The Color of Knowledge: Diversity and Librarianship

Stacie Mari Williams will complete her M.S. in Library Science and Archives Management at Simmons College?s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies in August 2011. She currently works in Access and Reference Services at Harvard Medical School’s Countway Library and sits on the board of directors of SLA-Boston as the organization’s archivist. She is interested in accessing all of the known information of the world on her smartphone, and reaching out to librar* folks, DJs, pastry chefs and Jedi knights via Twitter (@Wribrarian).

Diversity in LIS – From My Perspective

Dear Reader,

Please take one moment to scroll down the page a little and look at the fancy little avatar photos we have below, exhibiting the contributing writers to this here blog. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Have any first impressions? Thoughts? I know I did. When bringing this group together for purposes of writing about library school and the profession we are about to enter, I approached the bloggers I had been reading, heard about, or came across in my daily interweb scanning life. It wasn’t until all those photos were posted on this page that I saw an issue. 1 white guy and 5 white girls. Two things bothered me about this discovery. First, if this little group of writers is any sort of microcosm of the greater LIS student body and the profession, there is a problem. Second, and this was most embarrassing to me, when scanning my Twitter lists and blogs for confirmation, I found very little evidence of diversity there.