Begins where diversity audits end, informing and supporting academic, school, and public librarians in the quest to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in a meaningful and sustainable manner throughout collections, policies, and practices. A primary question for many librarians, directors, and board members is how to evaluate diversity in a collection on an ongoing basis. Curating Community Collections provides librarians with the tools they need to understand the results of diversity audits and to formulate a reasonable, achievable plan for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion not only in the collection itself, but also in library collection policies and practices. Information on ways to make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of a library's everyday workflow will help ensure the sustainability of these principles. Mary Schreiber and Wendy Bartlett teach readers how to increase the number of diverse materials in their collections and make them more discoverable to library patrons through the implementation of a community collections program. Stories from librarians around the United States and Canada who are auditing and improving the diversity of their collections add broad, scalable perspectives for libraries of any size, budget, and mission. Action steps provided at the end of each section offer a practical road map for all types of libraries to curate a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community collection.

Reconsiders complex questions about how we imagine ourselves and our political communities

Begins where diversity audits end, informing and supporting academic, school, and public librarians in the quest to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in a meaningful and sustainable manner throughout collections, policies, and practices. A primary question for many librarians, directors, and board members is how to evaluate diversity in a collection on an ongoing basis. Curating Community Collections provides librarians with the tools they need to understand the results of diversity audits and to formulate a reasonable, achievable plan for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion not only in the collection itself, but also in library collection policies and practices. Information on ways to make diversity, equity, and inclusion part of a library's everyday workflow will help ensure the sustainability of these principles. Mary Schreiber and Wendy Bartlett teach readers how to increase the number of diverse materials in their collections and make them more discoverable to library patrons through the implementation of a community collections program. Stories from librarians around the United States and Canada who are auditing and improving the diversity of their collections add broad, scalable perspectives for libraries of any size, budget, and mission. Action steps provided at the end of each section offer a practical road map for all types of libraries to curate a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community collection.

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

With contributions from key scholars in a range of disciplines, this engaging new volume explores the complex issues surrounding collaboration between museums and their communities.

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities. The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaboration, which can gloss over the complexity of identities and lead to tokenistic claims of inclusion by museums. Over sixteen chapters, well-respected authors from the US, Australia and Europe offer a timely critique to address what happens when museums put community-minded principles into practice, challenging readers to move beyond shallow notions of political correctness that ignore vital difference in this contested field. Contributors address a wide range of key issues, asking pertinent questions such as how museums negotiate the complexities of integrating collaboration when the target community is a living, fluid, changeable mass of people with their own agendas and agency. When is engagement real as opposed to symbolic, who benefits from and who drives initiatives? What particular challenges and benefits do artist collaborations bring? Recognising the multiple perspectives of community participants is one thing, but how can museums incorporate this successfully into exhibition practice? Students of museum and cultural studies, practitioners and everyone who cares about museums around the world will find this volume essential reading.

Biocultural collections are plants and animals used by people, products made from them, and/or information and archives about them. They are numerous and diverse, including biological specimens, natural products (e.g., medicine, food, fiber, oil, latex, etc.) and cultural artifacts (e.g., clothing, baskets, weaponry, tools, etc.) from around the world. Biocultural collections benefit scientists, conservationists, development workers, teachers, students, and the general public. However, these collections are poorly curated and data based - if at all - making them largely inaccessible for research and reference. At a time when wild crop relatives, landraces, and knowledge about traditional plant uses are being lost at an alarming rate, our biocultural collections are also degrading and being orphaned or lost. Curating Biocultural Collections aims to address these issues and develop standards of curation, and help institutions to properly care for collections that have been severely neglected and under-utilized. Written and edited by experts from around the world, this book demonstrates that with proper curation, data basing, and on-line and physical access, these valuable resources can be used in research, conservation, development and education, and preserved for future generations. Kew Publishing in association with Missouri Botanical Garden Press