Library Loop

Quantifying Inclusivity – Thoughts on an incomplete Library Champions project

By Oliver Stummer, Resources Coordinator, Libraries & Collections, and Project Lead

“In all of our education, whether it’s in institutions or not, in homes or streets or wherever, whether it’s scholarly or whether it’s experiential, there is a kind of a progression. We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other, being able to distinguish among and between them, that is, knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about. And if we agree that purposeful progression exists, then you will see… that it’s easy, and it’s seductive, to assume that data is really knowledge. Or that information is, indeed, wisdom. Or that knowledge can exist without data. And how easy, and how effortlessly, one can parade and disguise itself as another. And how quickly we can forget that wisdom without knowledge, wisdom without any data, is just a hunch.”

                -Toni Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard)

1) Why quantify inclusivity – what motivations are there to take a data-based approach towards equality, diversity and inclusion?

If wisdom without data is just a hunch, and if data alone is just data, then we need to combine the two into the knowledge on which we base our actions. If we can quantify what needs to be done, and what we managed to do, then we can effect change that meets the needs and track our progress.

For these reasons I’m always concerned when talk of data is missing from conversations around diversity and inclusion. Too often we hear about the goals, or the ethical and moral ideals that underlie the drive for change. These are important and relevant goals, no doubt! But without the grounding in evidence, without data connecting the ideas to the realities we want to change, how can we be sure that we truly understand the mechanisms behind the problems and find an effective path to our goals? Are our idealisms founded on reality, or are we dreaming up utopias and codifying them in dogma? Because once we reach the point of dogma, we easily become blind to the realities at hand. We reach a point without data or wisdom to guide us.

These considerations in mind, I found myself wondering how we could use quantifiable data to inform our work towards a more inclusive culture within Libraries and Collections (L&C) and the wider King’s community. Researching, I found EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) data and Inclusion and Diversity reports produced by the King’s Data Analytics team, which mainly focus on headcount data for different demographic groups at King’s, and led us to explore what data we can work with within Libraries & Collections. (For information on EDI at King’s, see Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Annual Report 2020 – 2021.) Thus, the idea behind Quantifying Inclusivity was to invite our Library Champions to embark with us on a journey of discovery to explore what a data driven approach could mean for L&C specifically, where we might already have relevant data or where we may want to start collecting it.

2) Concrete ideas: going into the project and what happened then

After holding preparatory discussions with Anna-Lena Kleinert (Service Development Manager, Libraries & Collections) we established four key areas as starting points in our discussion with the library champions:

• To connect existing EDI data to the everyday experience of our library users
• To go further and find points of contact we can make quantifiable that show what in our students’ experience we don’t yet grasp
• To find stories within data which may bring new voices to the conversation
• To use the data as drivers where it can support us to better implement our values

With three Library Champions joining us for this project, we went into our first meeting in early December 2021. In this initial session we first discussed how we can arrive at definitions of our main concepts “inclusion/inclusivity” and how representative they are measuring everyday experience of inclusion in our libraries. We then had a look at King’s EDI reports and how they quantify inclusion and diversity.

At a second meeting in January, Library Champions shared some of their personal experience of barriers in accessing library services and collections, which was incredibly useful and opened up new perspectives to us. However, by the end of that month, we had made no progress on the discussion of existing data, lost one of our three students and struggled to engage our remaining two.

It was time to rethink our goals: Anna-Lena and I suggested that we explore further the experiences our remaining two Library Champions had related to L&C and, with them, draft concrete research proposals we could follow in a possible continuation of the project as a revamped Quantifying Inclusivity (2.0?) next year. To do so we split into pairs with Anna-Lena and myself each planning to collaborate with one of our Library Champions. Unfortunately, this second attempt to gain actionable outcomes from the project was unsuccessful.

3) What were the lessons learned?

• Going in with a broad-spectrum, exploratory approach may not be feasible considering the limited time available to work with the student champions. As such a more narrowly defined research proposal, maybe one or two concrete questions would seem more promising.
• Awareness of data-driven approaches to drive change or to governance is less prevalent than thought. There are still challenges, but also opportunities to foster this approach more widely.
• A future attempt to repeat this project might also profit from a more extensive explanation of what it is exactly that we’re after, to draw in students with a great interest in data and how it may be used to further social change at King’s and society at large.

4) Unquantified takeaway

So, what, if any, outcomes did this exercise produce?

We may not quite be now where we set out to go, no cornucopia of data or plethora of actionable insights. Yet some valuable perspectives were gained:

From our own research into EDI data undertaken as preparation for the project it has become clear that a data driven approach looks promising. But there is still a lot of work to do, both regarding what data we collect and how, and how we interpret this data. The KCL EDI reports, mentioned above, hold a lot of interesting data, however they are not very specific to the experience of our L&C customers. Understanding what it is that we’re missing, how we may be able to get that data and use it as drivers for change, however, will probably take more work than is possible to do within a single Library Champions project.

Judging from some of the concrete feedback from our Champions we will have to ask questions around the nature of the data we’re seeking: Where current EDI data seems to centre a lot around representation among staff and students, it doesn’t have a similarly strong focus on inclusion where hurdles of access – or lack thereof is concerned.

All that said, we must not yield to temptation to think of the project as a failure. It was a valuable first step towards future research and helped to show the many difficulties of taking an approach like this. However, I still believe that those difficulties can be overcome. Only by attempting this did we find out the size of the task and were able to get a feeling for how we might break this down into manageable pieces.

I want to thank our Library Champions and my partner in this project Anna-Lena for joining me on these explorations, as well as everyone who provided support and input!