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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity Commitments: Plan of Action

Current Actions

Collections

  • Develop/roll out website to document impact of 2020 on lives of persons in Greater New Haven area
  • Document activities of Grant Hagan Society, student org, to support people of color in Yale School of Music
  • Contact Dwight Hall to document student work with New Haven organizations 
  • Document how Yale student organizations are responding to national protests
  • Enhance, correct, and highlight description about our collection material
    • Provide leadership to the Yale Reparative Archival Description (RAD) project

Services

  • University Archivist and Chief Research Archivist serve on Yale University working group investigating Yale’s entanglement with slavery and connections to the abolition movement.

Spaces

  • Conduct audit of physical and virtual spaces to ensure they are inclusive, accessible, and welcoming

Workplace

  • Request that diversity competency language be included in all position focus statements or job descriptions so that the importance of inclusivity can be discussed with potential candidates (MSSA recommendation has been passed on to Central HR and is being addressed at the University level)  
  • Develop internal MSSA group to focus on workplace culture  
    • Develop departmental code of conduct to align with YUL community values and MSSA efforts to address bias in collections, services, spaces, and workplace
    • Develop departmental procedures for addressing microaggressions or inappropriate language/behaviors 
  • Update MSSA’s About page including mission statement, history, and collecting emphases

Future Actions

Collections

  • Enhance, correct, and highlight description about our collection material
    • Provide more subject terms for student papers with focus on under-documented populations in New Haven and at Yale, to enhance their discovery and use.
    • Create a Libguide on our holdings related to minority populations in New Haven and at Yale. Include language about silences and perspectives in MSSA’s collections 
    • Create a workflow for staff members to contribute citations and flag MSSA materials/collections documenting under-documented populations in New Haven and at Yale.
    • Create a workflow for staff members to suggest revisions to collection descriptions to make those descriptions more inclusive, accurate, and useful to researchers (pending guidance from RAD)
  • Pursue collaborative projects to surface primary sources/collections related to marginalized populations (Grad School placement of grad students in semester projects within the Library; participating in non-MSSA driven projects)

Services

  • Develop/provide guidance and parameters for archiving student projects, individual or teams, documenting New Haven and Yale history, and what we can do to assist