Toward Engaged Scholarship: Knowledge Inclusivity and Collaborative Collection Development between Academic Libraries and Archives and Local Public Communities

Abstract

In Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications, ACRL calls for more diverse and inclusive collection development (CD) by academic libraries and archives. Meanwhile, higher education is increasingly committing to community-engaged scholarship. This study investigated the extent to which academic libraries and archives are collecting, curating, and/or preserving knowledge produced by their local public communities. Researchers administered an electronic survey to relevant listservs and conducted follow-up interviews to develop a case study of one library’s efforts. Ninety of the initial 118 survey respondents (76%) indicated that their academic library intentionally collects, curates, and/or preserves materials created or owned by the local public community, with a majority working with minority or underrepresented populations in their communities. Respondents also reported working with unpublished archival material more than twice as often as nonarchival/circulating material, reflecting academia’s movement toward greater inclusion of traditionally excluded voices in the scholarly record. Additional research is needed for a host of issues raised by this work, in particular the relationship between university-community collection development and student learning. Library leaders can promote university-community engagement and knowledge diversity by incorporating local community knowledge into their collection development commitments and practices and tying this work to the parent institution’s strategic plan.