William C Welburn

Cultivating Partnerships/Realizing Diversity

Summary Academic librarians should not only seek methods for continuous learning about an increasingly diverse college student body, they are encouraged to pursue partnerships with campus agencies that work directly with students, especially those charged with building a diverse community of students. The authors present two examples to illustrate Strategies-in-action.

Do We Really Need Cultural Diversity in the Library and Information Science Curriculum

I have attempted to create a conceptual framework for the discussion of diversity and the curriculum in library and information science. I have sketched what I believe to be the core elements of a transitional course. More than a trite phrase, cultural diversity has an important role in educating professionals in the 1990s. It is central to understanding the former Yugoslavia, post-Apartheid South Africa, racial formation in Colombia, Brazil, and southern Mexico, Haitian refugees in New York or Florida, diversity within the Hispanic population in the United States, South and Southeast Asian migration to North America, anxiety over hate speech on college campuses, and the resurgence of xenophobia in society at large, As a profession, librarians and other information professionals interact with scholars who are drawn to study such issues affecting these and other cultural groups, retrieve information for policy makers for further analysis and policy formation, and work crossculturally in classrooms and media centers, in libraries and over the Internet to facilitate access. The task for the mediator or provider of information to a multiethnic, multicultural society is to combine the wealth of our understanding about how access is accomplished with a better understanding of the people who need, see, and use information