Beth Montague-Hellen. She says: “When I did that project we
had already built a community through social media so I belonged in that group. And LGBTQ+ Stem was us just saying, ‘we’re going to do our thing anyway, we can belong to our own group’. That is one way of doing it, but it doesn’t fix the problem of integration into the mainstream, it just gave us a place at the time. “We’ve got a Women in IT group in the IT department but it’s not really the belonging we want to get to. We want to get to the point where people feel they are so part of IT that their concerns and their issues are respected. They don’t have to be part of a separate group that understands them. You want that to actually just be the library. So it’s a stop gap on the way. But it’s about doing something now, to make people’s lives better versus the structural thing.”
Red lines and grey areas
Another cause of EDI burnout is trying to fix the whole problem. “There can be an all-or-nothing approach to campaigning,” Beth says, “that if we don’t change it at the source, what’s the point of doing it all? And I don’t think that is the point – it’s certainly not the point with this book. “What I’m trying to do is incrementally make things better. There’s a phrase that’s quite often used, particularly in neurodiversity and disability circles: ‘If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.’ So you don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t have to fix the whole problem. If you see all the catalogue desks are stand- ing only and inaccessible to someone in a wheelchair, you look at how to fix it. “You haven’t fixed things at a policy level, but you just literally made your library more useable and that’s what the book is trying to do.
“It’s not black and white, it’s all grey. It’s trying to work your way around things and compromise. That’s hard because people don’t like grey. They want there to be answers and in EDI there’s never a simple answer. It means sometimes
Spring 2025
you have to leave it at the point where nobody’s perfectly happy, but it works better than it did before.”
Fear factor
Despite the book being designed to alleviate fear and enable action incrementally, fear of getting it wrong remains a significant factor. “I’m not worried about anti EDI people,” Beth says, “I know they’re there and they’re going to do whatever they do. I was worried about getting it wrong from our side. And that is one of the hardest things about writing about EDI – that we eat ourselves from the inside. The thing that I was most worried about, writing this book, was that I would publish it and everyone on social media would just be like, ‘this is awful, what are you doing?’ and it would ruin my life. But the other book I see everywhere at the moment is the one about kindness, The Kind Librar- ian, and I think even for people who are doing the campaigning it’s easy to forget that the other people are still people.”
Red lines and fine lines
EDI is full of grey areas but it comes with strong feelings that could make flexibility painful. Two areas that Beth mentions where lines tend to blur are making alli- ances and defining neutrality. “It is important to make alliances with people you don’t 100 per cent agree with because otherwise you are only going to be stuck in your tiny little area. Working in LGBTQ+ I know lots of people I don’t agree with but I still have to work with them. But it can go too far if it’s based on ‘they hate the same people as we do so let’s fight them together’ because after- wards they might hate you as well.” In these cases she says a specific goal can be helpful, adding: “If you have a goal, bring everyone in who wants to work towards that goal, but don’t neces- sarily think that they’re going to help with anything else. They’re not your friends, they’re your allies. And very disparate groups, who don’t agree in lots of other
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 37
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
