UC Libraries Forum 2021: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

In the wake of a series of events, including the death of George Floyd last summer, the entire country yet again, started to discuss the challenges of racial justice in our communities. In response to this ongoing conversation was the decision by the UC Berkeley Library leadership to formally create a taskforce to look into the issue of racial justice in our Library environment, services and practices. The Task Force on Racial Justice is composed of 13 members of the UC Berkeley Library community, representing a wide range of departments, and inclusive of staff, librarians and a faculty member.

The task force convenes this panel as an opportunity to share insights into the process, challenges and opportunities inherent in doing this sort of work in a Library organizational structure. We will provide staff and librarians to discuss the issues we identified in our work; the challenges we faced and the strategies we used in narrowing our focus with such a large and complicated topic. Given the novelty of returning to campus in-person and rebooting Library services, we will also discuss the impacts of general overcommitment to projects and the additional emotional labor of working on this sort of reform work amidst other competing obligations. We hope sharing our experiences can be educational to our fellow UC colleagues, and recommendations will inspire others to adopt similar approaches and continue the advance of racial justice work in their own communities; and/or partner with parallel efforts across campuses, and throughout the UC System.