We know that building and defending inclusive collections is top of mind for many librarians. Join us this fall for two courses that will help give you the tools and skills to diversify your collections and protect intellectual freedom.
Censorship and Banned Books: How to Defend Intellectual Freedom
and How to Build and Defend Inclusive Collections
We know that building and defending inclusive collections is top of mind for many librarians. Join us this fall for two courses that will help give you the tools and skills to diversify your collections and protect intellectual freedom.
Featured Sessions
Censorship and Banned Books: How to Defend Intellectual Freedom
September 27
Session 1 | 12:00-12:45 pm ET
Proactive Resistance: Policies, Procedures, and Protocols
Whether you’re preparing for challenges or you’re already dealing with them, this session will give you the practical tools you need to manage censorship. You will learn innovative policy ideas to reduce and resist censorship in your area, as well as strategies for auditing your current practices to ensure they will adequately defend intellectual freedom in your area. You will leave this session with new ideas for streamlined procedures and protocols that you can establish in your library to help you resist book bans and defend the right to read.
Session 2 | 12:45-1:25 pm ET
Stronger Together: Building Community, Coalitions, and Allies
Defending intellectual freedom can’t be the job of just one person. This session will teach you how to find allies inside and outside of your library or school, build coalitions, and work as a community to combat censorship challenges. You will leave with shared resources and tools for how to connect with others to drive change in your community.
While it’s important to ensure our collections are diverse, what does it mean to ensure they are truly inclusive? In this session, we’ll discuss why moving toward inclusive library collections is a crucial step in advancing equity and justice at our institutions. You’ll learn from an expert how to assess your collections as they are now, and hear what considerations to make when ordering and weeding. We’ll also touch on how to address some of the challenges to materials in your collection and how to advocate for underrepresented voices that must be included.
Week 2 Session 2 | 3:00-3:45 pm ET
Conducting a Diversity Audit of Your Collections and Ordering: Where to Start
In this session, we’ll discuss the process of conducting a diversity audit of both your collections and your ordering. You’ll learn how to plan a diversity audit, which salient data points should be included, how to gather the requisite information, and how to set goals to address gaps. We’ll discuss the step-by-step process for establishing your diversity audit and how to make diversity and inclusion natural and ongoing parts of collection management and promotion.