Farmington River in Simsbury, CT. The Farmington River meets the Connecticut River in Windsor, CT. Attribution: YankeeGuy at English Wikipedia.
1. Collections - Chapel Hill Public Library, Chapel Hill, NC
Although Chapel Hill serves a bigger population than Windsor, their collection audit and findings are helpful. As described in chapter 4 of "Auditing Diversity in Library Collections", they wanted to better understand the community they serve and provide more foreign language materials for the increasing immigrant population. They audited four randomly selected months of fiction purchases between July 2019 - June 2020. Affter, they retroactively audited a sample of fiction among adult, young adult, and children's collections. They considered genre, race, and ethnicity/nationality. While gaps were seen, especially for adult fiction, they were also reassured that purchases in 2019-2020 were significantly more diverse (Voels, 2022).
2. Resources - Ferguson Public Library, Stamford, CT
The Ferguson Public Library website has multiple entry points for adult services online. Their outreach page describes access to resources and collections via bookmobile, "visiting books", homebound services, and their multicultural center. As desscribed in a recent article for Public Services Quarterly, they successfuly completed a pilot for a digital navigators system to provide internet access and technical expertise, now implementing this as a full program (Gauvreau, 2023). It is noted that the most successful navigators met not only in the public library but places such as barber shops, fast-food restaurants, senior centers, and faith-based centers.
3. Assigned Role related to community focus - New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA
New Orleans Public Library has an African American Resource Librarian and accompanying webpage full of resources for patrons. While the library has distinct outreach roles, it is clear from what is offered on the website that the librarian for African American resources provides both reference and outreach work for the community. In fact, the full title for this librarian is African American Resource Equity and Inclusion Librarian. According to the strategic plan through 2031, also linked on their Who We Are page, they plan to expand the space to create an African American Resource Collection Equity and Inclusion Center.
4. Strategic representations - New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA
The African American Resource Collection webpage expands upon the equity statement given on the larger library's About Us page, knowing that they are informing a more particular audience on their resource page. The website also makes known to direct inquiries to the dedicated department librarian. The African American Resource Collection page also keeps a clear list of collaborators and links to them, along with a video series on representation through film offerings on the New Orleans Public Library Kanopy catalog.
5. Internal Dept/Unit - Enoch Pratt Free Public Library, Baltimore, MD
There is a department named the Office of Equity and Fair Practice. While the staff list is not easy to find on the Enoch Free Public Library website, the unit includes an Accessibility Coordinator and a Director of Equity and Fair Practice. There is a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council for the library, as well. M'Balu "Lu" Bangura, current Chief of Equity and Fair Practice, is the recipient of Library Journal's 2023 Movers and Shakers Award for the category of "community builder" (Library Journal, 2023). According to the publication's profile, this role improves internal and external relations through trainings, supplementing outreach, and even developing a post-incarceration library employment program for women. As for Accessibility Coordinator, someone under this role often works with accomadation requests for events and daily use of the library, edits to the website, and connecting patrons to materials such as large print books or other items.
6. News and Events (internal) - Enoch Pratt Free Public Library, Baltimore, MD
As previously noted, the Office of Equity and Fair Practice in Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Public Library is a unit made to help employees and the public. This includes events internal to the library, such as diverse author talks or adding a small grocery store to a branch location, or becoming the first agency in the city to utilize trauma-informed training (Enoch Pratt Free Public Library, 2022). Their external communication shows an effort to address company culture. They also have one page for their publications archive, which provides a good starting point for seeing events and news outside of the calendar webpage format.
7. News and Events (external) - Oakland Public Library, Oakland, CA
Every tab on the oakland Public Library website connects you to either events, info one would need in order to attend events (e.g. accessibility info) or an opportunity to go outside and interact with stakeholders/extensions of library through offerings such as museum passes, the Oakland African American Museum and Library, or admission to the local history center. Their outreach page has a clear events request form which includes the chance to suggest an event. Their OPL Summer landing page is along the top navigation and is split into categories for teens, kids, and adults, which may help motivate adults to stay at the library for reasons besides accompanying a child to a summer program.
Gauvreau, C. (2023). Digital navigation pilots in four public libraries. Public Services Quarterly, 19(2), 119–124. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228959.2023.2169804
Sarah Voels. (2022). Auditing Diversity in Library Collections. Libraries Unlimited; eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). http://libdata.lib.ua.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=3335251&site=eds-live&scope=site