Collaborative editing for organizational change: Rewriting the IU Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan together

Abstract

The IUB Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan was originally written and published in Fall 2016 and has served the last few years as a way to gather and report metrics about the library organization, staff, the collections we provide, and the communities we serve in relation to diversity. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Dreasjon Reed in 2020 brought into sharp focus for library staff that what we were doing as an organization was not nearly enough to address systemic racism. As a result, the Libraries Diversity Committee began a collaborative process to understand organization-wide what it means to focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility and how our Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan could move us towards being a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, justice-oriented, and accessible organization and group of people. The focus of this talk will be to share how we organized this work, communicated with each other, and collaboratively worked on a new Diversity Strategic Plan together. This effort is coming from all of us in the Libraries and while it does require persistence, the methods shared here might be helpful to organizations working on improving transparency and encouraging participation.