New Book: Librarians of Color

Thank you to Rebecca Hankins for the following post about the new book, Librarians of Color.

[note: per Rebecca’s request, some content was removed as they work through issues with the publisher]

We mentioned in the introduction the why we wrote the book, but for us, we felt there needs to be a corpus of research and writings on diversity and the experiences of people of color in librarianship and archives, similar to information literacy, collection development, and any other relevant subject in these two informational fields. When we first sent out the requests for abstracts we received a number of folks saying they had just read or written on this subject as if that should be the end of it. We challenged the responses to think of this as an ongoing dialogue with many different perspectives that should be explored, commented on, and argued. We need to be a part of the information studies canon like any other important issue in libraries and archives.

The how of writing the book consisted of us sending out a call for proposal abstracts. We received an overwhelming response with enough abstracts for all 3 books (first on academia, second was going to be on law librarians, and the 3rd was on the experiences of young and diverse librarians). Miguel and I individually and then together scored the abstracts in a spreadsheet, then we came together. If there were any disputed contributors we talked about them; I had one and he had one that we kept in the book. We provided deadlines for when they were to have their contributions to us. We did the first editing and review, gave them feedback, then set another deadline for the final chapters. We pulled the entire manuscript together with an introduction and contacted the noted scholar and former ALA president to write a preface, then sent it to the publisher for feedback. Received feedback (this is when we found out we were removed from being editors of the series) that we shared with the contributors and sent back to the publisher. We were told that the index was being created, the cover was being made (no input from us), the proof would be shared for any final errors (didn’t receive until after we noted some glaring errors), then published.

Book is done and I’m pleased with the book for the most part and that I’m done with the publisher and the book is out. The contributors wrote from the heart without censors so I’m pleased about that too.