New Focus Needed To Recruit Minorities for Academic Library Jobs
Jennifer Pinkowski -- Library Journal, 9/21/2007
If academic libraries hope to increase the number of minority librarians on staff, a single comprehensive recruitment and public awareness resource should be developed to channel profession-wide efforts to one place—taking a lead from other professions, like nursing. That's the primary recommendation of a recent white paper released by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) called "Achieving Racial and Ethnic Diversity Among Academic and Research Librarians." Coauthored by Teresa Neely, director of the University of New Mexico's Zimmerman Library, and Lorna Peterson, an associate professor of Library and Information Studies at the University of Buffalo, the white paper mines the existing literature for new ways to tackle the chronic shortage of minority librarians in academic settings.The white paper builds on an ACRL study from 2002, "Recruitment, Retention, & Restructuring: Human Resource in Academic Libraries." The chronic disparity between the demographics of academic library staff and the demographics of the U.S. population is well-covered ground in the existing literature. Beyond that general incentive to increase minority recruitment, Neely and Peterson suggest a more strategic goal: having a library staff that reflects the population it serves.
The paper suggests several ways academic libraries can do this:
- Develop a comprehensive, collaborative recruitment and public awareness campaign for recruitment, eliminating duplication and channeling all efforts through one resource. The nursing profession, which also suffers from a chronic staffing shortage, provides a "fully developed, functional, and proven successful model" with discovernursing.com, a project of various national nurses' organizations and Johnson & Johnson. The proposed clearinghouse of information should be accompanied by a print, radio, and TV recruitment ads.
- Retain minority librarians by creating a welcoming and flexible environment that considers work culture issues, honors employee values and opinion, offers compensation and rewards, provides good management, and recognizes the need for work-life balance. All hires benefit from such an environment, the report notes, but it is "especially significant for retention of minority hires" because those staffers often lack a built-in support network.
- Advance minority hires to management positions. As the authors note, this is one topic the 2002 paper did not address. Ways to groom minority staff for leadership roles include providing opportunities for mentoring; shadowing leaders; soliciting nominations for awards and recognitions; job rotations; and support for participation in fellowships and institutes. The report also recommends tracking openings for top jobs and the "available leadership pool" of minority candidates, and developing subsequent data reports. The goal is to create "a system of accountability regarding the retention of advancement of underrepresented groups in libraries."
