Residencies Revisited: Reflections on Library Residency Programs from the Past and Present

Many academic libraries across the country have developed and maintained library diversity residency programs in support of a larger campaign to diversify librarianship as a profession. Library diversity residencies strive to provide early-career librarians of color with the experience and toolkit necessary to pursue a successful lifelong career in academic librarianship.

Beyond the residents themselves, there are various stakeholders involved in every residency program: residency coordinators, library administrators, and the professional organizations that back them. This book provides a space for the perspectives of all types of residency stakeholders to intersect, thereby producing a holistic narrative of library diversity residencies. The intended audience for this narrative is all academic librarians and administrators currently involved or interested in library diversity residency programs or generally interested in diversity initiatives.

On paper, diversity residencies have the potential to do so much good: jump-start someone's career, offer much-needed entry-level employment for recent graduates, and even offer the (false) promise of diversifying a predominantly and problematically white field. This collection will leave everyone asking: who do these programs really help?

Preethi Gorecki is the Communications Librarian at MacEwan University. In 2018, she started her career in librarianship as a Library Faculty Diversity Fellow at Grand Valley State University. Preethi holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests include practices for diversifying librarianship, project and task management tools and techniques for everyday academic librarianship, and student engagement as related to student wellness.

Arielle Petrovich is the College Archivist at Beloit College. She holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a BA in American Studies from Smith College. Her research interests include strategies for diversifying the archival profession, de-mystifying the archives, and fostering historical empathy in the archival classroom.