Addressing the red state challenge

We learned something interesting at the Texas Library Association conference, where we had a booth staffed by one of our instructors, who is Texan and a DEI specialist.

A barrier that some people face who want to sign up for our classes, especially in states that are hostile to DEI and skeptical of the library community, is fear of being monitored and suspected of being “woke.” This is a real thing in environments that have become hostile to library values. So we want to take some steps to address this.

One key thing is to allow for anonymous enrollment. You will still need to give us a unique, personal email address, but you can enroll using any pseudonym that you want, and you don’t have to use your work address.

Another thing we will do is allow you to specify what information we can share with your employer about your enrollment and participation if asked. By default, we keep your forum contributions and other information private.

We would also like to ask for your help regarding messaging that your employer can use to justify paying for our classes, in cases where the expense might be challenged. What are the pain points or things that we need to clarify and emphasize? What is the best format for sharing this information and making it usable?

We realize that for some customers this may seem like an odd set of concerns, especially for those coming from academic libraries. Many of our customers, though, are public librarians in red states and rural communities, and we are finding that these issues are very real. We want to reach out and support librarians in these environments as much as we can, and we welcome your suggestions.