What NOT to Do: Engaging New Generations of Diverse Library Professionals

While diversity initiatives are not a new phenomena in libraries, the field has struggled to provide tangible best practices for building a more diverse workforce, especially about recruiting and retaining young professionals who are racially and ethnically diverse. A probable reason for this is the dearth of literature and proposals informing library professionals of what not to do when recruiting from diverse populations. This panel presentation will dissect and critique the efficacy of library initiatives that aim to recruit for diversity and provide suggestions on how to design more efficient long-term strategies to recruit and retain diverse library professionals.

Based on data from the ALA and a surfeit of literature and proposals, it is evident that the library profession is in need of diversification. The overwhelming whiteness of the library profession calls for us to interrogate the systems that keep the profession less racially diverse and examine how the performative nature of diversifying the profession has tabled true progress in the actual hiring and retention of diverse library professionals. As professionals we need to ask the following questions:

-- Why, despite all of the diversity initiatives, is the profession not evolving?
-- What is not working in the strategies developed for recruiting a diverse workforce?
-- What ways are we unconsciously replicating whiteness in hiring for diversity?
-- Have we fully contemplated and assessed diversity recruitment and hiring practices at our institutions? How can we create a plan with measurable goals to attract, retain, hire, and promote diverse library professionals?
-- Have we fully recruited for diversity early enough? What are we not considering when we attempt to recruit and hire teenagers and young adults into a predominately white profession?
-- Are we taking a holistic approach in identifying the young people want to engage as library professionals? How are we speaking to young people who encounter complex political and social ecosystems especially during times of change (i.e., the pandemic, the changing nature of work, and the shifting social realities and movements that emphasize inequities)?

The impetus to inform library professionals of the perils of current diversity recruitment strategies and how to innovate more long-term recruitment and retention strategies is due to our first-hand experiences engaging potential future library professionals. After receiving funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we aimed to address the pipeline problem of exposing teenagers and young adults to careers in librarianship early. In our efforts, we followed current research and recruitment strategies and discovered that these were not sufficient in preparing us for the unexpected challenges we encountered. Our panel of librarians will share the growing pains of the first year of a two-year IMLS grant-funded project, Diverse Librarianship Career Training and Education Program, detailed more below.

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville’s Diverse Librarianship Career Training and Education Program received $249,999 in funding as part of the Institute for Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) $22.7 million investment in U.S. library initiatives. In collaboration with East St. Louis Senior High School, the Diverse Librarianship Career Training and Education Program is a two-year project that will develop a career training program that introduces 10 high school seniors to careers in librarianship. The first cohort of high school seniors began in fall 2021.

The project is led by Library and Information Services (LIS) staff, including principal investigator (PI) Tammie Busch, MLS, assistant professor and catalog and metadata librarian, and co-PIs: Lora Del Rio, MSLIS, associate professor, research and teaching coordinator, and humanities librarian; Elizabeth Kamper, MLIS, assistant professor and information literacy librarian; Shelly McDavid, MLS, assistant professor, access and library spaces coordinator, and STEM librarian; and Simone Williams, MLIS, assistant professor and diversity and engagement librarian. An additional key staff member is Denice Adkins, PhD, MLS, professor at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri, and co-editor of Journal of Education for Library and Information Science. Adkins serves as project evaluator.

The project team, joined by staff at partner institutions including the East St. Louis Learning Resource Center, Edwardsville Public Library, St. Louis Public Library, Missouri Historical Society, and State Historical Society of Missouri, will recruit, mentor, educate and train students from diverse and underrepresented communities. This project will disseminate a toolkit for libraries and cultural institutions to support the recruitment, training and retention of diverse librarians.