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VIVA: Member Spotlight EDI: Brightpoint

Virginia's Academic Library Consortium

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Approaches to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: 

Brightpoint Community College

What would you like to share about EDI work done at your library or at your institution?

John Tyler Community College is changing our name! After an extensive 2+ year process, we will be known as Brightpoint Community College starting in the summer of 2022. The decision to change our name from John Tyler will make us a more equitable institution for our students, faculty and staff. More information can be found here.

What are your library and/or institutional plans for future EDI efforts?

Our library was involved with the renaming process on multiple levels, and the library has already started working on find/replacing our college name on library materials. Vendors, barcodes, book stamps, LibGuides, website…this is an extensive process. The library is also in our second year of a diversity audit of our print collections, looking at current titles through a more focused DEI lens. The library established a new DEI eBook collection and team members collaborated on a diversity statement for the library.

The past 18 months have held many challenges and changes. How have you grown and learned to do things better? Were there initiatives that didn’t go as you had planned or things you would do differently in the future?

Our technology initiatives are insanely popular with students, and we have expanded with more laptops, hotspots and calculators over the past 18 months. Text-A-Librarian is also a hit; most of our remote reference questions are asked by students via SMS. Our streaming film festival collaboration was small, but with promising results.

 

Yet even with all of these successes, these pandemic months have felt like running to stand still. Public service numbers are changing. We have an even-more-robust online library to support. The library team is stretched between the digital world and the physical world. What will the library of the future look like? If nothing else, we’ve learned to expect change and to prepare by asking “what’s next?”