disabilities. And so I do want to specify that when we talk about diversity, that usually we do mean diversity in terms of identity categories that are underrepresented or

[C]

marginalized, not just difference.

[B]

I mean, a diverse collection could be.

[C]

We have history books and science books, but that's not what anyone really means nowadays when they use the term.

[B]

But then equity is thinking about the structures, and this can refer to the topics in the book. So like buying books that talk about poverty, racism, talk about disability studies and the disability rights movement so that people are learning about that in the books. But it also could involve thinking about the systems of what gets published and of how you buy books and which books you get discovered. And so we used to do most of our ordering through approval plans, and we've been doing a lot less. I don't. I really don't have any sense of how much this is happening to other libraries, although I feel like the book sales industry is collapsing, so I assume it's happening in other libraries. But we will. We make certain diversity initiatives. We might buy 150 books a year that are part of the diversity initiative, but the bulk of our ordering is still coming from approval firms.

[C]

And it's mostly the major publishers.

[B]

And we don't know necessarily what the. I used to do an analysis of what was coming in on approval when we got more.

[C]

When we got more books that way.

[B]

And the analysis was by publisher and the average price per publisher and what the discipline is. But there wasn't a look at, like, what's the identity of these authors, where are these books talking about topics related

[C]

to inequalities and just, you know, social justice.

[B]

So you might end up feeling like you're doing something because you have an

[C]

initiative, and it could be a very small portion of your. Of what you're purchasing.

[B]

So equityism might involve thinking about the whole system, like, should you be changing your approval plan, should you be adding

[C]

particular publishers or buying from different places?

[B]

And that. That also gets into inclusion. It is actually even sometimes a little difficult to distinguish where's the line between what's equity and what's inclusion. But I think that's fine.

[C]

I think they're supposed to be interrelated.

[B]

So inclusion has to do with not. It should mean more than just adding. So at the university level, one thing that happens sometimes is universities focus on Recruitment. And then a student might come into college and not really feel welcome. You know, they don't have professors who look like them or they're a first generation college student. And so that's like adding without fully including. And in the library. What we have talked about in our DEI and collections group sometimes is ways that people in different minority groups can

[C]

be involved in the selection process.

[B]

And we have very few, well, we have very few people of color. And so one thing we've started doing is buying books from a local black owned bookstore because we feel like at least the people who own this bookstore are choosing which books they want to highlight. And when we use that as a resource, that is a way for us to include the voices of black people or other people of color in our selection. So, and then there's other examples in the book that I, that I cited of people going to student groups, like

[C]

talking to an LGBT student group or

[B]

having like students do an assignment where they help choose a book. And so there's an inclusion process of including people in your selection processes as

[C]

well as including their voices in the

[B]

collection or not exactly the same people's voices.

[C]

Right. You're not including your students voices in the collection, but people who have characteristics in common with your students.

[B]

So the second part is why it matters. Actually, before I go on to why it matters, I want to say that when I use the term diversity, I do generally mean dei. You know, I'm trying to also keep in mind equity and inclusion. So. And I think a lot of people do that. I think that's not always the case. But I think usually nowadays when we

[C]

talk about diversity, we don't just mean difference. We hopefully are thinking about some sort of equity as well.

[B]

And in terms of why it matters. So to some extent, I don't think that many people would read my book if they didn't already think it mattered. But I think that actually thinking through why it matters to you ends up affecting your assessment, ends up affecting the

[C]

way you do the assessment, and could

[B]

end up could end up affecting how

[C]

you talk about it public publicly as well.

[B]

And so I don't want to jump ahead, so I'm answering your next question. But if you're doing assessment, one thing that is maybe the least politically controversial is just supporting your curriculum, right? If you have a social work program or you have a, say, your education program, there are probably a lot of classes related to disability. There's probably classes related to English language learners and you want to support those classes, or you have a social work program, and they're working with people who are immigrants or probably a lot of people of color.

[C]

You want.

[B]

You want people to have both read books that might relate to serving those populations, but you also want them to have the vision that there are also people of color who are professors and there are also disabled people who write academic books, so that they aren't only thinking

[C]

of those groups of people as people that you help when you're in a helping profession.

[B]

If you're framing your assessment as being about supporting the curriculum, that's a pretty

[C]

easy thing to justify.

[B]

Like, you didn't choose what classes were offered.

[C]

The class was already there, and you want to support them.

[B]

The other, at the simplest level, I would say the other two main reasons are people seeing themselves reflected and learning about people who are different from you. There's. I read one article that listed. I don't remember how many. It was, like, seven different discourses of diversity. And I don't remember all of them, but there was one that talked about, like, preparing people for a global workforce, which might be something that, like, sounds good at certain universities, you know, that might kind of play well. It has a danger avoiding talking about inequality and avoiding talking about diversity within this country. But it's something that, because it sounds corporate, that, like, might be palatable what,

[C]

you know, to administration.

[B]

But there's also discourses of diversity that are about learning about systems that you

[C]

might want to change.

[B]

And there's a danger of. So it's very important to learn about people who are different from you. But there's also a danger of talking about diversity as if the purpose is to help white people and like, straight white men. I remember reading a sentence once in something that I was editing where someone was talking about LGBT literature and was saying, like, it exists to help teach

[C]

us about different people.

[B]

And I was like, I don't think that's what lgbt. I don't think LGBT literature exists for

[C]

straight people,

[B]

but it's good for straight people to read it, Right? But you do want to remember that there's a value in both, you know, people seeing them, particularly people who are smaller or more. More oppressed minority seeing themselves reflected, and

[C]

also evaluate learning about people who are different from yourself.

[B]

So I'm not. I'm not that well worth well versed on what are these specific, different discourses. But that's. I don't know that most librarians need that. I think, like, a general idea of

[C]

what are the different ways you can

[B]

frame it and these. Your different intentions. I'll get into this more later. But the intentions are going to affect how you do your assessment as well. If you're looking for something to reflect your community, you want a method that's going to allow you to compare by percent.

[C]

Like, percentage of our books are about,

[B]

you know, black people versus what percentage of our students are black. There's a lot of numbers we don't know.

[C]

Like, no one knows really, what percentage of the students are lgbtq. The students might not know. Their answers might change throughout college in

[B]

disability, often, I don't think that there are. There might be numbers of how many

[C]

people have requested accommodations for disability.

[B]

So depending on whether you want. You want a curriculum and you want a collection that's reflecting your student body, or you might want it to be

[C]

more diverse than the student body.

[B]

That was something that Lauren and Maria talk about in their presentation that I

[C]

saw at the very beginning of this

[B]

process, that they wanted their collection to

[C]

be more diverse than their student body.

[B]

And so it wasn't. Their goal wasn't to make the numbers match?

[C]

No, they were interested in numbers, but there wasn't a goal of matching their own student body.

[A]

Well, I think that's an important point, is that it shouldn't just be a numbers game. It really should. And I like that you bring in the idea of belonging into this conversation as well for students. I think that's an important part. But I really do have to ask this question now that we're having this conversation. Given the current political climate, how should librarians approach evaluating collections for diversity, equity, inclusion, both within their institution? Because we know that this is a topic in many states, but also in conversations with external stakeholders.

[B]

I mean, it's interesting that one of the guest chapters in my book is someone in Florida, because she even mentions in the book that political pressures have made it somewhat harder to do this work. But her guides are still there on our website, so I don't know how. How it's affected her. We've been really lucky at Tumble so far. We have not. We have not been asked to stop talking about DEI or change how we talk about it. In fact, right before the book came out, I realized that, you know, my boss knew that I was writing it,

[C]

but the Dean of Libraries didn't know.

[B]

And I thought, well, I should tell him in case. In case this becomes controversial. And he wrote back. I emailed him, and he wrote back to me and said, well, you should

[C]

be part of this. We support this.

[B]

And so I have felt lucky in that way. But I. I've tried to come up with suggestions. Again, I feel some responsibility to have suggestions of what could you do if, if you were being discouraged. And I think it depends a lot on at what level in the hierarchy are you getting this message. Like if it's something that the head of the library supports diversity but you

[C]

can't talk about it publicly versus if your head of the library is saying don't do this.

[B]

So I think that the different motivations that I was listing, some of those would fly better than others. So it seems a bit hard to argue with an assessment that's about how your collection supports the curriculum. And you might need to mix in. Maybe you're going to look at the whole college of education and not only at diversity related topics in the college

[C]

of education,

[B]

but that's not, I don't think that's probably not necessarily going to be harmful to broaden your project. You know, like there's also that language

[C]

of preparing students for a global workforce

[B]

which does kind of, it does take

[C]

out the equity of it.

[B]

I mean, but I think I don't, I just, I haven't been in this situation, but I, I think some of it is about how you publicly talk about it and you might still be able to internally get away with doing an assessment that is actually based on real values of inclusion. We feel, on our DEI community, we often talk about how we feel like part of doing the work is advertising

[C]

that we're doing it.

[B]

You know, especially for that belonging aspect. It's not that helpful for us to be buying these books if we're not telling people that we're, that we're doing it. And so we're always trying to advertise our initiatives because I think that contributes. I mean, I hope it does.

[C]

We don't have a way of measuring that, but.

[B]

And I wasn't able to find any

[C]

studies that like actually measured whether the library book collection influences student sense of belonging.

[B]

But I think, I think it should

[C]

matter anyway even if we haven't measured it.

[B]

But. So I would think to some extent it's maybe framing projects in ways that, in ways that align with like these diversity discourses that your administration might prefer. Unfortunately, it probably also means not sharing

[C]

as much of what you're doing.

[B]

I mean, you might be able to make changes to what you're buying, but then you probably, you might not be able to go give a conference presentation

[C]

about it if that's something that's important to you.

[B]

And you probably can't write a blog

[C]

post and put it in your library newsletter.

[B]

We've done some audits that have not been very publicized. And I, I also think they, they

[C]

didn't really include that final step of making changes to the collection.

[B]

But, you know, I, I think people are not tracking exactly which books we buy. I mean, obviously they're in the catalog, but, like, outside the library, people aren't necessarily going to know if we start

[C]

buying books from, you know, an indigenous publisher or something.

[B]

And so I think you probably could do some of the assessment without advertising it. As someone who really likes writing and presenting at conferences, I would find that sad. But I also think that it matters

[C]

to be able to advertise it.

[B]

But I definitely admire people who are

[C]

doing what they can with constraints.

[A]

And you offer some good suggestions here, framing it in terms of supporting the existing curriculum at the institution. And even if it's highlighting working with a local bookstore. Right. That's a great way of that town gown relationship and showing how the library is engaging the larger community. Now, as we think about these large collection assessments, what are some of the key components involved in planning for a diversity audit of this scale? And you kind of hinted at some of the complexity at doing this kind of work. So what are some of the steps and key components in planning a project like this?

[B]

So there's, I think that the pieces of planning are also very intertwined. I mean, there's, there's thinking about your motivation, there's the scope of the project, there's choosing a method. And I remember when I was writing, I was trying to think of like, could I map this in a linear way? Like, pick your motivation, pick your method. And they're, they're very connected. And I know that I would say the most common motivations are just a vague sense of justice.

[C]

You know, we should be doing something

[B]

or that a person is liaison to a specific area.

[C]

And they.

[B]

So like, if someone is the African American studies librarian or they're, they work with Asian studies and they want to assess their area of the collection, there's a natural scope there. Like, they're not going to spend so much time defining which aspects of diversity

[C]

they're interested in, because what they're interested

[B]

in, I mean, there are still some

[C]

questions to be answered, but what they're interested in would be their area of the collection.

[B]

So sometimes the scope kind of comes naturally and sometimes it doesn't. When people have the vague, like, we

[C]

should be doing some sort of diversity

[B]

assessment, I think it's still useful to define because it's so much going to affect what you assess. So if your goal is to support the curriculum. You're going to start by looking at what courses and what programs you have. If your goal is to have the student body reflected. So these things are going to affect

[C]

what populations you look at.

[B]

And there are some methods, and I'll get into this when I talk about the methods, but there are some methods that let you look at a lot of different identity traits, like diversity coding.

[C]

In particular.

[B]

You can have a category for race in every book that you code. Just write down what is the race and. Or you could, like, if you code for gender identity, you could come across something you hadn't even thought of. You know, someone who uses the pronoun Z and like, okay, I'm going to write that down. This person uses Z. And you could, you can include any race, any gender, you know that, that you come across. Whereas if you're doing metadata searching, where you need to come up with a string of search terms, you're probably going

[C]

to pick a couple traits at a time.

[B]

Like, is this book, you know, am I going to just make a list of every trait related to African Americans and blacks?

[C]

And am I going to include racism in general? Um, which sadly, I feel like that's just very linked to the idea of African Americans. You know, there are going to be

[B]

books about racism, but so you would be more limited in how many populations and list checking kind of varies.

[C]

You can, you can do it for just one identity, one demographic group or more.

[B]

So your motivation is probably tied into how many different groups you want to look at. And then that is going to affect which method makes the most sense. I imagine people often just feel kind of drawn to a method, but usually the articles will have a rationale of like we discussed and here's why we

[C]

decided this one needs more sense than another.

[B]

You also need to know how many people are involved. I saw a presentation a couple of years ago at the Acquisitions Institute and the. At Timberland Lodge. And the presenter was. She was in a temporary position and she wanted to do an assessment and she put out a call, does anyone want to work with me on this? And nobody did. And so it provides a really clear example in my mind of like, she knew she had. Her scope had to be really limited. And so she just did books that were. I think she searched for the natural science as a keyword. I might have some details wrong, but it was limited to books published after a certain date.

[C]

I don't remember if it was 2000 or 2020.

[B]

And it was books that had natural. That were about natural Science. And, you know, that was what she could do as one person in the time that she had. I'll say I. I asked if she

[C]

wants to write a guest chapter for

[B]

my book, but she was already in the middle of.

[C]

She'd already submitted the journal article for publication.

[B]

So I do think her work was. I like seeing the publication.

[C]

I thought the work was good.

[B]

Then there was another study that I, that I cited.

[C]

I haven't interacted with the authors, but

[B]

they were able to hire these student interns and construct it as an internship. And so they had so many people, it was like four staff, I don't remember the numbers. Four staff members and multiple student interns. And they even got a few other student workers to work on it. And so they were able to do that much quicker. And another factor is if you. We did get into the reasons why assessment matters, but one of the major reasons would be measuring your progress. So I had said earlier that a lot of people, including my own dei committing it initially felt like, well, why would we assess when we already know that there's work to be done? Let's just start doing that work. And if you're doing an assessment so you can measure progress and you want to be able to repeat it every year, you want a method that doesn't

[C]

take you six months to do.

[B]

And some of these methods are easier

[C]

to repeat than others.

[B]

So I think that there's. And my book, I think the nature of it as kind of a how to book is a little bit idealized and that I just, I don't think everyone really is going to go through all these questions ahead of time. But in theory, you should think about, like, why you're doing it, what populations do you want, how much time do you have? And then let that influence what method you choose and what scope. I mean, even once you've chosen a

[C]

method, you still have some leeway to choose.

[B]

Are you going to do a lot

[C]

of list checking or just a couple lists? There's still some of those. You're looking.

[B]

There's also the question of whether you're looking at author identities, which I can get into more. But there's only one of these methods

[C]

that allows you to look at the author identities.

[A]

So you've talked about some of these methods. Let's talk what are some lenses that we can view collection diversity by? And how would these lenses inform the methods that we choose? Because you've highlighted some of these methods already. But how does the. How does that lens by which we view collection diversity influence or inform the methods we're going to choose as part of our assessment.

[B]

So when we initially. When Emily Hopkins and I had initially started talking about this book, we were envisioning it as being written as lenses. And there was a lens of subject matter and there was a lens of authorship, and then there's this third lens of looking at your. Your own actions. And I sometimes give that short shrift because it's not exactly the same as collection assessment, but although I think it's important. And so we. Those were our three. Those were the three lenses we had in mind. And when I started actually writing, I realized that there's lenses and there's methods, and they're not as separate as I had thought, you know, that subject matter. If you're assessing subject matter, the three

[C]

methods all could be used to assess subject matter.

[B]

And there's only one method that can

[C]

be used to assess altering out of

[B]

these and then institutional efforts as a lens. I guess there's a variety of ways you could assess that depending on what the efforts are. But so the structure of the book is more about methods. And it was a little hard to figure out how to put back in that concept of lenses once I had

[C]

sort of changed the structure of it.

[B]

But I think it's good to go through them as like, you know, the reasons for assessing subject matter I think are obvious. I mean, particularly if you're supporting the curriculum. I also think for students seeing themselves reflected, they might not be paying that much attention to who the authors are. You know, they might. The subject matter has, I would think, also affects, maybe even more so affects at least even self reflected. So, and it's also, the information is already in our catalog. You know, our books are cataloged with subject headings, so there's somewhat easier to assess subject matter. The question of author identities. At my institution, we asked for some volunteers amongst our reference librarians to do these little focused audits. And when we talked to them about it, they were very uncomfortable with the

[C]

idea of assessing author identities.

[B]

And this is where that Lehman and Emerson, Lauren Lehman and Maria Emerson article I felt was really helpful to me. And I see it cited a lot because they talk about their guidelines for

[C]

just how to be thoughtful about assessing author identities.

[B]

And so I think it can be done in a respectful way, but you have to not be guessing and you are going to end up with a lot of people who, like, we don't know. Almost nobody who's white publicly says they're

[C]

white in their bio.

[B]

You know, it's the unmarked category and so you could end up with a whole category of people where it's like, we're just going to mark their race as unconfirmed. Probably they're white. They might be like someone who really looks black, but if they haven't said it, you also can't say it. So there does end up being a lot of unknowns. But the reason why it still matters to look at author identities is partly because, going back to that equity question, there's. There are fewer. When people have a marginalized identity, they're just less likely to, like, rise to the point where they're publishing a book, particularly an academic book. And so I think it's. It is one way, you know, trying to find those books and make sure we're getting them is one way to try to. It doesn't level the playing field, but

[C]

it levels the results a little more, the outcome a little bit more.

[B]

There's also. So I don't know a lot about critical race theory, and I read a bit because I felt like I needed

[C]

to mention it in the book.

[B]

And what my understanding is that it includes the belief that having a minority

[C]

identity inherently affects your perspective on the world.

[B]

And I remember in my book I talked about William Jones Wilson and the declining significance of race and how he ended up revising that and years later

[C]

writing an addendum that was actually still is very significant.

[B]

And if you think about it, it's going to affect someone's understanding of history, their interaction with the legal system, with the health care system, their family wealth, so that it's hard to imagine that that would not somehow affect how. What you wrote in a book. So I think that just getting perspectives of authors of varied identities, we also are assuming that it's going to affect students ability to either feel that they belong in the academy or see themselves

[C]

reflected in the collection.

[B]

And another reason is that there are certain assessments where their starting point is. Like, there was an article that I read that it was the person I can't remember, the department was called something like American Indian Studies, and it has since changed its name.

[C]

And I don't remember what it's now called. It's probably North American Indigenous People or Indigenous Studies or something, but I don't remember.

[B]

But like, he was assessing that segment of the collection. And so to him it was like it was already a given that the

[C]

books were about this population.

[B]

So what he wanted to look at was, are they bi. You know, are they like authentic voices from coming from this population? And I think. I think Calderon talked about that too. She was the one that was studying books about natural science, and she had

[C]

to do that small scale because she was working alone.

[B]

I think she also talked about, like, the value of the voices of this

[C]

population as well as.

[B]

And if you think about it, of course, if you want. If you're looking for books about marginalized

[C]

people, of course you want some of them to. Or most of them, you know, to be by those people.

[B]

So it is. I mean, our experience was that people were really uncomfortable and chose not to

[C]

assess all their identities.

[B]

But I have. I have a table in my book that has what. And I kind of just. I mean, mostly I made it up, although certainly based on reading, you know, other people's thoughts. Like things that are really clear statements of identity. Like, they say in their bio that they use she or pronouns.

[C]

You can say that this person uses she. Her pronouns. Like, it's on the.

[B]

If it's on the book. Sometimes people's parts of their identities change

[C]

after they publish a book, but mostly

[B]

if it comes from them, you know, and then there's these maybes, like, if they mention that their parents grew up in Hong Kong, are they Asian? I don't know.

[C]

Like, their parents could have been missionaries in Hong Kong.

[B]

Like, most of the time, I think if they mention where their parents are,

[C]

particularly if they say their parents are from there.

[B]

But it's like, mostly, I think that's okay. And then there's like, definite notes. You know, you don't guess based on a photo, even having someone attend an hbcu. Like, not everyone there is actually black. You know, I mean, that's why they're

[C]

called historically black, because not everyone there is black.

[B]

So there are things where it's really tempting, but you really shouldn't. Um, so I do think it can be done thoughtfully. And also, it's very important that you should always be presenting your results in the aggregate. And so even if you were wrong about one person, if you were really thoughtful about it, and maybe you were wrong about a couple people, like, it's. The consequence isn't huge if you're always

[C]

presenting your numbers just as totals.

[B]

So. And then I should leave some time for my last warrants, which there's barely

[C]

any time to talk about the actual number,

[B]

the lens of assessing your institutional efforts. So I, you know, several years ago would have said, well, you just can't

[C]

assess your collection for diversity. Like, none of these methods are perfect.

[B]

And I remember talking to someone who said, yeah, you really can't. All you can do is assess what you're doing. And I, you know, of course, being

[C]

an assessment focused person, eventually decided that

[B]

even if the methods aren't perfect, you

[C]

can still do them.

[B]

But I think that there also is really a value to assessing what you're doing because it lets you think more broadly. You know, it lets you assess, are

[C]

we doing professional development or do our

[B]

policies include something about diverse perspectives and underrepresented groups or our actions? Like we, I mean, I know that at Temple, books that are not in

[C]

English take much, much longer to get

[B]

onto the shelves, and I am not pushing to change that. It's like everyone, you know, we're short staffed and short on resources, and I'm not pushing to change that. But it's also a sort of obvious inequality there that when something's not in

[C]

English, it's taking much longer to get out there.

[B]

So also when you do evaluate your efforts, it, it allows you to take a broader look at the ways your patrons interact with the collection and how you acquire things. And it, I think the one sort of flaw is that it's not, it's not as much of a formal assessment. I mean, if your assessment is, let's look at our collection policy and see what it says, and then we're going to revise it. And then at the end of the year, we're going to, our assessment is going to be, did we meet our goal? You know, okay, we did revise the policy. I mean, it's not, I think it's still, you can do it with an assessment mindset.

[C]

It just doesn't follow formal assessment processes.

[B]

I think that that lens is important because if you want to change your collection, it can be helpful to also

[C]

change, to look at your processes with a evaluative lens as well.

[A]

So let's talk a little bit about the actual methods. And so you talked about some of those methods, like authoritative lists, which most librarians are probably familiar with, but also metadata searching as well as diversity coding. So I was hoping you could take us through some of these methods and how we can use them to assess and audit our collections.

[B]

And I'll try to be briefer because

[C]

we're getting close to time.

[B]

So the, the authoritative list, which I called list checking, there was, I should say there was an article by William H. Walters that came out while I was maybe halfway through writing. And it was, I felt like it was the article version of my book. But it wasn't a how to. It was a literature review where he looked at, like, what are the, the methods people are using and it was, it felt really affirming because I was like, yeah, he, he did. He looked at a lot of literature and it came down to the same

[C]

few things that I did.

[B]

So he called this the checklist method. And he has a table of like, these are all the studies I found that use the checklist method. And it's. And I do have a chapter that's

[C]

Melissa Denzelis chapter where she talks about using lists as well.

[B]

It's. It is just taking a list and

[C]

looking to see if you have the books.

[B]

But it's. I'm trying. So like, just in short, like the benefits of this would be it's really easy to take action once you've done the assessment.

[C]

You can buy the books that you didn't have.

[B]

It lets you look at things retrospectively. Someone has vetted the list and so it can be a form of that inclusion piece as well. If you look at who created the

[C]

list, and these are people who, they

[B]

might not be people who belong to the group that's being represented, but they

[C]

have some close connection to it, I guess, if they're involved in making the list. If you've chosen your list well.

[B]

So it is a way of involving

[C]

some people who might have more knowledge of this certain population.

[B]

The disadvantage is that it's. For one thing, it's hard to repeat unless you have an entirely new list. So Melissa used resources for college libraries and they have a different list every year.

[C]

And so she was able to keep repeating her list checking. But it wouldn't make sense if your list was like winners of the Cran

[B]

Scott King of War. And then there's only going to be

[C]

one new one every year. I guess you could include the finalists.

[B]

And then the Emerson and Lehman article talked about they were uncomfortable with authoritative lists because they felt like it sets a higher standard for books about minority groups than for other books. And I don't think it necessarily does. I just think you have to remember

[C]

that you should have more books in your collection than what's on the list. Right.

[B]

Like if you find a list of 20 books and they're about, you know, African American women, well, you know, you

[C]

should have more than 20 books.

[B]

You know, it's. It's like a, it's a quick test. It is, I will say, like most of these methods would work at any size library. And there seems to be a common feeling that it's harder to do assessment at a larger library. The process of list checking is the

[C]

same at any size library. You know, I mean, you check the List against what you look things up in your catalog.

[B]

Metadata searching also. I mean, it, I think one advantage of it is that it of metadata searching is that you can search. You're evaluating your whole collection. So what you would do is, unfortunately, there are very little, very few resources

[C]

that already exist that you could just borrow. But what you would need to do

[B]

is create a list of like every search term you can think of that's related to, you know, every search term related to Native American, indigenous people or subject term.

[C]

I mean, every term related or every term related to African Americans.

[B]

And there's one really good article that talks about how there are certain terms that are so closely related, like jazz

[C]

music or sickle cell anemia they mention

[B]

or the Harlem Renaissance, you know, where there's. If that were your subject term, there wouldn't be the phrase African American or black. But those are still so closely connected that you probably would include them.

[C]

If you were looking at, if you

[B]

were trying to figure out how many

[C]

books do you have about, you know, black people in America?

[B]

I, I mean, I guess people would

[C]

have sickle cell anemia, not in America,

[B]

but, you know, people in the bounds

[C]

of the world as well.

[B]

But you do have to, in order to do it very thoroughly, you'd have to think pretty broadly about like every term that we think is related to this population. And then you create a big list of subject terms. You could do it with call numbers. I don't think that works as well because a book can only have one

[C]

call number and sometimes the call number is not.

[B]

It's not going to tell you as

[C]

much about the book.

[B]

I think the advantage of this is that you can repeat it easily. So this is a method that you

[C]

can repeat year to year.

[B]

If your collection is very large.

[C]

The results aren't going to change hugely year to year, but probably some, hopefully some.

[B]

It can be done in any size collection. It tends to involve just one or two populations. I mean, it takes a long time to make a list of what you

[C]

think all the relevant search terms would be.

[B]

And so this tends to be a method that you would only be looking

[C]

at one or two populations.

[B]

It is one of the better ones if you want to compare to your student body. Like it would make sense to say, you know, we have this many books that are on LGBT topics and this

[C]

percentage of students, if you knew the percentage of students. I know I said earlier, you probably

[B]

don't, but, you know, so that is one that I think you could compare to your student body. It's easily repeatable One of the downsides is that the books might not be good. You know, they might be outdated, offensive books. Particularly if it's like disability or, you know, a lot of books about Native Americans. Like it just it, it's a very

[C]

surface level understanding of what you have.

[B]

But. And it is, I think it is the least used.

[C]

That's why I didn't get a guest chapter on it because there's very little that's been done.

[B]

And then diversity coding is the most flexible. It's probably the hardest to do at a large institution. It involves, so William Walters calls this

[C]

the book inspection method, which is also

[B]

a good name I think because it involves, you do have to look closely at individual books and you always have to take a sample. And so I think that at a large institution your sample is just. It's going to be a small percentage of your collection. But even I don't think people should be deterred from it because they're at a large institution. Because I think that anyone at any size institution would have to be doing sampling. But this method has you take, so you take your sample of books and then you're looking at them and you're coding either the author or the subject

[C]

matter and you're saying, look, so it

[B]

was this book about non white people and if so like which you know

[C]

which racial groups or you could look

[B]

at like what protons does the author use?

[C]

Do we know something about whether the author is in a same sex relationship or there's.

[B]

It's fairly rare that you have that

[C]

level of information about an author.

[B]

There probably have to be currently alive

[C]

or alive in recent times.

[B]

So you can code for different characteristics of the subject. This method lets you include a lot of different characteristics and it also lets you look at the intersections of those characteristics. So if you've coded for gender and race, you could make cross tabs and say like books about black women, books about black men. So it lets you look more closely at like diversity within diversity, you know,

[C]

intersections of different marginalized groups.

[B]

It. So I think I said that has a lot of flexibility. It's probably the most time consuming.

[C]

I think it's probably the most interesting too. But because you're actually looking at books,

[B]

you can either just go by what's in the catalog record, you can sometimes preview an ebook like on a vendor website you might be able to preview. Or even on Amazon you might be able to preview parts of it, if that helps. The Emerson and Lehman did this method and they, they limited their people. The people working on this to 10 minutes per book, which made sense. I think, you know, if you're, I think I wrote something in my book. Like, you know, if it takes you more than 10 minutes to figure out that this person is in a same sex relationship, does it really count to

[C]

your students as representation? No, they're not going to spend more than 10 minutes trying to figure that out.

[B]

And then there was a guest chapter in my book, the Vex and Casio article. I mean chapter they, they were super fast. I actually wrote to them and said like it was, the book was almost

[C]

ready to submit and it was like, I think there's an error.

[B]

The way you wrote it, it looks like you co it took you one

[C]

minute per book to code.

[B]

And they said, yeah, we designed it that way.

[C]

We wanted it to be fast.

[B]

And they, they actually, it's a very small library, but they, they code every book every year.

[C]

They only buy I think 500 books a year.

[B]

But they designed this like they wanted it to be really quick. That was part of their intention because they wanted to be able to keep doing this every year. They wanted it to not take a huge amount of time. So there's this, that's just a different philosophy, but there's was, yeah, it was

[C]

much quicker than that.

[A]

So those are really interesting methods. The one thing I'm hearing is not benchmarking against other institutions. So that's something you brought up in your book. I was wondering if you could just talk about that really quickly.

[B]

I mean, and it's not only that, but it's like it's so unclear what the targets are at all. I mean, I think the benchmarking with this topic, like with dei, it could easily turn into a way to feel better about yourself than maybe you should. I mean, I don't know who the target would be, what would be the perfectly diverse library, but if you see that you're doing the same as your peers, maybe you all need to work on this and maybe you are all working on it. But I also think people are very tempted to have some sort of benchmark and often it's the student body. And I think that that doesn't always make sense either. Emerson and Lehman said they want their

[C]

collection to be more diverse than the student body.

[B]

We had one of my co workers did a small assessment project where she looked at books in the social work collection that were related to Asian people. And she gave me a huge list of terms related to like every ethnic

[C]

group and nationality in Asia.

[B]

And it was about 6% of the

[C]

books in the social collection, I think.

[B]

And then she. She thought of a whole lot of ideas of what we could compare this to.

[C]

What percentage of our students are Asian, what percentage of the American population is of Asian descent.

[B]

And I wasn't animal percentage of social workers. I think she found a lot of

[C]

potential numbers for comparison.

[B]

And I wasn't really sure which of these made sense. I thought, if anything, probably the census

[C]

one would make the most sense.

[B]

But if we're training our students to be social workers who work with Asian Americans, I don't think it makes sense to compare that to how many of our students are Asian Americans. So I think a lot of times

[C]

it doesn't make sense to have that as a target.

[B]

So there's another thing, like comparing yourself to your. How you did in the past. So the Vex and Castillo chapter in my book, I actually, I've never met them, and I don't know if her name is Cass Dlo or Castillo, but they were very good to work with. So they compared year to year and they saw a lot of progress. And what I thought was really neat about theirs was I also, as the editor of the chapter, went to them and asked, did you do something to change your processes? Because I see that the number of books you have coded as including some sort of racial diversity went way up. And if you did something, you should

[C]

include that in the chapter.

[B]

And they said, we didn't.

[C]

It was just measuring.

[B]

The fact that we were measuring this made us think about it more. And that changed our purchasing, which I thought was really cool, actually, to have

[C]

that as an example as well.

[B]

And they were great, I should say. I discovered them because there was a presentation they had given that was linked in that William Walters article. And I was like, it's perfect. I want people who have presented about something but haven't yet written about it so that I can see the work and know I like it. And it was perfect because they were just at the point of starting to think about writing something up, and they

[C]

were like, oh, okay, we'll do it for your book.

[B]

But I think that they provided a great example of how measurement can then affect your behavior. So measuring year to year is often a valid. I mean, it's not. You still might not have a target. I mean, how many. It's just not that clear, like how many of your books should be about

[C]

non white people or non straight people. But.

[B]

But being able to compare to something is useful. I mean, numbers. You know, as someone who works with numbers all the time, you usually do

[C]

want something to compare your numbers to

[B]

so that that's another.

[C]

A possible target is your own past, how you did in the past versus how you're doing now.

[A]

Yeah, I love that idea of benchmarking against yourself and past performance versus benchmarking against another institution. But as we wrap up our conversation today, I'm wondering, now that the book's out, what are you working on next?

[B]

It's an interesting question because I've taken a little turn in that I recently volunteered to join our systematic review service. And when you do a systematic review, you're creating a search for someone like

[C]

faculty or a medical student or someone who's doing research.

[B]

And you have to create this really comprehensive list of terms. And it reminds me of that metadata searching method and what I had written about in the book. Like, you know, I have this example of like, here's every term related to racism and lcsh, you know, and now instead I'm looking in mesh and finding every term related to pregnancy. And so it was, it felt like a, in some ways a weird jump, but in other ways it's like I think I'm, I'm already doing some things that are related or some sort of similar skills. And so I going to be busy next week with this training institute, the Evidence Synthesis Institute. And it's, it's so different. Like I'm not used to working directly with faculty or working with medical. What I can only do searches that

[C]

aren't super medical because I don't understand enough.

[B]

But it's a very different lens on the library and the services that we

[C]

provide in the library.

[B]

I look in, it's not collection focused, but I think that it uses some, some skills that I'd already been developing from like writing reports in the libraries, so.

[C]

Or reports about our collection.

[B]

So that's been the thing that's been

[C]

making me busier lately.

[A]

Yeah, that sounds like a really interesting process. Well, Karen, I want to thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

[B]

Oh, thank you.

[A]

So I'm your host, Michael Lamagna, and thank you for listening to the new Books in Library Science podcast channel on the New Books Network.

[D]

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