Cultural humility offers a renewing and transformative framework for navigating interpersonal interactions in libraries, whether between patrons and staff or staff members with one another. It foregrounds a practice of critical self-reflection and commitment to recognizing and redressing structural inequities and problematic power imbalances. This collection, the first book­length treatment of this approach in libraries, gathers contributors from across the field to demonstrate how cultural humility can change the way we work and make lasting impacts on diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries. This book's chapters explore such topics as how Indigenous adages can be tools for reflection and guidance in developing cultural humility the experiences of two Black librarians who are using cultural humility to change the professio; new perspectives on core concepts of customer service rethinking policies and practices in libraries both large and small using cultural humility in approaching collection development and creating resource guides what cultural humility can look like for a tribal librarian working in a tribal college library reflecting on cultural humility itself and where it is going

This accessible and compelling Special Report introduces cultural humility, a lifelong practice that can guide library workers in their day-to-day interactions by helping them recognize and address structural inequities in library services. Cultural humility is emerging as a preferred approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts within librarianship. At a time when library workers are critically examining their professional practices, cultural humility offers a potentially transformative framework of compassionate accountability; it asks us to recognize the limits to our knowledge, reckon with our ongoing fallibility, educate ourselves about the power imbalances in our organizations, and commit to making change. This Special Report introduces the concept and outlines its core tenets. As relevant to those currently studying librarianship as it is to long-time professionals, and applicable across multiple settings including archives and museums, from this book readers will learn why cultural humility offers an ideal approach for navigating the spontaneous interpersonal interactions in libraries, whether between patrons and staff or amongst staff members themselves; understand how it intersects with cultural competence models and critical race theory; see the ways in which cultural humility's awareness of and commitment to challenging inequitable structures of power can act as a powerful catalyst for community engagement; come to recognize how a culturally humble approach supports DEI work by acknowledging the need for mindfulness in day-to-day interactions; reflect upon cultural humility's limitations and the criticisms that some have leveled against it; and take away concrete tools for undertaking and continuing such work with patience and hope.

Provides information literacy practitioners with a thorough exploration of how threshold concepts can be applied to information literacy, identifying important elements and connections between each concept, and relating theory to practical methods that can transform how librarians teach. A model that emerged from the Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments project in Great Britain, threshold concepts are those transformative core ideas and processes in a given discipline that define the ways of thinking and practicing shared by experts. Once a learner grasps a threshold concept, new pathways to understanding and learning are opened up. The authors of this book provide readers with both a substantial introduction to and a working knowledge of this emerging theory and then describe how it can be adapted for local information literacy instruction contexts. Five threshold concepts are presented and covered in depth within the context of how they relate and connect to each other. The chapters offer an in-depth explanation of the threshold concepts model and identify how it relates to various disciplines (and our own discipline, information science) and to the understandings we want our students to acquire. This text will benefit readers in these primary audiences: academic librarians involved with information literacy efforts at their institutions, faculty teaching in higher education, upper-level college administrators involved in academic accreditation, and high school librarians working with college-bound students. Provides an essential, foundational text on the theory behind the new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Supplies librarians with the context to frame the work they do with information literacy in the same manner as faculty Demonstrates how librarians sharing pedagogical approaches with faculty enable more cooperative projects, better faculty-librarian communication, and truly integrated librarian instruction