Diversity & Inclusion at the INFO College

The University of Maryland’s School of Library and Information Services (the original name of what is now the College of Information Studies) began at its founding in 1965 with an agenda focused on bringing information to communities that were typically ignored by libraries and expanding the range of people who joined the library and information science professions. Paul Wasserman, the founding Dean of the School, and faculty members such as Mary Lee Bundy, James Welbourne, and Richard Moses focused the early years of the School on truly innovative – and in some cases audacious – projects to alter the ways in which libraries and information functioned in communities.

Many years later, reflecting on the daring of the School’s early years, the great F. William Summers identified the School as the first library and information science program to fully embrace the “social gospel” and focus on “identifying and addressing the manifold social needs of the community” as the heart of the education program. Or, as Wasserman summarized the goals of the School, faculty and students from the School “formed the vanguard of the activist movement [in librarianship] by demanding social responsibility from the American Library Association.”

Within the first few years of launching the School, the faculty had established three major initiatives to broaden the inclusiveness of library and information science education and practice.

1) The School created an office to recruit students and faculty from underrepresented populations in library and information fields. Several members of the faculty and staff of the School were drawn from urban library systems in the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia as a result of these efforts. The School also became the first library and information science program to have a scholarship program specifically for students from populations underrepresented in the field. Shortly after founding the School, Paul Wasserman wrote that the duty of the School was to “equip human beings who are both competent and committed to expanding the potential of man, of our culture and our society.” This belief was reflected in many courses focused on special populations – people with disabilities, prisoners, the urban poor – that were developed at the School in its early years and that influenced subsequent course offerings at many other library and information science programs.

2) The School designed an Urban Information Specialist Program specifically to prepare librarians to work in high poverty, urban areas. This Specialist Program was a 36-hour Master of Library Science (MLS) degree program entirely focused on the information needs of residents of urban areas. The majority of the students in the program were from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds. Program design and financial support for the first students in the program came from a grant from the federal government.

3) A partnership was established with the Enoch Pratt Free Library of the City of Baltimore to create a “public information center” in the city to serve as a clearinghouse of information related to health, housing, education, police and emergency services, consumer affairs, employment, and government in general. The public information center was established in a high poverty area of Baltimore and featured large amounts of information related to daily life information needs and as well as telephone-based reference services.

Outside of the School itself, several members of the faculty founded a non-profit corporation to create materials for improving the conditions of the urban poor. Through this non-profit entity, faculty members created publications and provided training and consulting services to libraries and other organizations. Very much a do-it-yourself operation, the nonprofit nevertheless managed to produce a series of publications and kits and even ran conferences on the topic of improving equality for the urban poor.

With Richard Moses and Mary Lee Bundy as its directors, the library was designed to serve the needs of the local community while also serving as a learning lab for students in the MLS program. For community members, the library provided information resources that were otherwise not easily available to them. For MLS students, the library was the ultimate field study experience. For the School’s faculty, the library was a chance to try out new ways to make the library services relevant in an urban community with a wealth of poverty and a dearth of resources.

The utterly unprecedented nature of the High John Library (named after an African American folk hero from the era of slavery) raised controversy in the field of librarianship, seen as a public challenge to the entire field. Critics at that time, when libraries were viewed as sanctified archives of literature and did not engage with their communities, attacked High John for overstepping the boundaries of the library profession. Some argued that libraries should not serve poor communities altogether and that library students certainly should not be educated specifically to work in such communities. The High John Library was even criticized for using language and terminology in its literature that was tailored to the community.

Pushback on the concept of the High John Library was also fueled by the bold activism of the faculty and students involved. They organized and staged a series of protests at the ALA conference to pressure the ALA to create the Social Responsibilities Roundtable (to bring greater field-wide attention to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion) and drove around the South in a truck emblazed with the High John Library logo to publicly shame libraries that still practiced de facto segregation.

Despite criticisms of the radical nature of the High John Library, students and faculty continued to use it as a test case for many new approaches to outreach and community services. The library held outdoor rock concerts, projected movies on the outside walls of the building, and used surrealist promotions – “Read 1,000 books and win an alligator!” – among many ways to creatively reach the community.

Contradictory to its goals, the library fundamentally failed to connect with the local community and struggled to maintain staffing and resources. In 1970, the High John Library was absorbed into the local public library system, ending its life as an experiment in library activism. Looking back, a major failure of the project was the lack of co-design with the local community. Services were based on expectations and assumptions about the community made by the experiment’s facilitators. The facilitators themselves were also predominantly white and did not reflect the diversity of those they aimed to support. Ultimately, the local residents did not embrace the library as a part of their community.

The High John Library remains the only attempt made by a library and information science program to run a public library as a central part of its educational and public service mission.

To Learn More: D. Barlow & P. T. Jaeger (Eds.), Celebrating the James Partridge Award: Essays toward the development of a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable field of library and information science (pp. 21-32). London: Emerald.

The School – now the College of Information Studies or the University of Maryland INFO College – is still devoted to efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and justice. The approaches have changed over time, but the goals remain the same. The College now has an undergraduate degree, three Master’s degree programs, and a doctoral program, with diversity and inclusion being strong themes across the College’s degree programs.

In the spring semester of 2013, a Diversity Climate Assessment Survey about the College of Information Studies was made available for a period of six weeks. As part of the College’s ongoing efforts to ensure that diversity and inclusiveness are woven into all aspects of the College environment, the goal of the survey was to better understand how members of the College community perceive the current state of diversity and inclusion. The survey provided the opportunity to get not only a sense of perceptions of diversity and inclusion within the College, but also a detailed picture of the diversity within the members of the College community. Read about the survey results.