Survey For Librarians of Color

To All Librarians of Color:

Myself (Kawanna Bright) and two of my colleagues, Deborah Lilton with
Vanderbilt University and Pambanisha King with Auburn University, will
be presenting a session at the National Diversity in Libraries
Conference in October 2008, entitled “When Diversity is Too Much: New
Librarians of Color and Expectations for Involvement in Library
Diversity Initiatives”. The focus of this program will be to discuss
diversity initiatives utilized to recruit and retain librarians of color
into academic libraries and how they can sometimes have a negative
impact on the librarians they are designed to support. As part of this
session we will be presenting information from published research, but
the main focus of this session will be to present the results of a
survey of librarians of color and their opinions on how these programs
impacted them.

This is where you come in! If you are a librarian of color who works in
an academic library (or has ever worked in an academic library during
your career) we need you to complete our survey. This is your
opportunity to share your thoughts on the different diversity
initiatives that have been a part of your career, whether it was a
recruitment scholarship to help you earn your degree, a residency
program to launch you into the field, a leadership institute to prepare
you for upward movement, or programs that happened internally in the
libraries that you worked in, including diversity committees, diversity
training programs, or cultural enrichment programs. We would also be
interested in hearing about other experiences that affected you
specifically as a new librarian of color.

The goal of this survey is not to collect information to “bash” these
programs. The researchers agree that on the whole these programs are
positive for the librarians who participate in them as well as the
libraries that host them and the field itself. However, the possible
negative impacts of these programs need to be discussed as well in order
to help programs improve and to better prepare new librarians of color
for careers in academic librarianship.

This survey is completely anonymous – no identifying information will be
collected. We will not be collecting information on specific programs,
and are asking participants to respond with generalities (the survey
instrument reflects this request to not include identifying information).

The survey is available at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=obT9ro6gb8sztIvaWtz4PQ_3d_3d and
takes between 15 and 25 minutes to complete, depending on the number of
experiences that you have had.

Your participation is greatly appreciated. Please also feel free to
share the survey with colleagues that you feel would be interested in
participating. All questions concerning the survey, the presentation or
the project as a whole can be directed to Kawanna Bright,
kmbright@ncsu.edu, Pambanisha King,
kingpam@auburn.edu, or Deborah Lilton,
dlilton@gmail.com.

Sincerely,

Kawanna Bright, Pambanisha King, and Deborah Lilton