"A Canadian Mentorship Program to Sustain Racialized Librarians"

Valentina Ly, University of Ottawa

Racialized librarians face extra barriers because librarianship is predominantly a white workplace. Mentorship has often been identified as a solution for helping racialized librarians overcome these extra obstacles and improve the retention in libraries and contribute to the diversification of the profession. Ideally, mentorship should come from other racialized librarians, as they have experience navigating complicated workplace obstacles such as cultural barriers and dealing with microaggressions. Unfortunately, finding a racialized librarian to provide mentorship can be difficult when they are underrepresented in libraries. A Canadian library network re-established a formal mentorship program in 2018. The mentorship program is unique because it focuses on having racialized librarians across Canada mentor each other. Follow-up surveys from four mentorship sessions were collected between 2018 and 2022 with 81 mentors and 82 mentees responding. The results from the surveys will be presented, which will provide insight on the participants’ experiences regarding communication, their relationship with their partner, the helpfulness of the mentorship, and the importance of racialized mentorship.

"The Importance of EDIA in Canadian Academic Libraries"

Jermal A Jones, University of Waterloo Library    
Cecilia Tellis, University of Ottawa Library

To our knowledge, there are limited roles in Canadian academic libraries whose sole focus is on Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Access (EDIA). While libraries in the U.S. are in a political struggle over EDIA and face efforts to remove books and threaten their operations in Canada we should be keeping a close eye on these challenges. Building a sustainable resistance to these kinds of efforts requires engaged communities and a dedicated role to educate and advocate for social issues such as the environment, race, gender, disability and access to resources. People should be able to go to libraries and find texts that represent their identities and search for information in the archives that do not cause further harm. In the short time in our roles, we would like to highlight the importance of some of the work that we have undertaken and to emphasize a call to action for more Canadian academic libraries to create these types of positions. The realization and theory that has been developed from professional experience in an institutional EDI office, is that having this specialized role better positions the library to hire, retain and diversify its staff, coordinate customized training and resource sharing, and generally support a culture of inclusion more effectively than if these roles were not present. However, this work is not without its challenges, and we would be remiss if these were not mentioned. Participants will hear honest accounts from two EDIA leaders.