Weinberg Memorial Library Creates Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Accessibility Committee

For several years, the Library faculty, staff, and administration have undertaken efforts to foster and maintain as welcoming, accessible and inclusive an environment as possible. In order to formalize these efforts and ensure that the Library continues to work in this direction, the Library faculty, staff and administration have created the newly formed Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA) Committee.

The committee is currently comprised of four Library faculty members: Prof. Kate Cummings, Prof. Colleen Farry, Prof. Ian O’Hara, and Prof. Sheli Pratt-McHugh, as well as two Library staff coordinators – Media Resources Coordinator Sharon Finnerty and Inter-library Loan Coordinator Kevin Kocur – and counseling and human services graduate student Mackenzie Machell.

Pictured (left to right): DEIA Committee members Sharon Finnerty, Kevin Kokur, Prof. Ian O’Hara, Prof. Kate Cummings, Prof. Sheli Pratt-McHugh. Not pictured: Prof. Colleen Farry, Mackenzie Machell.

The committee is charged with overseeing and coordinating the Weinberg Memorial Library’s core commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. It will work with all Library units and other campus constituencies to initiate, advise and mobilize support for appropriate action related to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility within the Weinberg Memorial Library.

The scope of the committee’s work will engage the Library’s spaces, collections, catalog, and instruction, as well as research and scholarly services. The committee will oversee work to audit Library collections to ensure equitable representation across varied sociocultural groups, audit Library spaces for accessibility across the innumerable ability levels present in our society, map Library spaces for environmental attributes, and examine our cataloging and classification practices to address harmful and problematic terminology inherent across multiple cataloging and classification systems.

Initial work is being done to create new subject guides related to traditionally marginalized groups to highlight resources in and outside the collection that may be of value to our campus community. There have also been preliminary conversations related to producing library programming and events that feature experts on DEIA-related topics sharing their research and expertise within the Weinberg Memorial Library for the campus community and the greater community of the city of Scranton.

Arising out of Library strategic and tactical planning meetings, the Library DEIA Committee has developed a collection of Library-related DEIA goals. These were researched, guided by, and developed through examining what academic libraries at our peer institutions, other Pennsylvania academic libraries, and our fellow AJCU schools have begun implementing in their own libraries. The Library’s DEIA goals have been developed with great care and in accordance with DEIA-related initiatives put forth within the broader campus strategic planning. The Library is in full support of all such measures being undertaken campus-wide, and the Library DEIA Committee initiatives will be undertaken in accordance with and in support of broader campus-wide goals.

The WML DEIA Committee is currently reorganizing the section of the Library website that provides information related to these efforts. Under the “About the Library” section of the website, there is now a link labeled “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility.” This area is the future home of information sharing related to these efforts. Please visit this area of our website for further information as the committee continues our efforts to provide the most equitable, welcoming, accessible, and inclusive environment we can for our students, faculty, staff, and our entire extended campus community.

—Assistant Professor Ian O’Hara, Research & Instruction Librarian