When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
The Best of TIE: 2025!
Posted on December 30, 2025 in Blog Posts
As Toward Inclusive Excellence continues to chart a new path, our team is constantly striving to offer our readers a comprehensive roster of dynamic and robust content. The past year yielded new webinars, new book lists, and countless blog posts that were both engaging and informative. As we reflect on so many great posts from 2025, we’ve compiled the top five here. We are grateful to all of our contributors who have shared their insights and experiences. We hope that reading (or re-reading) these pieces sparks new motivation to address the challenges still facing DEIA in library spaces in the year to come. If you’ve been inspired by anything you’ve read through TIE in the past year, please reach out to us with a pitch (see details below). We’re always eager to highlight new voices!
Content Round-ups
Commemorating Pride Month with TIE and Choice Content 2025 (June 4, 2025)
Commemorating Pride Month
To commemorate Pride Month, the Toward Inclusive Excellence team gathered TIE content and Choice resources from the past year that highlight queer studies and LGBTQ issues. Choice, the publisher of TIE and a publishing unit at the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, provides book reviews to help librarians identify academic sources and professional development tools like webinars, podcasts, and white papers. Read the full round-up.
Blog Posts
More Than a Study Spot: How Libraries Foster Belonging (January 7, 2025)
By Jamia Williams
The concept of belonging has emerged as a key focus in discussions surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion. As Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey highlight in their paper “What Does It Mean to Belong?”, Stanford researcher Geoffrey Cohen defines belonging as “the feeling that we’re part of a larger group that values, respects, and cares for us—and to which we feel we have something to contribute” in his book Belonging (2022). But what does this mean within the context of academic libraries? Read the full blog post.
Gender Assumptions (June 17, 2025)
By Stephen Krueger
While taking a course on web accessibility recently, I was jarred by the way the audio description and alt text examples assumed gender: the people in the videos and images were described as women or men—or once, for no apparent reason apart from perhaps the presence of a corduroy blazer, as “a gentleman”—with “she” or “he” pronouns, seemingly chosen based on to appearance. (It’s possible they asked every person in every video or image to self-identify before creating the descriptions, but I rather doubt it.) I am not an expert on that topic, though others are, and it is a compelling rabbit hole—I am currently resisting the urge to stay up too late reading a gender studies thesis and an academic article on TV show audio descriptions and gender instead of writing this blog post. The accessibility course is simply one example of what I want to highlight: the ways assumptions about gender show up in library work. Read the full blog post.
Information Literacy: More Necessary and More Rare Than Ever (June 10, 2025)
By Sam Berry-Sullivan
I will have been a librarian for eight years by September 2025, and in that time I have worked at three academic libraries. At two of those three institutions, I was asked to introduce students to resources available at the library, how to search for information in relevant databases, and how to then cite the information they found in APA format. At my first and current libraries, instruction sessions are the ubiquitous “one-shot” format. This means that, as the lone librarian liaising with our most highly enrolled programs, I am lucky to meet each student once. Only one of these institutions offered three-part library instruction in which each session built on the knowledge from the session before, starting with a basic introduction to the library and ending with students practicing information evaluation techniques on a handful of different source types. Students practiced building complex searches and learned why it’s critical to credit their sources, and I was able to leave the third session confident that they could differentiate between an article from a magazine versus one from a scholarly journal, and understand when each source might be appropriate to use. Read the full blog post.
TIE Talks
TIE Talks with Martha Jones (March 5, 2025)
This TIE Talks features returning guest Dr. Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. Martha joins TIE Talks to discuss her new book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. With several historical nonfiction titles under her belt, Martha turned to memoir to trace her family’s history along the “jagged color line.” Using oral histories, letters, photographs, and family heirlooms, she goes beyond “official” archival documents to chronicle her family’s history of enslavement, evading anti-miscegenation laws, and leadership at the historically Black liberal arts college Bennett College. By looking at her family’s past, Martha seeks to understand her own Black identity and how her ancestors touched and crossed America’s color line. In the interview, Martha explains her decision to write a memoir, how her Black Studies academic background aided the research process, and her advice for pursuing historical family research as a Black or mixed-race scholar. Read the full post.
Interested in contributing to TIE? Send an email to Fatima at Choice (fmohie-eldin@ala.org) with your topic idea.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.