Optional Reading:
From Week 8 Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in LIS and Information Professions
Hall, T. D. (2007). Race and place: A personal account of unequal access. American Libraries, 38(2), 30-33. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2020/04/23/race-place-unequal-access/
Additional Readings:
From Week 5 A History of LIS
Brady, H. and Franky, A. (2015, September). A History of US Public Libraries. Digital Public Library of America
Over this semester, I wanted to learn more about the diversity or lack thereof within the Library and Information Science industry and the inequality between white and African American populations over history and the present day. When choosing the articles to read and write about for this paper I decided to look for articles that were based on these issues. The articles I chose were from weeks 8 and 5. The first article I chose was the article called Race and place: A personal account of unequal access, by Hall. The second article I chose was the article called A History of US Public Libraries, by Brady and Franky. I will be breaking down these articles with a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the articles as well as relating them back to what we learned in class.
The first reading, it was a first-hand account of the inequality of access in the rural deep south in the past and present for the year 2007. The author talks about the library where she went to growing up like this, “Anti-theft bars covered every possible point of entry….It was painted a yellowish color that, depending on how the sun hit it, read from pale canary to drab mustard” (Hall, 2007). Her descriptions of the library that she visited weekly as a child painted quite an image for me as the reader. Her description of the library “from the other side of the tracks” as she called it was, “their public library, a gleaming white, a newly blue-carpeted edifice to self-learning” (Hall, 2007). One of the main strengths of this author is her descriptions of the area and the libraries that she visited as a child and the big differences between them. Her writing helps to paint a picture of the past and the present that she is writing about at that time. At the end of the article, she described the renovation of the library that she had visited a lot as a young child after many years of not visiting when in need of the internet, “By the time I made my way to the new iteration of the yellow palace—now relocated, expanded, and situated across the street from a thriving shopping plaza that features the wonder of all wonders, a grocery store—my head was swimming with possibilities. My euphoria was short-lived. Inside the library, the large majority of children and adults gathered around a bank of computer terminals each waiting for their precious hour of allotted time” (Hall, 2007). The one weakness that she has within this article is that she doesn’t reference studies or anything academic about the changes over time but I think that’s why I like it because it reads more like a blog post than a scholarly article or the digital archives I chose to compare it to. I think that this article helps show that over time libraries in the rural deep south have evolved but still have inequalities.
The second article I chose was the digital archives called A History of US Public Libraries. This article’s authors chose to have a more typical scholarly layout but in an exhibition way. Once you press the “Explore Exhibition” button when you first open the page it shows you the entire exhibition and you can choose on the left-hand side (Brady and Franky, 2015). I chose to go to the “Segregated Libraries” section because that goes into the history of inequalities in public libraries and the African American community (Brady and Franky, 2015). The main strength of this section is that it helps to show the inequalities through pictures and descriptions of the time. The history of the African American community when written by most historians tries to sound objective and like the inequalities, and adversities that they faced are in the past as if they don’t still exist. That is the main weakness of this exhibition because it sounds neutral and objective about these issues. In comparison to the article written by Hall, this exhibition shows more of an overall history vs a personal experience history of inequalities and adversity of the African American community.
When it comes to this class we talked a lot about neutrality but not as much about the diversity and inequalities that libraries still perpetuate in present-day as well as in the profession's history. Both of these articles represented the Library and Information Science industry just from different perspectives. The first article written by Hall was more of a personal experience of the inequalities and adversity of the African American community and how it is shown through the public library system. This article to me helps show how libraries can not be neutral and ignore the socioeconomic issues that the community and populations of people are facing. The second article written by Brady and Franky showed a more broad picture of the history of libraries and some of it focused on the inequalities and adversity that the African American community has faced within the library system and industry. Overall I liked the first article more because of the personal touch and description of the inequalities and adversity that were faced and are continuing to face by those of lower socioeconomic standing and the African American community in the deep south.
