The Monash University Caulfield Library caters to students in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) through programmes and collections designed to inspire design creativity and support research needs. The collection includes resources that represent Australian art and design theory and practice, including fine press publications, artists’ books and zines. In early 2018, the Caulfield Library staff redeveloped their mission statement to better articulate the focus of the library. The Caulfield Library aims to be a welcoming focal point for the diverse campus community, provide a supportive, equitable, and tailored user experience, and develop and provide quality resources and engaging programmes that strive to meet the needs and expectations of library users.
In order to fulfil the library's mission, library staff have collaborated with Assistant Lecturer Kate McEntee from the Department of Design to analyse and diversify the Caulfield Library design collection. This project is titled: The Equity Collection. The aims of the project are to interrogate the diversity of the current design collection, to improve the ability of the collection to extend and reflect the multicultural nature of the university community, and to promote books authored by under-represented groups including Indigenous people, people of colour, female and non-binary authors. The transformed collection will come together to showcase authorial diversity and inclusivity, aligned with the Caulfield Library Charter and Monash University Inclusive Teaching guidelines.Footnote 1 The collection will be complemented by promotional events and an online tool designed to encourage design lecturers and researchers to broaden the range of resources they use in classrooms and in practice.
Definitions
The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) uses the word ‘inclusive’ in documents such as the Statement on Public Library Services Footnote 2 and ‘diversity’ in the Core Values Statement.Footnote 3 The Core Values Statement requests that library and information services professionals commit themselves to values including ‘respect for the diversity and individuality of all people’.Footnote 4 Similarly, the American Library Association (ALA) lists ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion’ as ‘fundamental values of the association and its members’.Footnote 5 In the context of academic librarianship, Semenza, Koury and Shropshire neatly clarify and define the difference between diversity and inclusion in their exploration of diversity in academic libraries.Footnote 6 They write:
‘Diversity’ is a descriptive term that is widely used in the literature surveyed and throughout higher education to describe conditions that reflect heterogeneity in any number of ways. The term, ‘inclusion’, assumes a similar meaning yet suggests a more active sense of the same concept, bestowing on it a positive value - an all-of-us-together philosophy. Innovation, advocacy and concrete implementation of ideas are all part of what is occurring in libraries throughout the world in support of diversity; thus, it is incredibly important to continue planning, implementing and assessing academic libraries diversity efforts.Footnote 7
In reviewing the literature of librarianship, it appears that inclusive collection development is not often at the heart of research on diversity in libraries. Articles have drawn attention to the importance of recruitment and retention of staff from a variety of backgroundsFootnote 8 and to outreach and access for diverse communities.Footnote 9 A notable exception is the work of Ciszek and Young, who used approaches including investigation of circulation and use statistics, WorldCat collection analysis, comparison to standard bibliographies, focus groups, patron interviews and surveys to assess the collection of a large university library.Footnote 10 In contrast, the Equity Collection project looks at the authorial diversity and inclusivity of a specific sub-set of a collection at a specific time.
Caulfield Library Design Collection background
The design collection is just part of the Art, Design and Architecture collection at Monash University Library, Caulfield Campus. The campus hosts 18,785 students, approximately 2000 of whom are enrolled in MADA.Footnote 11 Other faculties located on site include Business and Economics, Arts, Information Technology and Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. The Caulfield Library was built in 1972 as part of Chisholm Institute, which then became Caulfield Institute of Technology. Art studies and practice have featured prominently on the campus since its inception, and the collection has grown to support the interests of artists and designers over the past forty years. Since renovations were completed in late 2017, the library now provides 4440m2 of space and seating for 750 people. The Caulfield Campus student and staff body is multicultural and gender diverse. Its spaces are new, clean and welcoming. But does the collection welcome and include in the same way?
Project stage 1: Analysis of collection
The Equity Collection project proposed that the current design collection be interrogated to see whether design and design practice texts in the library currently included:
• Authors who identify as indigenous or first peoples
• Authors who identify as women or non-binary
• Authors who identify as being a person of colour
• Authors who come from countries considered the ‘global south’ or ‘peripheral countries’
• Work published in countries considered the ‘global south’ or ‘peripheral countries’
• Work disseminated by smaller scale publishers who may not consider institutional libraries as an audience
• Abstract forms of publishing that are not necessarily recognised by institutionalised knowledge centres
How might we begin to analyse a massive collection comprising physical books, eBooks, artists’ books, ephemera, DVDs, online tutorials and audio-visual material? The library team determined that the current design collection contains four main sub-groups reflective of the different design majors currently taught at the university: Industrial design, communication design, interaction design, and urban planning and design. Some resources may belong to more than one of these groups. Marcus Chester, Librarian aligned to Art, Design and Architecture, took the lead in creating and documenting the queries run in the library management system ALMA (Ex Libris). Dewey Decimal Classifications were used to determine the topic of a particular item. Limitations were needed to in order to retrieve a reasonable dataset. Queries were limited to the library at Caulfield campus, where the majority of design books are located. However, it must be noted that Caulfield is only one of eight campuses, including Peninsula, Parkville, Clayton, Malaysia and South Africa, each with their own libraries, and each (possibly) holding various items related to design. The search was also limited to include only physical items, thereby excluding the extensive online collection. This decision was purposeful, in order to be able to promote and compare alternate books during stage three of the project.
Searches retrieved the following results: From a total 193,311 physical books in the Caulfield library, 52,035 are considered to belong to the Art, Design and Architecture collection. Within this collection, 7460 are part of the current design collection. The subsequent step was to de-duplicate records and remove multiple copies from the results. The records of the remaining physical books were then investigated to determine the identity of the author (or editor, if applicable). The background and location of the author was researched, as well as the publisher of the item and the location of that publisher. This process is of course open to errors, including the possible misattribution of author gender and misidentification of ethnicity. To remedy this, the dataset will be made open access through the Monash University Figshare data repository, so that any errors can be brought to the attention of the project team.
Project stage 2: Sourcing diverse titles
The second stage of this project was to crowd-source items from Design faculty staff and international design experts. This occurred in two rounds over the space of five months. The first request for titles distributed via email on May 28, 2018, explained that the Equity Collection project:
…is seeking to discover resources, not necessarily but possibly published in smaller circulation or outside of the mainstream publishing industry, which you have found helpful in your work/practice. We are reaching out to people we know in the design field to source as wide and diverse resources as possible. Do you have a few thinkers, publishers or writers you could contribute to this collection? This might be a text you love from your personal explorations that informs your design practice, a blogger you follow who writes insightfully but perhaps not ‘academically’ or a text used regularly to teach design outside of Western design schools. You might be familiar with a small local publisher that prominently features work by women or people of colour we could contact to discuss this project. Any and all resources you could send our way would be greatly appreciated.
The second email, sent on August 23, 2018, was more far more successful at generating responses. The second email asked for ‘The top 3 texts that have had the most impact on your work and/or changed the way you think about the world. They do not need to be specifically about design, or academic’. One respondent wrote, ‘What if mine [book recommendations] are all written by white Westerners?’ This is an excellent question, highlighting the need for a project such as the Equity Collection to explore, collect and share more diverse resources. The list of recommended titles will be made accessible during stage three of The Equity Collection project through an online resource and an exhibition.
Project stage 3: Connecting resources and communities
Throughout the process of crowd-sourcing diverse titles, it has become clear that librarians continue to be in an excellent position to put the right book into the right hands. Resources that have been requested by one staff member can be placed on hold for a second staff member with similar interests, leading to expanded conversations between individuals. Collection development continues to provide a starting point in the relationship between librarians and faculty staff. ‘The book is the hook’ that begins conversations about the needs of students, which in turn leads to research and learning skills education and training becoming embedded in the curriculum. The development of research and learning skills then leads to library users uncovering diverse resources provided by the library.
In the Equity Collection project, resources and communities will also be connected on a broader scale. To close the project, an event will showcase new acquisitions in the Caulfield Library and will be replicated as a resource in the online space. Items will be displayed alongside descriptions and recommendations from library staff and design academics to encourage their use in and outside of university classrooms. These items will be set up in opposition to items that have been collected from the current collection, accompanied by a complete set of findings from the collection analysis.
Conclusions
A significant knowledge gap exists in regard to the authorial diversity and inclusivity of knowledge resources in design. Anecdotally, it is recognised across the MADA at Monash University that resources are dominated by work produced in a Eurocentric frame, often by white males. As highlighted by design scholars Akama and Yee:
When we note the names who fundamentally shaped the thinking in design, it starts to indicate circular patterns of theory proposed by a handful of people largely concentrated in Europe and US whose ideas are continually cited to perpetuate its authority and privilege. This reflects the broader phenomenon of the visibility of men and the invisibility of women and ethnicities in design, both in industry and academic texts.Footnote 12
The predominance and use of these resources allow for a perpetuation of colonialism and prejudice that privileges the work and knowledge of dominant groups of people and frames of knowledge, while implicitly devaluing the work and knowledge of under-represented peoples. There is a need to understand how we are unknowingly perpetuating systemic prejudices in our education system. There is a growing conversation in design academia around the need to decolonise design practice and education.Footnote 13 By conducting this research, we aim to make explicit and visualise this anecdotal information in a useful and engaging manner.
The broader goal of the work is not to merely draw attention to a presumed problem within our literature and sources, but to also build a resource to address that problem. The Equity Collection seeks to create a more inclusive and accessible database for researchers and educators alike. We aim to take a critical approach to the design of the collection and carefully consider the accessibility, interaction and modes of dissemination. It is essential that we develop a critical categorisation of work, for example going beyond using a gender binary to identify authors. The collection itself should emphasise and reflect the values of inclusivity, diverse knowledge production and non-traditional forms of dissemination. This project directly supports improving tertiary education and research resources for the design faculty at Monash University, with aims to expand the work's availability to design faculties across Australia and internationally. Follow the project as open data and resources are added to the Monash University Figshare data Repository (monash.figshare.com).
An earlier iteration of this paper, titled “Designed for Diversity: A Collaborative Campaign for Equity in the Monash University Library Collection” was presented at the 2018 Arlis/ANZ Conference: Expanding our reach: Art, research and access (Canberra, ACT, Australia), October 2018.
