Stop Talking, Start Doing!: Attracting People of Color to the Library Profession

By Gregory L. Reese and Ernestine L Hawkins

A practical guide to finding, nurturing, and retaining a diversified workforce for libraries that reflects and attracts the communities they serve. The authors offer marketing strategies geared to the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0838907628
• ISBN13: 9780838907627
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: American Library Association
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A readable presentation and useful work.

With a great deal of documentation, the authors describe the changing demographics of the labor force, higher education population , library environs , and library users. However, library professionals are lagging this seachange . The library profession itself does not reflect this. Why? Stop Talking Start Doing looks at the Why ? and makes its case with an effective mix of data and scenarios from library professionals at varied levels . The authors include a number of revealing anecdotes which illuminate what should be changes/additions in who, what, how and where libraries deliver their services.Many ideas and issues (closing libraries in urban cities ) are old hat and have been argued against in earlier times ; in isolated situations before diversity or multiculturalism was hip. For instance ,a proposal for investigating library services to nontraditional library users and libraries in an urban area as a doctoral project circa 1980 was not encouraged . In fact the proposal was blown off - dismissed - with a couple of lame reasons . However , with the twenty first century just around the corner it may be possible that those who are interested or concerned about a more diverse library profession in the new century will read this most readable seminal work. Diverse library professionals can create and deliver information, information services, and information technologies more effectively to a diverse population . Another outcome of the reading of the work may be that more library professionals are motivated to change their attitudes and assumptions or at the very least have their awareness level raised. One of the best things about the book is its descriptions of diverse participants practices, activities, responses and counter responses where the diverse voices and stances emerge and perhaps can be honestly examined in an effort to work together for future resolutions . Mixing statistics, interviews, and commentary, the authors discuss the under representation of minority information professionals which unacknowledged and not addressed will continue to effect unfavorably the number of practicing minority information specialists and their sensitivity ( to services, collections, communications, etc.) for minority information users .