Practicing Map and Geospatial Information Librarianship through the Lens of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice

View correction statement:

Correction

“Librarians and library-based geographic information professionals have the ability and responsibility to address issues around diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in our professional practice and through engagement with our varied user communities.” So began the call for papers for what has become this special (double) issue on the topic of “Practicing Map and Geospatial Information Librarianship through the Lens of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice.” It was a belief in this idea, rather than any specific claim to authority on this topic, that led to the conception of this special issue and the work of the authors included within that led us to this point of publication.

The last several years have seen a wave of social justice demonstrations and conversations that have brought the ongoing effects of systemic racism and inequity to the forefront, including in libraries. Many of our libraries and academic institutions issued statements supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and committing to anti-racism, reflected on how DEIA-focused learning and activities could be prioritized in our organizations, and hopefully dedicated resources to advance and sustain these efforts. Nevertheless, we still find ourselves at what may seem like only the beginning of a necessary and overdue reckoning with the structures and practices that perpetuate inequities across our institutions and profession, requiring continued acknowledgement, reflection, conversation, and action to rectify.

It is within this environment that our guest-editorial team has operated, bringing with us varying personal experiences and professional expertise as current and former map, geospatial, and data professionals in academic libraries. We chose to revise the terminology used in the title of this issue compared to the original call for papers - to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) - to better reflect the content of the articles that follow. To consider the scope of DEIJ as it relates to this special issue and to librarianship more broadly, we draw upon definitions provided in the indispensable work of Bussmann and colleagues in their recent series of columns in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship:

• Diversity: “A term that attempts to express, when used in higher education, an organizational recognition that people with different life experiences and identities affect organizations differently, and that people of differing experiences and identities should be represented in organizations because multiple perspectives are important. Diversity includes race, sexuality, gender, physical disability, mental abilities and disabilities, economic reality, class in society, etc.” (Bussmann et al. 2020).

• Equity: “The act of creating opportunities in order to obtain justice, fairness, and equality without impartiality or barriers” (ibid.).

• Inclusion: “Intentionally providing for or creating an environment that not only contains diverse people but also welcomes and allows for the meaningful involvement, contributions, representation, and empowerment of any person, particularly those who have been historically excluded” (ibid.).

• Social Justice: “A broadly encompassing term used to collect a variety of ideas and actions that work toward bringing justice to communities and people who are otherwise treated unjustly. Also used to describe the struggle to create, through advocacy, education, and activism, a society that is truly just and equitable” (ibid.).

We acknowledge that there are a broad range of concepts that fall under the scope of DEIJ, only some of which will be represented in this special issue. Rather than comprehensiveness, our aim in organizing this publication has always been to share diverse perspectives, advance conversations, and spur reflection and action as to how map and geospatial librarians can approach our work through a DEIJ lens. We hope you will see this special issue as an invitation to further engage in and advance these conversations and that, like us, you will learn from, be challenged by, and find inspiration in the articles to follow.

We have organized these papers into two issues based on the broader topics of “Community Engagement and Collections” and “Pedagogy,” though there is overlap between the two. Issue 1 begins with a contribution from Mattke, Delegard, and Leebaw discussing their work on Mapping Prejudice and offering an example of map librarian leadership on an interdisciplinary, community-engaged, and highly impactful project. The authors issue a call for academic libraries to “scrutinize their established practices and priorities” to embrace opportunities for co-creative, community-engaged scholarship; radical resource sharing; and making space for experimentation and unpredictability; and for library leaders to acknowledge the benefits of such work and allocate resources accordingly.

Next, Philogene discusses their work on the Brooklyn Health Map and how engagement with students, colleagues, physicians, and community health advocates helped in identifying information seeking challenges faced by these groups and inspired the author to leverage their GIS expertise for the creation of a community data dashboard. Additionally, the author highlights examples of how this resource has been improved since its implementation, including how considering its content through a DEIJ lens led to more inclusive representations of the community’s linguistic diversity.

Dyess and Teplitzky follow with an example of how they engaged with an active graduate student group to support their call to action for improving the Earth & Planetary Sciences department’s climate in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). They demonstrate how recognizing this collaborative opportunity positioned the library to offer strategies aimed at amplifying diverse voices in the Earth Sciences discipline and highlight resources in their library collections and beyond that promote DEI. The authors also provide a constructive characterization of how this kind of work often happens in academic libraries when noting that their guide has served as both a springboard and complement for other DEI efforts that are “driven by passion, but accomplished by listening and action.”

Next, Aldred discusses their approach to actively aligning collection assessment and development efforts, especially as they relate to geographic diversity, with larger efforts to address biases and “de-colonize” the field of Urban Planning. Through the development of a shareable tool for automated geoparsing and geocoding of descriptive metadata, the author broadens the potential impact of their work from a local collection assessment to one that could be conducted on a larger, decentralized scale, with the goal of increasing geographic diversity in collections supporting Urban Planning programs at other institutions.

In the final paper of the community engagement and collections issue, Chomintra employs a lens of criticality to situate practices in map and geospatial librarianship within the larger context of critical cartography, critical GIS, and critical information literacy. The author draws on conversations happening more broadly across the field of librarianship to identify possible opportunities for map and geospatial library professionals to approach our work with a focus on DEI, especially in the areas of collection development, metadata and discoverability, and instruction. Chomintra’s discussion of DEI in library cartographic instruction provides a bridge to the theme of our second issue, pedagogy.

Brown begins Issue 2 describing a purposeful shift in the map librarian’s instruction model from a “show and tell” approach to one built around active learning and critical information literacy. The author highlights the relevance and potential of map collections for centering DEI and embedding cartographic, primary source, and critical information literacy into the curriculum, through presenting examples and a model that can be replicated in other educational settings.

Next, Ranganath notes the importance of geospatial data, analysis, and visualization for understanding patterns of systemic racism and inequality, and the role geospatial librarians can play in introducing scholarly and activist communities to these techniques. The author calls on geospatial librarians to reflect on how we as instructors can combine the teaching of essential geospatial skills with social justice themes without overwhelming learners in introductory GIS workshops. They share a valuable example of how geospatial librarians can design such workshops to connect data and GIS analysis to “the lived experiences of real people in a concrete and compelling way, and thereby encourage learners to empathize with the human beings that are behind the data points.”

Mueller echoes this sentiment in their paper presenting a lesson plan focused on the topic of sexual and gender minority health that emphasizes potential intersections between the work of health science, data, and geospatial librarians interested in teaching data visualization and data literacy concepts through a social justice-minded approach. In particular, the author discusses ways that observational data collection through community assessment techniques, such as walking and windshield surveys, can be an impactful addition to exercises focused on developing data literacy and GIS skills in the health sciences curriculum and beyond. They note that “community assessments can be an engaging way to remedy the more abstract nature of GIS and data visualization, and can thus offer an avenue for increasing empathy and awareness of the lived experiences of others, most importantly those of historically marginalized groups.”

In the final paper of the pedagogy issue, Zhang describes an example of a library partnership with the Public Square, an institutional initiative with aims to foster community connections and work toward equitable solutions to complex problems. They discuss the pedagogical design and implementation of a spatial literacy workshop meant to engage the public with knowledge, skills, and dispositions that they can use to better understand and solve problems in their community, and how the choice of data and activities aligned with the Public Square’s theme of “Toward Equity.” In doing so, the author highlights the important role map and geospatial librarians can play in integrating spatial literacy education and public engagement to bring “university expertise to address issues of public concern,” while also bringing us full circle to the community engagement focus of several other papers found in these issues.

The approaches, activities, and themes discussed in the papers that make up this special issue contribute to and intersect with broader conversations around DEIJ in librarianship, critical GIS and cartography, and other areas. While such conversations around DEIJ in librarianship and library work have proliferated in recent years, it is important to note that the field remains overwhelmingly white demographically and permeated by whiteness ideologically (Galvan 2015; Hathcock 2015). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2020 report on labor force characteristics by race & ethnicity, the makeup of librarians and media collection specialists in the United States was 83.1% White, 9.9% Hispanic/Latino, 9.5% Black, and 3.5% Asian¹ (BLS 2021). This is less diverse than the general population of the United States, and represents only a marginal improvement from 2010, when librarianship was reported as 87.5% White by the same study (BLS 2011). We are not aware of demographic data that is specific to map and geospatial librarianship, though we encourage that there is some action taken to gather such information in the future. This knowledge is important to enact institutional change in creating initiatives to attract a more diverse workforce, broadening the range of perspectives represented across our field, and assessing the outcomes of such efforts.

As Angela Galvan (2015) writes, “Librarianship in the United States lacks diversity because the existing workforce functions within oppressive structures, while the culture of whiteness in libraries maintains them.” DEIJ work in librarianship should explore not only demographics and representation, but also account for how power and privilege operate in the profession, which can have an effect on many aspects of librarianship including demographic representation and the prioritization of specific knowledge structures (Leung and López-McKnight 2021). These ideas relate to map and geospatial librarianship as well as librarianship at large, and addressing these issues will require sustained work.

We are not naïve about the impact of a special issue in a niche academic journal. These are academic papers meant to lead to interrogation, conversation, reflection, and action among map and geospatial library professionals. These are ideas and activities worth sharing so that we can continue to learn from one another and advance our practice, so that we can undertake that necessary work. Despite this chosen mechanism of sharing, DEIJ cannot be confined to special issues and other types of one-off activities, or framed as separate and extra work (Leung 2022). DEIJ can be a lens through which we approach our work every day, through which we can educate and impact our campuses and communities, and through which we can challenge existing power structures and inequitable practices in our institutions and profession.

In particular, we issue a call to professionals in a position of privilege to examine individual and institutional biases, to read and reflect, to engage and act, and to push against the systems that continue to oppress and disadvantage underrepresented and historically marginalized groups in our libraries and in our communities. We hope that the articles in this special issue will inspire and challenge our community of practice to do so.

Joshua Sadvari
University Libraries, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA
[email protected]
Theresa Quill
Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
Dorris Scott
University College, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Notes

1 These are the only racial and ethnic categories reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Indigenous or Native populations are not reported.