$1 Million Grant to Help Bring Diversity to Library Professionals

Hope Olson (left) and Hur-Li Lee

Photo by Rebecca Hall

MILWAUKEE – A collaboration involving local universities and libraries has received a federal grant of nearly $1 million to recruit and educate students of diverse backgrounds as information professionals in cataloging, indexing, metadata and other related fields.

The School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) will have primary responsibility for the project, which will also involve the Marquette University Libraries, the Milwaukee Public Library and the UWM Libraries.

In addition to the $991,246 grant from the U.S. government’s Institute for Museum and Library Services, the partner institutions will contribute $232,000 to the Diversity in the Organization of Information and Its Technology (DOIT) project. The money will be used to recruit students for the MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science) program, provide them with scholarships, paid internships, computers and travel to professional conferences and other gatherings.

“Having librarians of diverse backgrounds helps the profession better serve a diverse population,” says Hope A. Olson, professor in UWM’s School of Information Studies and principal investigator for the project. She and Hur-Li Lee, associate professor of information studies, will lead the project, which is part of the government’s “Librarians for the 21st Century” initiative. Other partner members include Bruce Gay of the Milwaukee Public Library, Jean Zanoni of the Marquette University Libraries, and Steve Miller and Michelle Harrell Washington of the UWM Libraries.

The library profession in the U.S. has a strong commitment to bringing more people from underrepresented populations into the field, says Olson. This is important for a number of reasons, she adds. Library visitors of different cultural backgrounds may be more comfortable with services offered by library staff who also reflect diverse cultures. And having librarians of diverse backgrounds brings different views and perspectives to libraries and the information sharing profession. Libraries need to “reflect the overall culture, not just part of it,” says Olson.

She points out that, although the U.S. population is growing increasingly diverse, Association for Library and Information Science Education statistics show that in 2002, African Americans made up only 4.2 percent of those receiving the master’s in library science, Hispanic graduates made up 3 percent, Asian American/Pacific Islanders 2.4 percent and American Indians only .4 percent.

Milwaukee is a good place to recruit a diverse student body into the field, says Olson, because of its substantial population of African Americans, Hispanics, Hmong and American Indians. The project also will seek out students from other groups who are underrepresented in the profession, she notes.

UWM’s distance education master’s program, which allows students to complete the MLIS via the Internet, will be a key factor in recruiting potential students from elsewhere in Wisconsin, the upper Midwest and throughout the country, says Olson. The UWM program includes a strong focus on the area of information organization -- the process of organizing recorded information according to standards to make it retrievable. These skills, which first developed in libraries and information science, are increasingly important in other fields in today’s knowledge-based economy, Olson notes.

Funding will begin in December 2005, but UWM and the partners are already looking at ways to get the word out about the program, which will support the education of 20 MLIS students. A cohort of 10 on-campus students will begin the program in the fall of 2006, and the 10 distance education students will start in the spring of 2007. Each student in the program will be paired with a staff/faculty mentor from UWM’s School of Information Studies and a professional mentor from one of the three library partners. Distance Education students may be paired with a librarian near their home. During their last two semesters, students will undertake paid internships at the participating libraries or libraries in their vicinity. These internships and a trip to the 2007 American Library Association national convention will help orient the new librarians to the profession, says Olson. The project includes an evaluation phase, which will summarize what works and doesn’t in the recruiting and education process.

“One lasting result we hope to achieve with this project is integrating diversity into the curriculum for information organization," she adds. "That also will benefit MLIS students in the future, both here and at other institutions.”

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