Advancing Social Justice through University Libraries Collections: Survey
the Landscape Working Group
Group members: Hilary Bussell (convener), Miriam Centeno, Tamar Chute, Courtney Hunt, Moon Kim,and Cate Putirskis

Working Group Charge and Purpose••To “identify models for potential work in areas such as: evaluating existing collections,assessing arrangement practices, description work, and discovery support. The summer
conversations allowed the Libraries to identify a range of otherorganizations and communities that are focused on social justice and collections and havedone work that we can learn from.”
To consider questions including: “Which organizations and communities are doing goodwork in this space? How can we engage with them? What kinds of questions are theyasking? Where are they seeing success or resistance? What conversations, practices, tools,
or initiatives could be relevant to our own work? Do we need more learning or skills in orderto participate in this work?”

Steps taken
The Survey the Landscape Working Group (WG) convened in October 2020, meeting twice a monththrough March 2021 and once a month thereafter until November 2021.
The WG developed two primary outputs: an environmental scan of institutions doing work in this area
and a survey sent to the wider library community.
Environmental scan: Members of the group worked collaboratively to create a spreadsheet ofinstitutions and organizations doing innovative work on collections and social justice. While most of theinstitutions we looked at were academic libraries, after some deliberation we decided to also include
other organizations including archives, public libraries, governmental and special libraries, consortia,associations and collectives. Our reasoning for this was that we wanted to create a sample that wouldrepresent the breadth of possible work in this area, and leave the door open for inspiration fromorganizations that, while not comparable to our own, are doing innovative work. We created astandardized list of collections-work categories under which the various projects/activities fall.
Survey: The WG conducted an informal survey of the wider library community that asked respondents
to describe projects or activities related to collections and social justice. We included fields whererespondents could provide information about whether the project was completed or ongoing, the typeof collections work it represents, and what they have learned from working on it. The survey wascreated in Google Forms and distributed over social media and various professional listservs. A
spreadsheet of responses was auto-populated in real time and made available publicly; the goal withthis was to provide a public, crowdsourced resource that could be of interest to others in the field.

Findings
Environmental scan
The sample consists of 37 organizations including 29 academic institutions, two library consortia, twogovernmental libraries/archives, an educational non-profit, and an archivist collective.
The projects/activities we examined fall under the following types of collections work: collection
development, acquisitions, cataloging/metadata, digitization, preservation and conservation, e-resource
licensing, outreach and education around DEIA collections, and scholarly communication/publishing.
Selected highlights include:• Auraria Library’s assessment of vendors’ business practices around sustainability, diversity,privacy, and accessibility• A collaboration between the American Indian Association of Illinois and Northwestern University
Libraries to digitize and preserve the history of the Native American Educational Services (NAES)
College.
• A general collections diversity assessment at the Library of Congress• A community archives collection at Depaul University Library featuring areas such as social
justice, women, and Latino community.
• An “Archival Silence” working group at Princeton focused on “fostering a campus-wide
conversation about the limits, freedoms, frustrations, and complications presented by the biases
inherent in both past and present archival practice.”
The full spreadsheet is available in Teams.

SurveyWe had 17 responses to the survey. Fourteen responses came from academic libraries, two from art
galleries/museums, and one from a hospital library. Over 88% of the responses described ongoingprojects. The most common type of collections work represented was collections
development/acquisitions, followed by description, accessibility, digitization/digital collections, andexhibits. Sixteen respondents chose to share what they had learned. These include insights such as theimportance of making DEIA work an explicit goal of every position, the importance of community input,
and the decision to no longer use LCSH to describe Indigenous Peoples. The full responses are available
here.

Proposed next steps
The WG proposes the following steps to build on the work done thus far.
1. Scope future environmental scans to specific types of collections work and/or libraries. Thisscoping would allow for deeper analysis using tools such as in-depth interviews or otherqualitative methods. This scoping should be informed by the findings from the other University
Libraries’ Social Justice and Collections Working Groups.
2. Survey Ohio State Community about what DEIA work they would like University Libraries to do.
Questions to include:a. What types of collections do they think it is important for us to build?
b. What type of programming around collections are they interested in?