Competency C

Articulate the importance of designing programs and services supportive of diversity, inclusion, and equity for clientele and employees.

Section 1: Introduction

Designing programs and services that support diversity, inclusion, and equity involves more than including representations of diverse communities or declaring inclusion to be an institutional value. Institutions must critically examine how their histories, policies, workplace cultures, collections, and decision-making structures shape who is represented, who participates, and whose needs are recognized. Chatman’s (1996) concept of information poverty further illustrates that equitable access must go beyond making information technically available: people experiencing social marginalization may distrust mainstream information institutions and instead rely on community-based networks. This challenge extends internally as well. Libraries and archives have historically participated in exclusion through their collections, services, professional cultures, and institutional decision-making. Research on librarianship has documented a history in which professional ideals of intellectual freedom and equal access coexisted with racial exclusion and segregated services (Wiegand, 2020), while organizational cultures can reproduce inequities among staff even when institutions formally embrace inclusion (Wolfgram, 2021).

Designing for equity also requires recognizing that access and inclusion are shaped by choices made throughout an institution, often in ways that are not immediately visible. I encountered this tension directly during my internship at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, where I researched films from the 1910s that sometimes contained racist stereotypes or used offensive terminology to describe immigrants and other marginalized groups. Archival description may need to retain language that appears in original materials or historical sources because changing or removing it can misrepresent the historical record and make materials more difficult for researchers to locate. At the same time, reproducing harmful language without context can make an institution’s descriptive practices alienating or harmful to the communities represented. This experience helped me understand that equitable archival practice does not always mean removing offensive language; it can instead require thoughtful decisions about how historical terminology is preserved, contextualized, and presented to users.

Meeting this competency means being willing to assess an institution’s decisions critically, recognize when established practices create barriers or reproduce harm, and consider how they might be changed without losing the historical or informational value institutions are responsible for preserving. It also means extending that consideration beyond clientele to the employees whose identities, perspectives, and working conditions shape how institutions serve their communities. The following evidence demonstrates how I have developed this understanding through coursework, archival research, and my professional experience, and how I have begun applying it to the design and evaluation of information services.

References

Section 2: Evidence

My understanding of diversity, inclusion, and equity in information organizations comes from a combination of historical and theoretical coursework, applied case-based ethical reasoning, hands-on archival research, and institutional funding analysis.

My first piece of evidence is a discussion post from INFO 204, responding to prompts about the history of diversity issues in librarianship. In this post, I drew on Wiegand’s (2020) research documenting how many Southern librarians actively excluded Black librarians from professional associations and maintained segregated services well after Brown v. Board of Education, without meaningful sanction from national organizations like the American Library Association. I also discussed Ettarh’s (2018) concept of vocational awe and how it can obscure the inequities that have existed, and continue to exist, within our profession, as well as Pawley’s (2022) account of Black librarians’ historical efforts to desegregate libraries and build collections representing African American history and culture. Studying this history shifted how I view the profession’s commitment to equity. It made it harder for me to view diversity as an issue that libraries can simply recognize and correct in the present. Instead, I now see current equity efforts as connected to a much longer history of exclusion, and to the work of librarians and communities who challenged that exclusion. This artifact demonstrates my understanding that meaningful equity work requires acknowledging the profession’s own history and recognizing that inclusion is not guaranteed just because an institution formally adopts equitable values.

My second piece of evidence most directly demonstrates the program-design aspect of this competency. It is a project proposal from INFO 284, in which I designed a memorial film restoration and public programming plan for Christine Choy’s 1976 documentary From Spikes to Spindles, which documents 1970s Chinatown labor activism and resistance to police brutality. One of the things I focused on while developing the proposal was how to make the restoration meaningful to the community represented in the film. I proposed pairing the film’s restored premiere with a companion exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in America, using that institution’s own permanent collection to connect the film to the broader material history of the community. I also built the programming around Choy’s former collaborators and community organizers as panelists rather than relying on outside scholars alone, so that people with direct connections to the history being presented could play a central role in interpreting it. I incorporated the National Film Preservation Foundation’s grant requirement that the restored film be made available for free educational and non-commercial access, and noted that the distributing organization, Third World Newsreel, planned to direct outreach efforts to community organizations and labor unions. Designing this project helped me see that inclusive programming requires thinking carefully about who is involved in presenting it, who the program is designed to reach, and how existing community institutions and networks can be mobilized to broaden access.

My third piece of evidence consists of two catalog entries I wrote during my internship as a research intern at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, part of the NEH-funded “Behind the Veil” project documenting early Hollywood films by women and BIPOC directors and screenwriters. The first, for The Man in Ebony (1917), documents a film written, directed, and produced by Dr. Rev. Thomas HB Walker, a Black minister, author, and filmmaker about whom very little has been documented. Through research in contemporary newspapers, I found evidence that the film premiered August 29, 1917, at the Strand Theater in Jacksonville, in contrast to the 1918 release date some existing sources had assigned to the film, and traced the likely identities of cast members named only in passing in period coverage. The second, for The Triumph of Truth (1916), documents a film starring and directed by Cleo Madison, one of early Hollywood’s few women directors, who according to a 1916 trade publication had “made a special study of the camera itself” and was “one of the few directors who is able, if necessary, to film her own productions.” Like most of Madison’s directorial work, the film is now considered lost, making accurate documentation of its plot, cast, and critical reception, which I gathered from contemporary trade reviews, one of the only ways its existence and Madison’s contribution to it remain accessible to researchers. Writing these and other entries gave me direct, applied experience with diversity and equity work at the level of archival description and historical documentation. This research has helped close gaps in the historical record created by a film history canon that has significantly underdocumented both early Black filmmakers and women directors, bringing their films and contributions into a more accurate and accessible account of film history.

My fourth piece of evidence is a discussion post from INFO 259 responding to a case study involving an archivist who selectively destroyed archival materials she considered morally objectionable because of her personal religious beliefs. The materials included images of colonized subjects, an attorney’s files concerning incarcerated clients, and interview transcripts for a book on transgender experience. What I found most challenging about the case was balancing respect for an employee’s religious beliefs with the institution’s responsibility to preserve materials according to its collection policy and mission. I argued that while employees’ religious beliefs should be respected, an institution cannot accommodate those beliefs when doing so prevents an employee from fulfilling essential professional responsibilities, and I proposed reassigning the employee instead of firing her. The case helped me recognize the importance of workplace policies that establish clear professional standards while also providing appropriate mechanisms for accommodation and reassignment when employees’ beliefs or circumstances conflict with particular duties. Such policies can support an inclusive workplace by respecting employees as individuals without allowing individual beliefs or biases to determine which materials are preserved and made accessible. This is especially critical since the materials the archivist destroyed documented communities whose experiences are already marginalized or underrepresented in mainstream archives. Supporting truly inclusive workplaces means considering the rights and experiences of employees alongside the responsibilities an institution has to its clientele and to the communities represented in its collections.

My fifth piece of evidence is the Political section of a group PESTLE analysis I contributed to for INFO 204, examining the Margaret Herrick Library. Unlike my other artifacts, this evidence does not demonstrate the design of a specific equity-oriented service, but instead reflects my understanding of the institutional and political conditions that determine whether such programs can be sustained. In this section, in investigating the political background conditions that might affect the future of the Margaret Herrick Library, I researched and discussed a 2025 executive order directing federal agencies to terminate all “equity-related” initiatives, grants, or contracts. I connected this policy shift to the broader funding environment for humanities and archival projects, including projects such as In Frame: Centering the Underrepresented in Moving Image Archives, a collaborative project among multiple film archives focused on creating a searchable public database of individuals and films historically marginalized from the American film canon. This research showed me that designing sustainable equity-oriented programs requires attention not only to an institution’s internal goals and resources, but also to the political and funding environments that can affect whether this type of work is able to continue. Tools like PESTLE analysis can help to identify external factors affecting an organization so that strategic planners, including those of diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives, can design programs with political and social constraints and opportunities in mind; it also enables brainstorming ways that institutions with shared goals can come together to lobby for political change.

Section 3: Conclusion

The process of creating these five pieces of evidence has changed how I understand the role of design in this competency. Designing an equitable program or service involves asking questions about how institutions operate: whose perspective has shaped a given decision, whose needs may have been overlooked, what barriers might prevent meaningful participation, how an institution’s own history affects trust, and what structures are necessary to sustain programs over time. Historical scholarship has shown me why information organizations must reckon honestly with the ways they have participated in exclusion; community-centered program design has demonstrated the importance of building services around the needs, voices, and existing institutions of the people they serve; my archival research has shown me that equitable preservation and description can actively address gaps in the historical record; ethical case analysis has taught me to consider how institutional responsibilities apply to both employees and the communities whose materials and histories they steward; and my institutional analysis has made clear that equity-oriented programs must also be designed with attention to the political and financial conditions that determine whether they can be sustained. These questions apply equally to clientele and employees: an institution cannot meaningfully serve diverse communities while disregarding the perspectives and experiences of the people who work within it.

As a future information professional, I see supporting diversity, inclusion, and equity as a responsibility that extends across an institution’s collections, programs, workplace culture, decision-making, and long-term planning, which no single program or policy can fulfill once and for all. To ensure that I remain current with inclusive practice in library and archival work, I will regularly consult the Society of American Archivists’ Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics, its Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and its Case Studies on Diversifying the Archival Record, as well as resources from the American Library Association’s Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services (ODLOS) and the ALA’s eLearning catalog of webinars on equity, diversity, and inclusion. These resources will help me continue evaluating my own professional assumptions and stay informed about changing challenges and approaches to designing information services that are responsive to both clientele and employees.