Special Reports

CHICAGO — Librarianship is still a predominantly white profession. It is essential that current practitioners as well as those about to enter the field take an unflinching look at the profession’s legacy of racial discrimination, including the ways in which race might impact service to users such as students in school, public, and academic libraries. Given the prevalence of implicit and explicit bias against Black and African American people, Amanda L. Folk and Tracey Overbey argue that we must speak to these students directly to hear their stories and thereby understand their experiences.

CHICAGO — Cultural humility is emerging as a preferred approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within librarianship. At a time when library workers are critically examining their professional practices, cultural humility offers a potentially transformative framework of compassionate accountability; it asks us to recognize the limits to our knowledge, reckon with our ongoing fallibility, educate ourselves about the power imbalances in our organizations, and commit to making change.

Core has published two new resources to help librarians and library workers better understand federated authentication, which lets library users access remote sites by logging in to a campus sign-on service.

The library profession has seen radical change in people’s thinking about all aspects of work and life, due in part to the sudden and prolonged shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing calls for social justice and antiracism in our services and practices. While many manuals for hiring and interviewing exist, including those in professional library associations and organizations, they may already be out of step with the rapid changes of recent years.