Digital Commons Network^™

2021 Scholarship For Diversity In Librarianship Recipients, Cathi Mack, Megan Palmer

South Carolina Libraries

At the annual South Carolina Library Association conference, students are honored that received a Scholarship for Diversity in Librarianship. There were six library school students that received the 2021 scholarship.

Working For A Better World: The Librarian As A Change Agent, An Activist And A Social Entrepreneur, Mia H. Mathiasson, Henrik Jochumsen

New Librarianship Symposia Series: Fall 2021

For many years, the social role of librarians has been a topic of heated debates, both within the library field and within library research. Such debates have traditionally been about questions of neutrality and the professional identity in librarianship. Recently, visions of librarians as radical positive change agents (Lankes 2016) have influenced and shaped this debate, raising new questions about neutrality or “post-neutrality”, professional agency and personal and political ideologies. However, what does it mean to be a radical positive change agent? To expand our understanding of the librarian as a radical positive change agent, this paper introduces the concepts …

Revisiting The Ideal Of Neutrality, Anne-Sofie Bollerup

New Librarianship Symposia Series: Fall 2021

Revisiting the ideal of neutrality

The idea of a neutral library and a neutral librarian is appealing. Without influencing or judging, the librarian trusts the citizens own judgement and steps away from her own opinion in order to serve and guide the users. The notion of neutrality as an ideal has been the dominating position among both librarians and Library and Information Science-researchers.

Advocates for the principle of neutrality claim that the idea of neutrality is both an expression of representative democracy and respect for the individual’s rights and that neutrality is an active choice (Blomgreen & Sundeen, 2020; Tewell, …

Struggling To Breathe: Covid-19, Protest, And The Lis Response, Amelia N. Gibson, Renate Chancellor, Nicole A. Cooke, Sarah Park Dahlen, Beth Patin, Yasmeen Shorish

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this article is to provide a follow up to “Libraries on the Frontlines: Neutrality and Social Justice,” which was published in 2017. It addresses institutional responses to protests and uprising in the spring and summer of 2020 after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd—all of which occurred in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The article expands the previous call for libraries to take a stand for Black Lives. We describe the events of 2020 (a global pandemic, multiple murders of unarmed Black people, and the consequent global protests) and responses from …