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The importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the information ecosystem
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The importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the information ecosystem
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Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SUZE: Hello, and welcome to today's NISO Plus session, which is entitled The Importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Information Ecosystem. My name's Suze. I'm head of public engagement at Digital Science, and I'm joined by three incredible speakers today in too many panels. We will have an interactive Q&A after this, so if you have any questions about any of the things our speakers have talked about, write them down.
SUZE: Make sure you save them for the Q&A session, and I'll make sure that they get asked. So we'll hopefully get some amazing answers from them after this. I'm really pleased today to be joined by Rebecca McLeod, who is the managing director of Harvard Data Science Review. I'm also joined by Allen Jones, who is the director of Digital Library and Technical Services and the current chair of Ex Libris Users in North America-- and he's also from the New School in New York City-- and by Judith Fraenkel, who is the director of product management at Ex Libris.
SUZE: We're going to kick off with a talk today from Rebecca, so over to you.
REBECCA MCLEOD: Well, hello, everybody. Oops. Hello, everybody. Again, my name is Rebecca McLeod, and I am the managing director of Harvard Data Science Review. And my role today on the panel is to highlight some cross-organizational groups that have come together in the scholar communications ecosystem to discuss study and address the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So I'm speaking on these different organizations because I, as a member of the board of directors for Society for Scholarly Publishing and NISO, I have kind of like a bird's eye view of what's going on. And I've been in scholarly publishing for decades, so I can say that when I started, pretty much every time I went anywhere for meeting, whatever, I was the only one that looked like me. And I'm very happy to see that some new efforts are being made and that there's some more people who look like me involved in scholarly communications.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So going back a bit about how these initiatives started, I think a number of surveys had come out in recent years around 2016, 2017 that shed light on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. And from issues of gender inequality to the noticeable lack of ethnic diversity in our workforce, there was an increasing awareness that as an industry, we are not a model of inclusivity. Publishing is truly a global enterprise, yet that diversity is not reflected in our collective demographics.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So I'm going to be talking about three cross-organizational initiatives, and I think it's really important to think about, cross-group, our engagement, because one organization can do a lot of work in D&I. But nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to change in an industry unless you have all the organizations, all members of the industry working together.
REBECCA MCLEOD: Of course, it's very difficult and something challenging because different organizations have different cultures, different types of diversity issues, so you have to kind of work through that. So the first one I'm going to talk about just a bit is the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I've been involved in that the most. And back in 2017, a task force was formed. I was one of the co-chairs of the task force, by the way-- and really to address kind of the lack of diversity within scholarly communications.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And we started this task force. There was a lot of discussions since SSP about gender equality, but I thought there should have been other-- we should extend that diversity issues to other types of things. So we start as a task force. We set up objectives that we wanted and goals that we wanted for the group and delivered some recommendations to the board.
REBECCA MCLEOD: Two years later, the board voted on making the D&I task force a standing committee and right now is extremely active and full of engaged individuals who represent SSP membership. And SSP membership covers all facets of scholarly communication, so you have librarians. You have folks who work in nonprofits, commercial presses, and tech partners. And one thing I like about this D&I group is that it's diverse.
REBECCA MCLEOD: There's people from the UK, from India, folks from different ethnic backgrounds, some people with disabilities. And it's truly a place for people to come together and try to come up with ideas for webinars. We bounce ideas about what to do within our own organizations. It's also really a good support network because one thing about D&I work-- it can be very lonely.
REBECCA MCLEOD: If you're a one person or one of a small group of people in your organization to try to advance a conversation, it really is helpful to have some people out there kind of being your cheerleader because it can be exhausting. A second organization is NISO. I just joined the board last year, and at my first board meeting in the fall, we had a directive to create a D&I committee for NISO.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So I'm on that committee, and our first action item was to update NISO's D&I, diversity, inclusion, and equity statement to make it more actionable. So we are working on that. We've done that. We've delivered it to the rest of the board, and the board is going to be reviewing it and voting on it in the spring board meeting. So once we have that, when it's up and going, we'll be sharing that with all the members.
REBECCA MCLEOD: But in the meantime, if you have any questions about it or any ideas about D&I engagement within NISO and our members, please let me know. And the next organization I'm going to talk about is the Coalition for Diversity in Scholarly Communications, or C4DISC. The C4DISC was kind of formed in 2017-- 2017 seemed to be the year between the SSP and then C4DISC-- by a small group of trade and professional associations who came together at the 2017 Scholarly for Society Publishing Meeting.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And it really was then looking at these lack of diversity and inclusion within the scholarly communications ecosystem. So I'm showing you the group of some of the founding members of C4DISC. Whoops. So representatives from 10 founding organizations came together to talk about the shared interest in addressing these challenges and to share information about current initiatives, to tackle the lack of diversity and inclusion within the industry.
REBECCA MCLEOD: We agreed to continue our discussions and collaborate on possible projects, starting with a joint statement of principles. And working collectively, we're able to combine our resources and have a greater impact. Of course, things take longer than you think with multiple organizations, with multiple perspectives, and multiple viewpoints and cultures.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So we've been meeting regularly since 2017, but it really wasn't until this past fall that we did a formal launch. So since that initial meeting, the nine founding members have met regularly to establish a joint statement of principles and define the organization's mission, vision, and values. And over the past year, about year and a half, the C4DISC steering group met with an outside consulting organization to help us develop a governance operational model.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So we launched with that model in September, and two of the founding member organizations, Society for Scholarly Publishing and AUP, Association of University Presses, are serving as the joint host organizations. So my role in C4DISC is through SSP, I'm a member of the steering committee. So this is the overall goal of C4DISC.
REBECCA MCLEOD: I'm not going to read this goal, but to that end of the goal that we're hoping to eliminate barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination. We are aiming to create and maintain an environment that respects diverse traditions and heritage and experiences, and promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, making full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision making.
REBECCA MCLEOD: We're trying to raise awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce, and we're supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations. So in October 2018, we released a joint statement of principles to demonstrate the commitment of participating organizations to promoting involvement, innovation, and expanded access to leadership opportunities that maximize engagement across identity groups and professional levels.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So more than 40 organizations have now adopted the statement of principles. And so we're inviting all scholarly communication organizations to join us in showing support for making our community more diverse, so anybody in the scholarly communications ecosystem can adopt these principles. So from the very beginning of C4DISC, there was a great interest in the community about how people and organizations can get involved and contribute to the valuable work that we're doing.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And there are many several ways that individuals and organizations can participate in making our community more exclusive, equitable, and diverse. So people can join us through their organizations as being a member, or they can be individuals, can volunteer or donate. And of course, just adopting those statements of principles is also very helpful.
REBECCA MCLEOD: If people have ideas about or would like to get involved, I'll have some information at the Q&A. As the founding members of C4DISC, we're proud of the work we've done so far, and we've actually created some working groups that are made up of individuals from either our member organizations but also can be individuals who are not even part of the C4DISC member organizations. Anybody can volunteer as an individual and get involved.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And these are some of the working groups, the communications and outreach doing some market research or have toolkits, looking at training resources and best practices and looking at racial inequities. And of course, we're looking for a time in volunteering, and we do take some donations as well from individuals and organizations.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So any person interested in furthering the work of C4DISC can join, can do work, working group, can donate money, can do anything. We welcome all types of support. So in short, scholarly communications requires creativity and a wide range of skill sets and viewpoints, and the future of scholarly communications would be positively impacted by attracting and retaining a pool of highly talented and creative professionals from diverse backgrounds and with a wide range of skill sets and viewpoints.
REBECCA MCLEOD: To ensure sustainability and growth, our industry must commit to long-term efforts to curb the deeply ingrained patterns of exclusion and inequities in our practices, policies, and frameworks, and this can't be done in siloed individual organizations. It can only be done by organizations collaborating and doing these cross-organizational initiatives that I've just talked about. So thank you for this time, and I'm really looking forward to hear what people have to say.
REBECCA MCLEOD: I want to hear their ideas and get any questions, so thank you again.
SUZE: Thank you so much, Rebecca. That was amazing. I think you're absolutely right. When things are so ingrained, it needs this complete collaborative, really holistic approach in order to really make lasting and meaningful changes that are appropriate to what we need. So I'm sure that our audience have loads of questions already. Make sure that you hold onto them.
SUZE: Make sure that you move over to our Q&A session after our next two speakers where you will get to ask Rebecca all of the questions that you want to. But for now, I'm going to hand over to Allen and Judith for their section of this panel discussion. Thank you.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: Hello, everyone. Thank you, Rebecca. It was very insightful. My name is Judith Fraenkel, and I'm here also presenting together with Allen Jones. So I'll start this presentation, and then Allen will follow up. I'm representing here Ex Libris, and Allen will represent what we call the community. And we will be talking about diversity and inclusion, a journey that started at Ex Libris, of course, that came out of a discussion with our customers and understanding the times and something that we weren't really addressing in a systematic way.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: Our next slide, please. So importantly to say that we started this journey by even very, very, very small steps that probably you think are clear or don't need an explanation, but we actually started in the company talking about what is bias. Even this small discussion in our company was not-- of course, we weren't thinking that we included bias, but we didn't have a conversation about it.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So everything started with, OK, let's decide internally what we talk about when we talk about bias, and we started an internal process of defining the most basic blocks of what is bias, what is diversity, what is equity, what we need to do. One more hit, Allen. Sorry. And of course, we are providing technology.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So after we had a very clear understanding of bias in terms of even the simplest dictionary explanation, we wanted to understand how this was incorporated into our systems, the products that we created. And even this involved a discussion of whether you do have, in our systems-- if you have bias or not.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So we had to go through a process of understanding what is bias in systems, how it exists, and also internally doing some work on, yes, there is bias in the system. And you need to address this, even if it's unconscious bias, even if it's created due to a lack of visibility. And then we decided that we wanted to go to the place where we had more impact.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And many of you know, Ex Libris, for example, has an Alma system. That's one of the products, but we also have discovery systems. And we have systems for research. But we thought that our focus would be discovery because the impact of discovery is not only with the staff. It goes beyond the staff to our students, who are very young students, actually, and it actually changes their lives, that it impacts them.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So I want to stress here that bias in discovery is not only what they find. It is also what they don't find. One of the basic conclusions of our research was that one of the biggest faults that you might find in a system-- it's not exactly what you find but what you don't find. Of course, there are things that you do find that need to be, in some ways, dealt with, but also, the things that you don't find are equally important.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So making the invisible visible became kind of a promoter for us, and we started this journey with a-- let's first look at our discovery. So it's not that we're not looking into other systems, but our main focus became the discovery. And Allen will talk maybe a little bit more about how we address this with the community. Next slide.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And of course, beyond a lot of learning that we launched and some internal trainings that we did in the company and readings that we did, we decided that we had to define an action plan, an anti-bias action plan, which would be actually something proactive and not just reactive.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So the first step we dropped here-- and I want to share with you the steps that we took as a company where, as I mentioned before, just making this all this awareness about bias. And it was a very interesting process. You would see employees talking about it and seeing things differently than what they thought was a very interesting process. Taking action in the sense of, OK, we want to define what it means to take action, so taking action means preventing, detecting, responding, solving, mitigating.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: There is, for example, one thing that we understood, one question, very basic question that we asked ourselves. For example, can we be biased? Can we really be biased? By definition, we're biased in some way. And we decided, yes, it's not that you can be biased, but you can give it more context, so a lot of talk about giving context to things and explaining what they are and also, again, the awareness of when you see something, then you can act accordingly.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: Again, the exploring is part of this very active approach to education. It was very, very important. We even opened up a lot of internal discussions about how you feel. Talk about it. Give us some personal examples of bias. It was very, very interesting. We also decided that we needed emphasis.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: This is easily moving us soon into Allen's part-- is first of all, as I said about making the invisible visible. It doesn't matter how much we work hard on this. We are not seeing the whole thing. We're not seeing, even if we're a global company, by the way. And Allen can tell a lot of stories of how, for example, our Australian customers see things and how the North American customers see things. But one important thing was enabling tools for reporting.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So we created an easy and open system of reporting so that we can get more insight. We decided to work with external consultants as well to get their point of view, and by this I mean people not exactly coming from the library business, because we wanted another view, a different view. And Rebecca, I think it was very helpful for me to hear your part because I think that this effort definitely has to be a joint effort between organizations.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And before the last part, which is the vision, values, and goals, which is very, very, very critical, is the community. So Ex Libris has a very, very big community of customers, very much involved community. And we knew that if we really wanted to make a change, if we really want to make a change, we need to involve the community. We want to hear their voices, and again, we wanted also a very diverse group of customers, not just a one-sided side of customers to help us out.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And this is the story that Allen will tell soon. And the last thing, which is critical in my view, is that this diversity effort, this equity-diversity effort, should be part of the company's vision, values, and goals. If this is not defined as a top-down effort, it will never really, really, happen. So of course, we wanted to have our management team involved as much as possible and back us in terms of all of the efforts that we're doing.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: OK, and this is my last slide for you, just in terms of how we see this in terms of the different areas that we need to touch base on. So I talked a lot about technology, and I would just say that instead of seeing technology is an enemy, we've shifted to seeing technology as a means to achieve more diversity, equity, and inclusion.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: We know there might be bias there, but actually, our approach here is the positive approach now. It's what can we do to make this even better. That's one. Of course, this has to come out of the company, also, so we want to have an employee base that is diverse, that is educated in these topics. And without our community, we wouldn't be able to do this, so we're working very hard with them to see what we don't see.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And now it's Allen's turn.
ALLEN JONES: Hello, everyone. My name is Allen Jones. I'm from the New School in New York City. I'm the director of Digital Library and Technical Services. I also function as the chair of the user community for the Ex Libris Users for North America. Our sister organization, the International Group of Ex Libris Users, represents other areas within the world of basically different institutions that use the common tool set of Ex Libris software.
ALLEN JONES: We have a unique type of relationship with Ex Libris in a couple of different ways, the major one being that we actually have a shared software agreement that we work through with Ex Libris so that different types of enhancements that the community wants-- we actually have an enhancement voting process that will allow us to get community-based features into the software within a 12-month period.
ALLEN JONES: So in that sense, many of the relationships that we have with Ex Libris are quite unique because we have this collaborative development agreement not only to address issues of small software features but also larger initiatives like diversity, inclusion, and equity. And we think in this way that this relationship is quite unique because rather than just thinking about it as an initiative that's kind of outside of the software, we're actually including it as part of the development process.
ALLEN JONES: And so in that sense, it's a bit of a reframing. Rather than thinking about this as something that's kind of outside and extra, this is actually part of the work that we do. The other thing that I wanted to mention, particularly about these two user organizations, is that we're independent from Ex Libris. And so what that basically means is that we're not a part of the company.
ALLEN JONES: We actually are representing our members and representing the different types of issues that are important and relevant to them. So when we talk about the community, we're actually talking about a worldwide network of institutions that span the entire globe. So within North America, we have 1,300 different institutions that represent Canada, the US, Mexico, the Caribbean, and all of their affiliate campuses.
ALLEN JONES: So for example, not only are there the home institutions, but there may be satellite campuses within-- particularly at the New School, we have a Paris campus. So we're representing both campuses and not just a single campus. Similarly, there may be other institutions, such as NYU, for example, that has both an Abu Dhabi as well as a Shanghai campus.
ALLEN JONES: The ELUNA membership covers all of those different campuses. With IGeLU, IGeLU has a similar type of situation. They're an organization that spans the rest of the world. They're actually a conglomeration of different regional and national user groups, and then together, we actually create these product working groups that actually focus specifically on each individual product.
ALLEN JONES: So when Judith and I began talking about what would a diversity, inclusion, and equity initiative look like, it was never separated from the software. It was actually part of the development process of what it was that we were looking at. So from the user organization's point of view, our goals are actually pretty clear. One, we wanted to create this advisory group, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the composition of that advisory group later.
ALLEN JONES: But one of the most important things about this particular group is that all areas of the library were actually represented, not just systems people, not just technical services people who deal with metadata. But we also wanted reference collection strategists, scholarly communications people, as well as access services people from a variety of different types of libraries and different institutions, not just the Harvards or the large places of the world.
ALLEN JONES: But we wanted the community colleges as well. We wanted to expand the diversity of different types of use cases because many of these different types of institutions were actually using the Ex Libris products and portfolios. Second, we wanted to think about the content supply chain, and I mean this when I talk about this as a supply chain from how publishers are actually delivering this information to Ex Libris to be included within their central discovery index.
ALLEN JONES: Already, there's bias there. We also have bias in terms of even the selection of what material we want included in this index. So in some ways, one of the first things we began talking about was a collection development strategy for what should actually be in this index, and that's before we even started talking of talking about relevancy ranking or other types of things that actually affect the software.
ALLEN JONES: So we were trying to address bias even prior to the actual ingestion of the content, thinking about it a bit more globally, and also thinking about it not just from the perspective of diversity terms but also First Nation terms, which I'll get into in a minute. We wanted to think about and discuss features that could potentially mitigate and educate the library staff as well as end users on potentially biased search content.
ALLEN JONES: So for example, one of the examples that I will frequently use is what the DPLA is doing with some of their digitized material around the Civil War. They're actually putting warnings up that there may be potentially offensive material within search results. This may be a model that we actually want to look at when we're talking about potentially touchy subjects.
ALLEN JONES: Another thing that we also wanted to think about was the issue of context. The Vietnam War is not the Vietnam War in Vietnam. It's the American War. And to think about how do you do that in a more personalized way within a global search application is very much an issue of diversity. To think about, what are the labels that we actually call these phenomenons?
ALLEN JONES: From a topic exploration point of view, taking context into account is absolutely key not just from the perspective of where is this particular institution located, but who are our users and what are their research tasks. We wanted to collaborate with Ex Libris very similar to the way that we've been doing with a lot of other features to think about the central article index because that was a central point first.
ALLEN JONES: But then there is also a number of other types of issues in terms of locally cataloged material that we wanted to expand to, but this first phase is really focusing on the central discovery index Finally, we wanted to educate the broad user community and really begin putting together a transparency initiative to talk about how it is that this article index actually worked, making sure that not only people within the working groups understood how the index worked, but actually, the librarians that support this research effort as well as end users.
ALLEN JONES: Finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the First Nation work that's been done by places like Orbis Cascade, University of Windsor, in introducing alternative subject terms to their authority files and what this potentially means for a large article index. One of the first features that we talked about was things like microlanguage support and being able to facet and limit digitized material that was in particular languages, not just having facets for the Roman languages or the Cyrillic languages, but supporting the entire ISO 693 standard.
ALLEN JONES: Finally, I wanted to put up a view of who are the people who are actually in this advisory group. And so as you can see, there are a number of people both from Ex Libris, as well as there are people from Library of Congress. There are people from Queensland in Australia as well as different places within the country, within the United States as well as abroad in Europe and elsewhere.
ALLEN JONES: So we were getting people from JSC. We were getting people from CUNY. We were getting people from community college like the Monterey Peninsula College or Megan Kinney from the City College of San Francisco. Many of these people are not necessarily from the large research universities, but they're dealing with many of the same types of diversity issues, one of the biggest ones being, how do we actually search for material that's authored by African-American authors?
ALLEN JONES: How do you do that in a search application? So we were trying to take people from a collection development point of view as well as a reference point of view to understand the research tasks that would actually be presented to this index in order to represent and think about the diversity problem. So we really are trying to take a multi-tier approach to this, both from the perspective of the end user as well as the librarians that use it.
ALLEN JONES: But more importantly, we're hoping that this can actually plug back into places like authorized taxonomies within Library of Congress or other types of publisher metadata and how publishers are actually talking about the articles that they publish. So the goals of the group are really to begin to understand and then lay out these features and build a more broader understanding of what's going on under the hood.
ALLEN JONES: So I hope that you have questions. I certainly love to talk about this issue. So if this is something that you're interested in, you can either reach out to myself through the ELUNA Steering Committee. You can also reach out to Judith or Dave Allen, who is my International Group of Ex Libris Users colleague. So with that, I say thank you.
ALLEN JONES:
SUZE: And thank you, Allen and Judith, as well. Honestly, both of you have such incredible presentations, and I think alongside what Rebecca's talked about as well, the ways that you're working with different, more representative communities is absolutely key to this. And I think the common theme that you all had running through your talks is the fact that everyone should get involved. Everyone should try and do their bit, contribute what they can, and the perspective from their particular groups.
SUZE: I have a whole bunch of questions for all of you, and I'm sure that I could probably spend another hour chatting to you all. But it's not my time. I've got to represent everyone else. So we are now going to wrap up this session, and we're going to see everybody else over at the Q&A where you will get to ask all of your questions. And I will do them as much justice as I possibly can in terms of getting the best answers out of our incredible panel.
SUZE: So I just want to say thank you very much to Rebecca. Thank you very much, Judith, and thank you so much, Allen, as well. We'll see you over at the Q&A. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SUZE: Hello, and welcome to today's NISO Plus session, which is entitled The Importance of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Information Ecosystem. My name's Suze. I'm head of public engagement at Digital Science, and I'm joined by three incredible speakers today in too many panels. We will have an interactive Q&A after this, so if you have any questions about any of the things our speakers have talked about, write them down.
SUZE: Make sure you save them for the Q&A session, and I'll make sure that they get asked. So we'll hopefully get some amazing answers from them after this. I'm really pleased today to be joined by Rebecca McLeod, who is the managing director of Harvard Data Science Review. I'm also joined by Allen Jones, who is the director of Digital Library and Technical Services and the current chair of Ex Libris Users in North America-- and he's also from the New School in New York City-- and by Judith Fraenkel, who is the director of product management at Ex Libris.
SUZE: We're going to kick off with a talk today from Rebecca, so over to you.
REBECCA MCLEOD: Well, hello, everybody. Oops. Hello, everybody. Again, my name is Rebecca McLeod, and I am the managing director of Harvard Data Science Review. And my role today on the panel is to highlight some cross-organizational groups that have come together in the scholar communications ecosystem to discuss study and address the topic of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the industry.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So I'm speaking on these different organizations because I, as a member of the board of directors for Society for Scholarly Publishing and NISO, I have kind of like a bird's eye view of what's going on. And I've been in scholarly publishing for decades, so I can say that when I started, pretty much every time I went anywhere for meeting, whatever, I was the only one that looked like me. And I'm very happy to see that some new efforts are being made and that there's some more people who look like me involved in scholarly communications.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So going back a bit about how these initiatives started, I think a number of surveys had come out in recent years around 2016, 2017 that shed light on the lack of diversity in scholarly communications. And from issues of gender inequality to the noticeable lack of ethnic diversity in our workforce, there was an increasing awareness that as an industry, we are not a model of inclusivity. Publishing is truly a global enterprise, yet that diversity is not reflected in our collective demographics.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So I'm going to be talking about three cross-organizational initiatives, and I think it's really important to think about, cross-group, our engagement, because one organization can do a lot of work in D&I. But nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to change in an industry unless you have all the organizations, all members of the industry working together.
REBECCA MCLEOD: Of course, it's very difficult and something challenging because different organizations have different cultures, different types of diversity issues, so you have to kind of work through that. So the first one I'm going to talk about just a bit is the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I've been involved in that the most. And back in 2017, a task force was formed. I was one of the co-chairs of the task force, by the way-- and really to address kind of the lack of diversity within scholarly communications.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And we started this task force. There was a lot of discussions since SSP about gender equality, but I thought there should have been other-- we should extend that diversity issues to other types of things. So we start as a task force. We set up objectives that we wanted and goals that we wanted for the group and delivered some recommendations to the board.
REBECCA MCLEOD: Two years later, the board voted on making the D&I task force a standing committee and right now is extremely active and full of engaged individuals who represent SSP membership. And SSP membership covers all facets of scholarly communication, so you have librarians. You have folks who work in nonprofits, commercial presses, and tech partners. And one thing I like about this D&I group is that it's diverse.
REBECCA MCLEOD: There's people from the UK, from India, folks from different ethnic backgrounds, some people with disabilities. And it's truly a place for people to come together and try to come up with ideas for webinars. We bounce ideas about what to do within our own organizations. It's also really a good support network because one thing about D&I work-- it can be very lonely.
REBECCA MCLEOD: If you're a one person or one of a small group of people in your organization to try to advance a conversation, it really is helpful to have some people out there kind of being your cheerleader because it can be exhausting. A second organization is NISO. I just joined the board last year, and at my first board meeting in the fall, we had a directive to create a D&I committee for NISO.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So I'm on that committee, and our first action item was to update NISO's D&I, diversity, inclusion, and equity statement to make it more actionable. So we are working on that. We've done that. We've delivered it to the rest of the board, and the board is going to be reviewing it and voting on it in the spring board meeting. So once we have that, when it's up and going, we'll be sharing that with all the members.
REBECCA MCLEOD: But in the meantime, if you have any questions about it or any ideas about D&I engagement within NISO and our members, please let me know. And the next organization I'm going to talk about is the Coalition for Diversity in Scholarly Communications, or C4DISC. The C4DISC was kind of formed in 2017-- 2017 seemed to be the year between the SSP and then C4DISC-- by a small group of trade and professional associations who came together at the 2017 Scholarly for Society Publishing Meeting.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And it really was then looking at these lack of diversity and inclusion within the scholarly communications ecosystem. So I'm showing you the group of some of the founding members of C4DISC. Whoops. So representatives from 10 founding organizations came together to talk about the shared interest in addressing these challenges and to share information about current initiatives, to tackle the lack of diversity and inclusion within the industry.
REBECCA MCLEOD: We agreed to continue our discussions and collaborate on possible projects, starting with a joint statement of principles. And working collectively, we're able to combine our resources and have a greater impact. Of course, things take longer than you think with multiple organizations, with multiple perspectives, and multiple viewpoints and cultures.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So we've been meeting regularly since 2017, but it really wasn't until this past fall that we did a formal launch. So since that initial meeting, the nine founding members have met regularly to establish a joint statement of principles and define the organization's mission, vision, and values. And over the past year, about year and a half, the C4DISC steering group met with an outside consulting organization to help us develop a governance operational model.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So we launched with that model in September, and two of the founding member organizations, Society for Scholarly Publishing and AUP, Association of University Presses, are serving as the joint host organizations. So my role in C4DISC is through SSP, I'm a member of the steering committee. So this is the overall goal of C4DISC.
REBECCA MCLEOD: I'm not going to read this goal, but to that end of the goal that we're hoping to eliminate barriers to participation, extending equitable opportunities across all stakeholders, and ensuring that our practices and policies promote equitable treatment and do not allow, condone, or result in discrimination. We are aiming to create and maintain an environment that respects diverse traditions and heritage and experiences, and promoting diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, making full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision making.
REBECCA MCLEOD: We're trying to raise awareness about career opportunities in our industries to groups who are currently underrepresented in the workforce, and we're supporting our members in achieving diversity and inclusion within their organizations. So in October 2018, we released a joint statement of principles to demonstrate the commitment of participating organizations to promoting involvement, innovation, and expanded access to leadership opportunities that maximize engagement across identity groups and professional levels.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So more than 40 organizations have now adopted the statement of principles. And so we're inviting all scholarly communication organizations to join us in showing support for making our community more diverse, so anybody in the scholarly communications ecosystem can adopt these principles. So from the very beginning of C4DISC, there was a great interest in the community about how people and organizations can get involved and contribute to the valuable work that we're doing.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And there are many several ways that individuals and organizations can participate in making our community more exclusive, equitable, and diverse. So people can join us through their organizations as being a member, or they can be individuals, can volunteer or donate. And of course, just adopting those statements of principles is also very helpful.
REBECCA MCLEOD: If people have ideas about or would like to get involved, I'll have some information at the Q&A. As the founding members of C4DISC, we're proud of the work we've done so far, and we've actually created some working groups that are made up of individuals from either our member organizations but also can be individuals who are not even part of the C4DISC member organizations. Anybody can volunteer as an individual and get involved.
REBECCA MCLEOD: And these are some of the working groups, the communications and outreach doing some market research or have toolkits, looking at training resources and best practices and looking at racial inequities. And of course, we're looking for a time in volunteering, and we do take some donations as well from individuals and organizations.
REBECCA MCLEOD: So any person interested in furthering the work of C4DISC can join, can do work, working group, can donate money, can do anything. We welcome all types of support. So in short, scholarly communications requires creativity and a wide range of skill sets and viewpoints, and the future of scholarly communications would be positively impacted by attracting and retaining a pool of highly talented and creative professionals from diverse backgrounds and with a wide range of skill sets and viewpoints.
REBECCA MCLEOD: To ensure sustainability and growth, our industry must commit to long-term efforts to curb the deeply ingrained patterns of exclusion and inequities in our practices, policies, and frameworks, and this can't be done in siloed individual organizations. It can only be done by organizations collaborating and doing these cross-organizational initiatives that I've just talked about. So thank you for this time, and I'm really looking forward to hear what people have to say.
REBECCA MCLEOD: I want to hear their ideas and get any questions, so thank you again.
SUZE: Thank you so much, Rebecca. That was amazing. I think you're absolutely right. When things are so ingrained, it needs this complete collaborative, really holistic approach in order to really make lasting and meaningful changes that are appropriate to what we need. So I'm sure that our audience have loads of questions already. Make sure that you hold onto them.
SUZE: Make sure that you move over to our Q&A session after our next two speakers where you will get to ask Rebecca all of the questions that you want to. But for now, I'm going to hand over to Allen and Judith for their section of this panel discussion. Thank you.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: Hello, everyone. Thank you, Rebecca. It was very insightful. My name is Judith Fraenkel, and I'm here also presenting together with Allen Jones. So I'll start this presentation, and then Allen will follow up. I'm representing here Ex Libris, and Allen will represent what we call the community. And we will be talking about diversity and inclusion, a journey that started at Ex Libris, of course, that came out of a discussion with our customers and understanding the times and something that we weren't really addressing in a systematic way.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: Our next slide, please. So importantly to say that we started this journey by even very, very, very small steps that probably you think are clear or don't need an explanation, but we actually started in the company talking about what is bias. Even this small discussion in our company was not-- of course, we weren't thinking that we included bias, but we didn't have a conversation about it.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So everything started with, OK, let's decide internally what we talk about when we talk about bias, and we started an internal process of defining the most basic blocks of what is bias, what is diversity, what is equity, what we need to do. One more hit, Allen. Sorry. And of course, we are providing technology.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So after we had a very clear understanding of bias in terms of even the simplest dictionary explanation, we wanted to understand how this was incorporated into our systems, the products that we created. And even this involved a discussion of whether you do have, in our systems-- if you have bias or not.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So we had to go through a process of understanding what is bias in systems, how it exists, and also internally doing some work on, yes, there is bias in the system. And you need to address this, even if it's unconscious bias, even if it's created due to a lack of visibility. And then we decided that we wanted to go to the place where we had more impact.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And many of you know, Ex Libris, for example, has an Alma system. That's one of the products, but we also have discovery systems. And we have systems for research. But we thought that our focus would be discovery because the impact of discovery is not only with the staff. It goes beyond the staff to our students, who are very young students, actually, and it actually changes their lives, that it impacts them.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So I want to stress here that bias in discovery is not only what they find. It is also what they don't find. One of the basic conclusions of our research was that one of the biggest faults that you might find in a system-- it's not exactly what you find but what you don't find. Of course, there are things that you do find that need to be, in some ways, dealt with, but also, the things that you don't find are equally important.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So making the invisible visible became kind of a promoter for us, and we started this journey with a-- let's first look at our discovery. So it's not that we're not looking into other systems, but our main focus became the discovery. And Allen will talk maybe a little bit more about how we address this with the community. Next slide.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And of course, beyond a lot of learning that we launched and some internal trainings that we did in the company and readings that we did, we decided that we had to define an action plan, an anti-bias action plan, which would be actually something proactive and not just reactive.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So the first step we dropped here-- and I want to share with you the steps that we took as a company where, as I mentioned before, just making this all this awareness about bias. And it was a very interesting process. You would see employees talking about it and seeing things differently than what they thought was a very interesting process. Taking action in the sense of, OK, we want to define what it means to take action, so taking action means preventing, detecting, responding, solving, mitigating.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: There is, for example, one thing that we understood, one question, very basic question that we asked ourselves. For example, can we be biased? Can we really be biased? By definition, we're biased in some way. And we decided, yes, it's not that you can be biased, but you can give it more context, so a lot of talk about giving context to things and explaining what they are and also, again, the awareness of when you see something, then you can act accordingly.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: Again, the exploring is part of this very active approach to education. It was very, very important. We even opened up a lot of internal discussions about how you feel. Talk about it. Give us some personal examples of bias. It was very, very interesting. We also decided that we needed emphasis.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: This is easily moving us soon into Allen's part-- is first of all, as I said about making the invisible visible. It doesn't matter how much we work hard on this. We are not seeing the whole thing. We're not seeing, even if we're a global company, by the way. And Allen can tell a lot of stories of how, for example, our Australian customers see things and how the North American customers see things. But one important thing was enabling tools for reporting.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: So we created an easy and open system of reporting so that we can get more insight. We decided to work with external consultants as well to get their point of view, and by this I mean people not exactly coming from the library business, because we wanted another view, a different view. And Rebecca, I think it was very helpful for me to hear your part because I think that this effort definitely has to be a joint effort between organizations.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And before the last part, which is the vision, values, and goals, which is very, very, very critical, is the community. So Ex Libris has a very, very big community of customers, very much involved community. And we knew that if we really wanted to make a change, if we really want to make a change, we need to involve the community. We want to hear their voices, and again, we wanted also a very diverse group of customers, not just a one-sided side of customers to help us out.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And this is the story that Allen will tell soon. And the last thing, which is critical in my view, is that this diversity effort, this equity-diversity effort, should be part of the company's vision, values, and goals. If this is not defined as a top-down effort, it will never really, really, happen. So of course, we wanted to have our management team involved as much as possible and back us in terms of all of the efforts that we're doing.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: OK, and this is my last slide for you, just in terms of how we see this in terms of the different areas that we need to touch base on. So I talked a lot about technology, and I would just say that instead of seeing technology is an enemy, we've shifted to seeing technology as a means to achieve more diversity, equity, and inclusion.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: We know there might be bias there, but actually, our approach here is the positive approach now. It's what can we do to make this even better. That's one. Of course, this has to come out of the company, also, so we want to have an employee base that is diverse, that is educated in these topics. And without our community, we wouldn't be able to do this, so we're working very hard with them to see what we don't see.
JUDITH FRAENKEL: And now it's Allen's turn.
ALLEN JONES: Hello, everyone. My name is Allen Jones. I'm from the New School in New York City. I'm the director of Digital Library and Technical Services. I also function as the chair of the user community for the Ex Libris Users for North America. Our sister organization, the International Group of Ex Libris Users, represents other areas within the world of basically different institutions that use the common tool set of Ex Libris software.
ALLEN JONES: We have a unique type of relationship with Ex Libris in a couple of different ways, the major one being that we actually have a shared software agreement that we work through with Ex Libris so that different types of enhancements that the community wants-- we actually have an enhancement voting process that will allow us to get community-based features into the software within a 12-month period.
ALLEN JONES: So in that sense, many of the relationships that we have with Ex Libris are quite unique because we have this collaborative development agreement not only to address issues of small software features but also larger initiatives like diversity, inclusion, and equity. And we think in this way that this relationship is quite unique because rather than just thinking about it as an initiative that's kind of outside of the software, we're actually including it as part of the development process.
ALLEN JONES: And so in that sense, it's a bit of a reframing. Rather than thinking about this as something that's kind of outside and extra, this is actually part of the work that we do. The other thing that I wanted to mention, particularly about these two user organizations, is that we're independent from Ex Libris. And so what that basically means is that we're not a part of the company.
ALLEN JONES: We actually are representing our members and representing the different types of issues that are important and relevant to them. So when we talk about the community, we're actually talking about a worldwide network of institutions that span the entire globe. So within North America, we have 1,300 different institutions that represent Canada, the US, Mexico, the Caribbean, and all of their affiliate campuses.
ALLEN JONES: So for example, not only are there the home institutions, but there may be satellite campuses within-- particularly at the New School, we have a Paris campus. So we're representing both campuses and not just a single campus. Similarly, there may be other institutions, such as NYU, for example, that has both an Abu Dhabi as well as a Shanghai campus.
ALLEN JONES: The ELUNA membership covers all of those different campuses. With IGeLU, IGeLU has a similar type of situation. They're an organization that spans the rest of the world. They're actually a conglomeration of different regional and national user groups, and then together, we actually create these product working groups that actually focus specifically on each individual product.
ALLEN JONES: So when Judith and I began talking about what would a diversity, inclusion, and equity initiative look like, it was never separated from the software. It was actually part of the development process of what it was that we were looking at. So from the user organization's point of view, our goals are actually pretty clear. One, we wanted to create this advisory group, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the composition of that advisory group later.
ALLEN JONES: But one of the most important things about this particular group is that all areas of the library were actually represented, not just systems people, not just technical services people who deal with metadata. But we also wanted reference collection strategists, scholarly communications people, as well as access services people from a variety of different types of libraries and different institutions, not just the Harvards or the large places of the world.
ALLEN JONES: But we wanted the community colleges as well. We wanted to expand the diversity of different types of use cases because many of these different types of institutions were actually using the Ex Libris products and portfolios. Second, we wanted to think about the content supply chain, and I mean this when I talk about this as a supply chain from how publishers are actually delivering this information to Ex Libris to be included within their central discovery index.
ALLEN JONES: Already, there's bias there. We also have bias in terms of even the selection of what material we want included in this index. So in some ways, one of the first things we began talking about was a collection development strategy for what should actually be in this index, and that's before we even started talking of talking about relevancy ranking or other types of things that actually affect the software.
ALLEN JONES: So we were trying to address bias even prior to the actual ingestion of the content, thinking about it a bit more globally, and also thinking about it not just from the perspective of diversity terms but also First Nation terms, which I'll get into in a minute. We wanted to think about and discuss features that could potentially mitigate and educate the library staff as well as end users on potentially biased search content.
ALLEN JONES: So for example, one of the examples that I will frequently use is what the DPLA is doing with some of their digitized material around the Civil War. They're actually putting warnings up that there may be potentially offensive material within search results. This may be a model that we actually want to look at when we're talking about potentially touchy subjects.
ALLEN JONES: Another thing that we also wanted to think about was the issue of context. The Vietnam War is not the Vietnam War in Vietnam. It's the American War. And to think about how do you do that in a more personalized way within a global search application is very much an issue of diversity. To think about, what are the labels that we actually call these phenomenons?
ALLEN JONES: From a topic exploration point of view, taking context into account is absolutely key not just from the perspective of where is this particular institution located, but who are our users and what are their research tasks. We wanted to collaborate with Ex Libris very similar to the way that we've been doing with a lot of other features to think about the central article index because that was a central point first.
ALLEN JONES: But then there is also a number of other types of issues in terms of locally cataloged material that we wanted to expand to, but this first phase is really focusing on the central discovery index Finally, we wanted to educate the broad user community and really begin putting together a transparency initiative to talk about how it is that this article index actually worked, making sure that not only people within the working groups understood how the index worked, but actually, the librarians that support this research effort as well as end users.
ALLEN JONES: Finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the First Nation work that's been done by places like Orbis Cascade, University of Windsor, in introducing alternative subject terms to their authority files and what this potentially means for a large article index. One of the first features that we talked about was things like microlanguage support and being able to facet and limit digitized material that was in particular languages, not just having facets for the Roman languages or the Cyrillic languages, but supporting the entire ISO 693 standard.
ALLEN JONES: Finally, I wanted to put up a view of who are the people who are actually in this advisory group. And so as you can see, there are a number of people both from Ex Libris, as well as there are people from Library of Congress. There are people from Queensland in Australia as well as different places within the country, within the United States as well as abroad in Europe and elsewhere.
ALLEN JONES: So we were getting people from JSC. We were getting people from CUNY. We were getting people from community college like the Monterey Peninsula College or Megan Kinney from the City College of San Francisco. Many of these people are not necessarily from the large research universities, but they're dealing with many of the same types of diversity issues, one of the biggest ones being, how do we actually search for material that's authored by African-American authors?
ALLEN JONES: How do you do that in a search application? So we were trying to take people from a collection development point of view as well as a reference point of view to understand the research tasks that would actually be presented to this index in order to represent and think about the diversity problem. So we really are trying to take a multi-tier approach to this, both from the perspective of the end user as well as the librarians that use it.
ALLEN JONES: But more importantly, we're hoping that this can actually plug back into places like authorized taxonomies within Library of Congress or other types of publisher metadata and how publishers are actually talking about the articles that they publish. So the goals of the group are really to begin to understand and then lay out these features and build a more broader understanding of what's going on under the hood.
ALLEN JONES: So I hope that you have questions. I certainly love to talk about this issue. So if this is something that you're interested in, you can either reach out to myself through the ELUNA Steering Committee. You can also reach out to Judith or Dave Allen, who is my International Group of Ex Libris Users colleague. So with that, I say thank you.
ALLEN JONES:
SUZE: And thank you, Allen and Judith, as well. Honestly, both of you have such incredible presentations, and I think alongside what Rebecca's talked about as well, the ways that you're working with different, more representative communities is absolutely key to this. And I think the common theme that you all had running through your talks is the fact that everyone should get involved. Everyone should try and do their bit, contribute what they can, and the perspective from their particular groups.
SUZE: I have a whole bunch of questions for all of you, and I'm sure that I could probably spend another hour chatting to you all. But it's not my time. I've got to represent everyone else. So we are now going to wrap up this session, and we're going to see everybody else over at the Q&A where you will get to ask all of your questions. And I will do them as much justice as I possibly can in terms of getting the best answers out of our incredible panel.
SUZE: So I just want to say thank you very much to Rebecca. Thank you very much, Judith, and thank you so much, Allen, as well. We'll see you over at the Q&A. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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