Libraries

In late 2018, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) responded to recent acts of antisemitic violence by “reaffirming its commitment to fostering diverse, equitable, and inclusive environments in its member library and archives so that communities may find in them the resources they need for inclusive and informed dialog.” 

The ARL statement shares alarming facts documenting an unquestionable increase in antisemitic acts on college campuses in recent years and asks the higher education community to redouble its efforts to foster inclusive dialog. At this same time, librarians at Indiana University were looking back to fall 2010 when a series of antisemitic events took place on the Bloomington campus, one of them involving the intentional destruction of eight books from the Jewish Studies Collection held at Herman B Wells library.

Noting the symbolic passage of time, members of the IU Libraries’ Diversity Committee are working with colleagues to mark the passing of eight years by reclaiming the content of the eight destroyed titles for Indiana University researchers. The discovery efforts conducted over time have produced very few direct replacements.  In fact, of the eight titles, only one physical copy has been found, although it is hoped some form of digital access will soon be established for all.  In the committee’s visible work to document and reclaim the missing titles, many IU Libraries collection managers were inspired to make related symbolic purchases in their own areas of study. 

This work resonates not only with the ARL call to action, but also with the IU Libraries foundational value statement found it its Strategic Plan: "IU Libraries esteems diversity of all kinds, building collections and collaborations to support students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and foster a global, diverse, inclusive community of excellent students, scholars, and teachers.”

Dismantling barriers to information access is central to the mission of the academic library. The rising cost of journal subscriptions puts research access at risk. At IU Libraries, we have been working on solutions to this problem for over a decade. One of the most prolific is our open scholarship  services—facilitating IU-authored, scholarly work on the open web for anyone to read.

Today, IU ScholarWorks, developed and deployed by the Scholarly Communication department of IU Libraries, delivers 49 Open Access journals and serves as the repository for more than 8,000 deposited items.

In traditional academic publishing, a persistent lack of diversity in authorship is well documented and discussed. That led Scholarly Communication leaders to ask: What happens when research is liberated and cost barriers removed? Can open access publishing offer a new environment of inclusion?

As the new Open Scholarship Resident, Willa Liburd Tavernier (pictured above in a team meeting) intends to find out. Charged with assessment and outreach of the current ScholarWorks inventory, Liburd Tavernier believes the two go hand in hand. “We don’t have information right now in terms of a profile of whom is left out. Once I do the assessment, then my outreach becomes very targeted to encouraging those gaps to be filled,” she explained.

Library leaders participating in the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Diversity Alliance are committed to opening doors, sharing their networks, and preparing residents for success. As part of its diversity plan implementation, IU Libraries joined the Alliance in 2017 and in 2018 recruited Liburd Tavernier with a highly strategic, well-defined resident position.

“I want to reach out to underrepresented groups and help form a more inclusive publishing space through open access. I want to create spaces in the same way that space was created for me.”
—Willa Liburd Tavernier, IU Libraries ACRL Diversity Resident, Open Scholarship