Karen Kohn, "Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

About this episode

Karen Kohn discusses her book on assessing academic library collections for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides a practical, step-by-step approach to designing and implementing evaluation projects targeting a variety of DEI goals in academic library collections. Offering both flexibility and detailed guidance, this book begins with a discussion of aspects of diversity that librarians could target in their assessment projects and notes project planning considerations such as defining a scope and timeline. It particularly notes how larger academic libraries can narrow the scope of a project to make it feasible. Subsequent chapters explain different methods for assessing a collection, with many examples throughout. Methods include: - List-checking involves comparing the collection to a list of recommended books. - Metadata searching produces a count of library holdings that contain certain subject headings or use specific call numbers. - Diversity coding allows staff to create their own categories and assign them to books in a sample. All three of these methods can be used to analyze the collection by subject matter. It is possible to use diversity coding to examine author identities as…

People in this episode

Guest: Karen Kohn

Topics covered

• diversity in libraries
• equity in library collections
• inclusion strategies
• library assessment methods
• academic libraries

Keywords

• library collections
• DEI goals
• assessment methods
• metadata searching
• diversity coding

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Bloomsbury

Books & works: Assessing Academic Library Collections for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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