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Social justice and the medical librarian*
Elaine Russo Martin, FMLA
See end of article for author’s affiliation.
This lecture discusses social justice and the role that medical librarians can play in a democratic society.
Social justice needs to be central to the mission of medical librarianship and a core value of the profession.
Medical librarians must develop a new professional orientation: one that focuses on cultural awareness or
cultural consciousness that goes beyond ourselves and our collections to that which focuses on the users of
our libraries. We must develop a commitment to addressing the issues of societal, relevant health
information. Using examples from medical education, this lecture makes the case for social justice
librarianship. This lecture also presents a pathway for social justice medical librarianship, identifies
fundamental roles and activities in these areas, and offers strategies for individual librarians, the Medical
Library Association, and library schools for developing social justice education and outcomes. The lecture
advocates for an understanding of and connection to social justice responsibilities for the medical library
profession and ends with a call to go beyond understanding to action.
The lecture emphasizes the lack of diversity in our profession and the importance of diversity and
inclusion for achieving social justice. The lecture presents specific examples from some medical libraries to
extend the social justice mindset and to direct outreach, collections, archives, and special collection services
to expose previously hidden voices. If medical librarians are to remain relevant in the future, we must act to
address the lack of diversity in our profession and use our information resources, spaces, and expertise to
solve the relevant societal issues of today.
INTRODUCTION
I am truly honored to have been selected as the 2018
Janet Doe lecturer. Like the many Doe lecturers
before me, being selected brings a host of mixed
emotions, varying from amazement, joy, pleasure,
and ultimately panic from the weight of the
responsibility. The Janet Doe Lecture is an extensive
examination of a topic related to health sciences
librarianship. The topic is open ended, as long as the
subject is under the very broad theme of philosophy
or history.
Like most of the Doe lecturers before me, I too
am not a philosopher nor a historian. My career as a
medical librarian has been a journey both literally
and figuratively. I have worked on both coasts and
in the middle of the country, deliberately relocating
to accept more advanced leadership positions. I
have outreach experience in three Regional Medical
Library network offices: the Pacific Northwest, the
Greater Midwest Region, and the New England
* The Janet Doe Lecture on the history or philosophy of medical librarianship, presented at MLA ’18, the 118th Annual Meeting Medical Library
Association, Inc.; Atlanta, GA; May 18–23, 2018. Julia Sollenberger, AHIP, FMLA, the 2017 Janet Doe lecturer, gave the introduction.
Region (in these last two, I led those programs). A
defining moment in my career was the opportunity I
had to work outside the United States, specifically in
Liberia.
I started my library career as a library technician
in a state medical society library and continued
working in different support staff positions while
attending library school part-time with the support
of the Medical Library Association (MLA)
Scholarship. My first professional job out of library
school was as a reference/user education librarian,
followed by administrative positions as a public
services department head, an assistant director, then
an associate director, and finally, a library director.
The libraries in which I worked were in both private
and public academic health sciences centers with a
variety of health professional schools and affiliated
hospitals. Because of this breadth of experience, the
kinds of projects I have worked on, and the diversity
of the communities in which I have worked, the
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topic for this lecture came naturally to me. I did not,
like many previous Doe lecturers, experience a long
and agonizing road for a search for my topic. For
me, it was quite the opposite. In fact, the topic chose
me and seemed a natural fit.
I fleetingly thought about and quickly dismissed
discussing the work I have done and continue to do
in promoting research data management as a
fundamental new role for medical librarians or my
project in public health information access and
outreach, specifically my approach to providing real-
time access to the literature for the public health
workforce who have no affiliation with academic
medical libraries. But I must confess my choice of
topic comes from contemporary concerns about what
is going on in our society today and is influenced by
movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #Metoo,
#Enough, #Resistance, #NeverAgain, and
#MarchforOurLives, and the proliferation of
accepted terms such as “fake news” or “alternative
facts.” When I started exploring social justice as my
topic, I had some initial doubts as to whether or not I
should go forward. I acknowledge that some
librarians might feel uncomfortable with the topic
and what is to follow. However, given what has gone
on to threaten our country’s democratic values and
principles, I am more convinced than ever that I had
to discuss “Social Justice and the Medical Librarian.”
I think most of us would agree that democracy
in any country depends on an informed electorate
with equal access to quality information, knowledge,
and education. Therefore, by definition, the library
profession is an integral part of democracy.
Specifically, what we medical librarians do—making
evidence-based health information available to those
who need it in order to help patients, families, and
caregivers make better patient-care decisions—
connects us to democratic principles and ideals of
equal access to information and health care. As
Louis Brandeis, a former Supreme Court associate
justice and “militant crusader for social justice,”
asked and answered, “What are American ideals?
They are the development of the individual for his
own good and the common good; the development
of the individual through liberty; and the attainment
of the common good though democracy and social
justice” [1]. In the United States, we have the means
for such democratic ideals, but we have not lived up
to the potential [2]. American democracy is in
danger because of an increasingly ill-informed
public who are easily manipulated with sound bites
and Twitter rants that lead to the infringement on
the rights of the poor, the disenfranchised, the
underserved, immigrants, people of color, women,
and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer
(LGBTQ) community.
With the continuing closures of hospital libraries
and relentless budget cuts experienced by many
academic medical libraries since 2008, coupled with
the proliferation of many alternative options for
accessing information, the need for medical
librarians is being questioned, and our sheer
numbers, ranks, and status are diminishing. If
medical librarians are to survive as a distinct
profession, then we must consider who we are as
individuals, embrace our place as medical
professionals in a democratic society, stand up for
human rights and social justice, and assert our social
responsibility.
Few Doe lecturers have touched upon the roles
of medical librarians in a democratic society. Henry
Lemkau Jr., FMLA, in his 2007 Doe lecture, said,
“Our lives are informed and given purpose by the
influences that surround us,” and he discussed our
profession “in the context of the social and cultural
worlds in which we function” [3]. I suggest that this
discussion has never been more important than it is
today, given the times in which we live (mass
deportations, children separated from their families
at the border, no sustained solution for the
Dreamers, and a government shutdown over the
border wall). I would add to the discussion the
context of the users, not just the professions, whom
we serve.
The importance of human values in medical
librarianship was first highlighted by Martha Jane
Zachert in her 1978 Doe lecture [4]. Previous to her,
Doe lecturers defined the values of medical
librarianship in terms of collection-building, self-
image, organization and retrieval methods, and
technological savvy. David Bishop’s definition of
diversity, for example, only focused on
specialization in the field of librarianship and did
not touch on diversity with respect to populations
[5]. But it was Zachert who wrote of developing new
values for the medical library profession “related to
man’s cognitive life and social, as well as to social
and cultural institutions and the process of social
change.” She identified professionalism as one of
our most “enduring values...perhaps the keynote of
our value system” [4]. In my view, professionalism
goes beyond the tasks we do or what we call
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ourselves, but rather embodies who we are and
what we stand for [5].
For the most part, Doe lecturers have shied
away from discussing politics and its effect on their
topics or the medical library profession. Estelle
Brodman was an exception with a somewhat
lengthy discussion of the effect of Hitler’s Nazis, the
Vietnam War, racism, and the perils of the “pursuit
of power” over the “pursuit of excellence” [6]. The
1989 Doe lecture by Rachael K. Anderson, AHIP,
FMLA, was the first to explore the factors that have
influenced who has been able to enter our
profession, with a particular focus on racial and
gender discrimination [7]. Gerald Oppenheimer, in
1988, was most adamant about our profession
looking outward and “concentrating on
values…which are directed outward to the society in
which we live and work” [8]. He went on to describe
the debate in MLA between those who felt we
should leave human rights to others and those who
felt the association should take a more active role in
democratic ideals.
You may think given the title of my talk that it is
also a political talk. Promoting equality and
democratic ideals is not partisan. Rather, it is a talk
about values and what Barack Obama named
democracy with a small “d” [9]. It is a talk about
social justice in our everyday work. It is a talk about
how we can be relevant to the people we serve by
providing information that improves everyone’s
health, not just the privileged few. It is a talk about
professionalism, and how we can incorporate and
promote social justice into our profession, how we
can become agents of societal change, and how we
practice as medical librarians in the context of the
times in which we live.
DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE
—Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is
the most shocking and inhumane. Martin Luther King [10]
What do I mean then by social justice in the context
of health care and medicine? While social justice and
diversity are linked, social justice goes beyond
representation. A term hard to define, social justice
in medicine is:
the open acknowledgement of the dignity and autonomy
of and delivery of high-quality medical care, to all
members of society, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity,
religion, sexual orientation, language, geography, origin,
or socioeconomic background. [11]
It is the idea that health care employees work
toward eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in
health care [11].
The 2002 Institute of Medicine report, Unequal
Treatment, first detailed a systematic examination of
racial and ethnic disparities in health care. It clearly
indicated that US racial and ethnic minorities were
less likely to receive even routine medical
procedures and more likely to experience a lower
quality of health services, and called out the social
responsibility of physicians toward their patients
[12]. Social justice is not just an admirable idea.
Social justice is a responsibility of the health care
team to provide health services for every person, no
matter where they live, what they do, or what
lifestyles they lead. The case for social justice
medical librarianship comes from our roots in the
health professions and medical education. I hope
this talk challenges our preconceived notions of the
role librarians should play in social justice and
suggests some specific actions.
There is a growing recognition amongst the
health professions and medical educators that there
is disparity in the health care delivered to ethnic,
racial, gender, and other minority populations [13].
These disparities lead to patient dissatisfaction,
noncompliance with treatment, and poorer health
outcomes. Diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV are
social diseases. There is recognition that the impact of
societal and economic factors on the individual needs
to be considered just as much as the bacteria of the
disease itself [14]. There needs to be a broader
awareness of the barriers to accessing health services
among underrepresented groups. There also needs to
be a comprehensive strategy in addressing them [12].
The Liaison Committee on Medical Education
(LCME) standard 7.6 is one concrete step [15]. All
medical schools in the United States and Canada
must address the issues of social justice, cultural
competency, diversity, and inclusion along with the
need for medical students “to recognize and
appropriately address gender and cultural biases in
health care delivery” as part of the medical school
accreditation process. Specifically, medical students
must demonstrate an understanding of how
culturally diverse perspectives of health and illness
affect a person’s response to symptoms, disease, and
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treatment. The LCME standards also require
students to understand how gender and cultural
biases affect health care delivery [16]. Medical
education is not alone: these themes are reflected in
transforming the education of future nurses, public
health workers, and other members of the health
care team. If medical librarians are to maintain our
status as members of the health professional team,
then we, too, must take up the call. I would even go
so far to say that future survival as a profession
depends on it.
Rudolf Virchow, who is considered the father of
social medicine, wrote in 1848, “Medicine is a social
science, and politics nothing but medicine on a
grand scale” [17]. Despite this, just like medical
librarianship, the medical profession has been slow
to respond to society’s issues. The medical
professions’ late response to the HIV/AIDS
pandemic and its effect on the LGBTQ community is
only one example. Yet as evidenced by the LCME
accreditation standards and the increased number of
journal articles in Academic Medicine over the last
decade, there seems to be a greater awareness
among medical educators that teaching social justice
to medical trainees and medical school faculty needs
to be essential to educating future health
professionals.
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND MEDICAL SCHOOL
CURRICULUM
There are examples of medical schools incorporating
social justice into their curricular offerings:
• Through problem-based learning methods,
medical students and faculty at the University of
Hawaii have developed the Social Justice
Curriculum Project, consisting of self-directed
learning, action, and self-reflection [18].
• The University of California Davis Health
System offers faculty development training on
how to conduct interracial dialogue on race,
racism, oppression, and privilege [19].
• In memory of Freddie Gray, faculty at
Northeastern Ohio University have designed a
curriculum to help trainees and faculty
understand unequal access to health care and
how physicians can work toward eliminating the
injustices contributing to inappropriate care [20].
• The Human Rights and Social Justice Scholars
Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai is a preclinical training program in
social medicine that incorporates service
learning experiences with lectures, mentorship,
research projects, policy and advocacy projects,
and a seminar series [18, 21].
• The Harvard Medical School hosts the “Equity
and Social Justice” series of lectures and
dialogues focusing on history and context,
culture and environment, health disparities, and
leadership and skills development.
Other medical schools are going beyond the
LCME guidelines and are beginning to also provide
advocacy training to address social determinants of
health. The LEADS Curriculum at the University of
Colorado School of Medicine, the Scholarly
Concentration in Advocacy and Activism at the
Brown University Warren Alpert Medical School,
and the Health Justice Scholar Track at Georgetown
University School of Medicine are early examples
that focus on empowering medical students to
design and execute advocacy projects for social
change.
I am fully aware of the criticisms of social justice
and social justice education. Some may think it too
politically liberal, or too politically correct, or too
leftist or activist. Some may feel that they cannot
express their conservative views in these settings.
The goal of social justice is not to have us conform to
one way of thinking but rather to give everyone the
opportunity to be engaged, thoughtful community
members who think critically about issues affecting
the community. This is the tradition of a liberal
education without having politically liberal
connotations. It is where students, educators, and
librarians recognize the complexity of the world and
our interconnectedness. It is an opportunity for us all
to reflect and think critically about these issues,
develop tolerance for ambiguity, appreciate diversity,
and respect the different views of others [22].
THE CASE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE MEDICAL
LIBRARIAN
Like medicine, medical librarianship is not only an
information science, but a human science. It is the
search, retrieval, evaluation, and application of
information to meet human needs to help health
professionals, students, and patients make informed
decisions about their health. Currently, much of
what we do in medical libraries still focuses on
developing vast libraries of print or online
collections, enhancing informatics technology-based
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skills, and developing evidence-based best practices
for delivering reference, education, or other services.
While performing activities such as developing data
science plans, digitizing special collections, and
conducting systematic reviews are important, they
need to be done in a social justice context.
Through a social justice lens, we would need to
introduce more humanistic approaches to our work:
refocusing our attention from serving ourselves and
what is more efficient or effective for us to do in our
libraries and shifting our focus outward. We need to
focus on learning what our users want from us,
learning how individual users experience the
library, and tailoring our services and approach to
their individual needs and experience. Social justice
librarianship involves developing a personal and
professional approach in which the practice of
medical librarianship puts the user’s interests and
needs front and center. Like medicine, we have been
slow to recognize what our social responsibility to
those we serve is and that there is no one size fits all
to the services we provide.
This lecture critically discusses this concept of
social justice and proposes that medical librarians
must go beyond the traditional approaches to
thinking about their work and must develop a
deeper understanding of and connection with the
social responsibilities of the health professions and
people we serve. Medical librarians must develop a
new professional orientation—one that fosters a
critical awareness or critical consciousness of going
beyond the self to others and a commitment to
addressing the issues of societal relevant health
information. This new professional orientation or
identity places information science in a social and
cultural context. It is coupled with a recognition of
societal injustices with respect to access to health
care and health information and a search for
appropriate action.
I will suggest a framework for medical
librarianship social justice, identify the fundamental
roles and activities in these areas, and suggest
strategies for individual librarians as well as MLA,
the Association of Academic Health Sciences
Libraries (AAHSL), and schools of library and
information sciences (LIS) for developing education
and outcomes. It is my hope that, through this
lecture, you will gain an understanding of and
connection to the social responsibilities of medical
librarianship, develop an individual approach to
reflective professional practice, and be inspired to
action.
THE SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION DEBATE
While there is more agreement today that health
professionals need to be trained in cultural
competence, multiculturalism, and social justice,
there is a debate regarding the curriculum and the
accompanying teaching methods. In academic
medicine, proponents of critical consciousness
theory view it as a way to help refocus the current
methods of health professional education. Medical
education focuses on developing procedurally
competent physicians. Adding social justice to
health education brings physician training back to
its original mission of developing socially conscious
health providers who focus on the patient-doctor
relationship and to “inform an appropriate crucial
pedagogy for fostering compassionate, humanistic,
socially conscious health professionals who act as
agents of change” [23].
The early efforts in social justice medical
education curricula stress developing competencies
in multiculturalism. These efforts use the categorical
approach where attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of
specific cultures and groups are defined, outlined,
taught, and memorized. While acquiring
multicultural competence implies learning about
multiple and diverse cultures, it is limiting. It often
leads to oversimplifying and stereotyping certain
groups. This is an unintended outcome. This
realization has led to new teaching methodologies
that focus on developing a set of skills to assess
individually what factors might affect a patient’s
care or developing critical consciousness [11].
Medical educator Delese Wear cautions that it is not
enough to be culturally competent and, in fact,
multicultural competency–based education can
become “a medical education paradigm in which the
notion of ‘novelty’ replaces that of ‘equality’ in
approaches to treating patients” [20]. Kumagai
argues that a competency-based approach to social
justice education is not appropriate, as linear modes
of learning may help the student accumulate
knowledge but not necessarily understanding. He
argues for new ways of thinking about how students
learn or know. Teaching social justice to support
professionalism calls for new content and new
teaching methods [24].
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The concept of the medical professional who
practices actively in the world involves a paradigm
shift away from passive learning of new knowledge
and skills to more active learning. It requires
developing a new professional identity with a
reflective orientation to the understanding of self,
professional self, others, and the world. It has its
roots in “Critical Conscious Theory,” a term
proposed by Brazilian activist and theorist Paulo
Freire in his 1970 work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Critical consciousness goes beyond critical thinking.
It is the “ability to intervene in reality in order to
change it.”
The link from education to democracy is implicit
in Freire’s work. Learners act as subjects in the
creation of democracy in education through telling
and listening to experiences. Consciousness is a
sense of one’s personal and collective identity, an in-
depth understanding of the world, and a penchant
for action against oppression [25]. Friere saw the act
of dialogue as an act of proclaimed equality:
dialogue, curiosity, creativity, and critical
consciousness actively seek to intervene and change
society. He observed the educational system in
Brazil, which focused on spoon-feeding or banking
and depositing knowledge to the masses, as
oppressive. He advocated for more active learning
and questioning as a way of freeing the individual.
He felt that learners needed to connect to their own
personal, cognitive, and emotional experience; to
engage with others through dialogue; and to
emancipate themselves and others through praxis
(applying theory to action). This capacity to connect
with one’s position in society and engage in
dialogue about inequities depends upon critical
consciousness—a reflective reading of the world.
From consciousness, learners could act as agents of
change. Social justice education is actively learning
by doing.
Friere’s theory of critical consciousness has been
applied to educational change in various disciplines,
most recently, medical education:
A Friere critical teacher is a problem-poser who asks
thought provoking questions and encourages students to
ask their own questions…students experience education
as something they do, not as something done to
them…educators…are challenged to de-privilege their
own power and authority and become informed,
experienced and knowledgeable facilitators of student
learning rather than depositors of information into the
mental vaults of learners. [26]
Students are both teachers and learners and vice
versa.
Kumagai expands on Friere’s work as applied to
teaching social justice in a medical context. He calls
on the teachings of German philosopher Jürgen
Habermas and his framework for knowing and
communicating. Teaching social justice requires
another type of learning, by which individuals (and,
indeed, groups and societies as a whole) formulate
new ways of understanding reality, of interacting
with others, and of perceiving their own identities.
Habermas identifies three primary ways in which
we generate knowledge. The first is “Work” or
instrumental action—knowledge based upon
empirical investigation and governed by technical
rules. Scientific research is an example of this
domain. In librarianship, this may equate to
technical work in maintaining systems and
collections. The second is “Practical Knowledge.”
This domain identifies human social interaction or
“Communicative Action.” It is defined by “building
consensus or standards” in order to determine
appropriate action. Legal and social sciences belong
to the “Practical.” In medical librarianship,
“Practical” is the way we help develop clinical
practice. The last is “Emancipatory,” or “self-
knowledge” or “Self-reflection.” This involves:
interest in the way one’s history and biography has
expressed itself in how one sees oneself, one’s roles and
social expectations…Insights gained through critical self-
awareness are emancipatory. Knowledge is gained by self-
emancipation through reflection leading to a transformed
consciousness or changed perspective. [27, 28]
For medical librarians, this can include
approaching the reference interview from the user’s
perspective and having a greater awareness of our
own biases prior to providing canned searches or
information packets. The medical librarian needs to
have empathy for the individual asking the
reference question and treat every question as an
individual need. Habermas’s framework of knowing
is important to consider as we think about a social
justice framework for medical librarianship.
Although medical training, appropriately so,
must focus on developing technical skills and
consensus-driven understanding of best clinical
practice, not all education to prepare health
professionals to work in society arises from these
ways of knowing. Implicit in the efforts to introduce
more humanistic care into medicine and to address
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topics as social justice and human values into
professional training is a requirement that a new
way of knowing does not involve just knowing facts
and figures. It involves the personal and
professional orientation toward self and others—a
way of being in the world—in which the practice of
medicine has the patient’s interests at the forefront.
This way of being cannot be taught through
traditional lecture or classroom settings but must be
acquired through reflection, dialogue, and
experience [28]. This type of education engages
learners and teachers in the exploration of self and
others through the use of narratives, reflective
writings, comics, art, theater, and film. The emphasis
is to engage in reflective interaction with a play,
film, or essay; with a patient; and with each other in
opportunities to grapple with moments of
uncertainty and discomfort, and to go ultimately
beyond discussion to action in the world. Medical
libraries, schools of LIS, and our medical library
associations need to emulate the efforts from our
health professional colleagues when it comes to
social justice education. We need to introduce more
of these ways of learning and concepts into our
formal and informal curriculum for medical
librarians.
DIVERSITY IN LIBRARIANSHIP
Let me now turn to diversity in our profession.
Though not the same as social justice, diversity is
important for achieving it. While the library
community considers diversity to be a core value,
the library sector has fallen short, despite ongoing
initiatives that focus on the recruiting minority
librarians.
What do we mean when we say diversity, and
why does diversity matter? Diversity matters
because we want our libraries to be reflective of the
diverse communities in which we work and the
users we serve. A recent McKinsey analysis of 366
global public companies found that those companies
with greater ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to
outperform their peers: “Diversity matters because it
is an opportunity to be innovative, to leverage gifts
and talents of all our people” [29].
For at least the last two decades, many academic
libraries have established diversity committees,
residency programs, and fellowship opportunities
for minorities in order to increase representation in
the workforce. In recent years, some academic
librarians have worked toward understanding this
issue and have spoken out about the shortcomings
of efforts to diversify the profession and advocate
for social justice [30]. Professional associations have
grappled with the issue of diversity and initiated
efforts to increase the representative numbers of
library employees of color in librarianship. Library
organizations have implemented programs toward
effecting change in the racial and ethnic makeup of
the profession. In 1997, the American Library
Association (ALA) began the Spectrum Scholarship
Program meant to address ethnic under-
representation in the library community. More
recently, the Association of Research Libraries began
providing a number of diversity initiatives
surrounding recruitment and career development of
underrepresented ethnic groups, including the
“Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce” and the
“Leadership and Early Career Development
Program,” among others. The Association of College
and Research Libraries has in recent years formed a
Diversity Alliance. MLA has had a Scholarship for
Minority Students and recently formed the Diversity
and Inclusion Task Force; AAHSL has acted
similarly.
Despite these efforts, librarianship remains a
primarily white female profession. The Ithaca S+R
report, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation,
called the “Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity Survey,”
is the most recent attempt to measure
representational diversity in libraries and
documents the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in
the profession. It found that over 75% of employees
at academic research libraries were white. And as
positions become increasingly senior, they also
become increasingly white [31]. The report also
found that library leaders or administrators are 89%
white and non-Hispanic. It also noted that many
non-white staff members work in roles such as
technical services, processing, and so on, which are
being phased out of libraries as they move from
print to electronic collections. One of the study’s
coauthors Roger Schonfeld wonders whether “There
is in fact a risk that libraries will become not more
diverse in the future but potentially less diverse in
the future if action isn’t taken” [31]. The report gives
credence to minority staff who have faced barriers to
advancement.
These issues become even more pronounced as
the national population has grown markedly more
diverse. The US population (2013 figures) is 62%
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white, with a projection for 2060 that white people
will make up only 40% of the population [32]. Using
the ALA Diversity Counts data and comparing it to
the US Census data for 2013 and US Census
projections for 2060, it is clear that we are far from
reflecting our country’s diversity.
However, diversity has a much broader
definition than race and ethnic representation and
encompasses combatting discrimination based on
age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender
expression, religious background, language, or
disability. The ALA Diversity Counts data go
beyond highlighting the disparity for race and
ethnicity. We lack other forms of diversity in
libraries as well, though demographic data for areas
other than race and ethnicity are less well defined or
tracked. The Diversity Counts authors highlight the
low employment of librarians with disabilities,
given the increase between 1990 and 2000 of people
self-identifying as having 1 or more disabilities.
While 19% of 21–64 year olds self-identified as
having a disability on the 2000 US Census, the
percentage of credentialed librarians was 4% [32].
The recent Association of American Medical
Colleges (AAMC) report called “Learners and
Disabilities” is similarly discouraging. Only 2.5% of
1,500 medical students self-identified as having
disabilities and needing accommodations [33]. The
report highlights the barriers that medical students
with disabilities experience in their training.
Going back to librarians, the Diversity Counts
report states, “Credentialed librarians are
predominately women, ages 45–54, and white. They
are not limited by disability and work full-time” [32,
34]. This lack of diversity in libraries in regard to
race, ethnicity, disability, and other factors distance
the very communities we seek to serve. And it
suggests a proportionally less diverse library
workforce on the horizon [34].
We need to ask ourselves why diversity does
not happen despite libraries making diversity a
priority. Why are these efforts not making any
meaningful difference? Why are we bringing people
from underrepresented groups into our libraries at
the same rate they are leaving the profession [34]?
What are the barriers to diversifying employees?
When asked this question in the Ithaka survey,
library directors recognize there is a problem but
identify the problem as something they cannot
control. They blame external factors, such as lack of
a talent pool or geographical location, rather than
internal factors such as unconscious bias in the
interview process. [31]. In addition, they identify
their libraries as more inclusive than the library
community as a whole, whether or not that is the
case [31]. Yet, we know that in comparing the
percentage of racial and ethnic subgroups in the US
population, the distribution in library assistant
positions is more or less proportional, whereas the
distribution in professional librarian positions is not,
the latter skewing heavily to an overrepresentation
of white people. Diversity Counts confirms this
discrepancy [35].
One strategy may be to look internally for
higher education and promotional opportunities for
library assistants in our own libraries. Perhaps
looking in our libraries and not outside the
environment is where the problem really lies. When
I was at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for
example, the university librarian, Sharon Hogan,
sponsored a program for underrepresented minority
library assistants to attend the master’s of library
and information science (MLIS) program at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Selected
employees went to school on weekends (tuition
free), the library provided transportation, and upon
graduation, students/employees were guaranteed a
paid professional position in the library system. It
should be easier today to implement programs like
this, especially since there are so many online LIS
degree programs available. Eligible employees could
be given educational leave to complete coursework,
allowed to use work computers, and receive tuition
benefits.
Common library hiring processes and practices
also contribute to the lack of diversity. We need to
examine the criteria for job descriptions, recruitment
processes, and hiring practices to open up the
pipeline for underrepresented groups to enter the
profession and provide opportunities for
advancement. While we discuss and say we
encourage the recruitment of library workers from
diverse backgrounds, our application requirements
are not designed to celebrate the experiences of
diverse applicants. We need to reframe application
requirements, materials, and interview questions in
ways that make sense for a variety of applicants’
experiences [36].
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SOCIAL JUSTICE IN MEDICAL LIBRARIANSHIP
In earlier portions of this talk, I discussed how
medical educators and health professional students
have incorporated social justice, through critical
consciousness, into their work and studies. I have
also discussed how our profession has been
challenged in achieving success in diversity despite
our efforts. Though social justice has not been the
focal point for the medical library profession, there
are examples in which individual medical librarians
have been active in what I would call social justice
outreach.
One such example is the response of some of our
members to the appearance of HIV/AIDS in the
early 1980s, a disease that was social and
stigmatized the populations it affected. While only a
handful of articles about this new disease appeared
in peer-reviewed journals in the early 1980s and the
disease was never recognized until after the Ronald
Reagan presidency, new and different sources of
information were developing to fill the void. Gay
and community-based organizations primarily in
New York and San Francisco, where effects of the
disease were most felt, were collecting and
distributing information about treatment and
prevention; often with the help of medical librarians
working with these organizations. The first MLA
presentation on this topic, “The AIDS Information
Crisis: Confluence of the Roles of Information
Creator, Seeker, and Provider,” by David Ginn,
which was delivered at the 1987 annual meeting in
Portland, Oregon, chronicled the information
phenomenon in the gay and community-based
organizations and called for the AIDS information
gap to be addressed by our profession [37].
At the same time, M. Kent Mayfield, MLA
headquarters continuing education program leader,
enlisted Ginn and Richard Stevens, AIDS director of
the Health Council of South Florida, to develop an
AIDS information course outlining the new and
expanding types of information that existed in the
community setting. In the meantime, Gerald J. Perry,
AHIP, FMLA, and Jeffrey T. Huber were publishing
important books on AIDS information resources and
terminology. Perry later went on to form the LGBT
Health Sciences Librarians Special Interest Group
(SIG) in MLA. In 1994, the National Library of
Medicine (NLM) developed a special funding
mechanism for HIV/AIDS community-based
information access, in which some of us have
partnered over the last twenty plus years, bringing
information retrieval, skills development, computer
acquisition, and Internet access to this affected
community.
There are numerous other projects funded by
NLM in which medical librarians partnered with
community-based organizations to enhance the
health information literacy of underserved
populations. As they are too numerous to name
them all, I will highlight a few I am most familiar
with. Projects included partnerships with mental
health patients and providers. E-mental health
programs, coordinated through the Countway
Library with partners at the Massachusetts
Department of Mental Health and the Dartmouth
College and Harvard University Medical Schools,
were designed to enhance the health information
literacy of seriously ill mental health patients and
their families, focusing on co-occurring disease.
Persons with serious mental illness have high
mortality rates, tend be smokers, experience obesity,
and present with multiple physical health concerns.
This project focused on information related to
physical as well as mental health resources. Another
project I worked on while in Worcester addressed
the opioid crisis. We worked with the city’s first
alternative high school for addicted teens. Medical
librarians worked with students, their parents, and
their teachers to create a resource room with
Internet, computer, and pamphlet materials and
sponsored speakers who focused on options for
recovery, addiction counseling, and the
decriminalization of addiction.
When NLM broadened its attention to serving
consumers in addition to health professionals, its
funding for health information outreach to
minorities, underserved, and vulnerable populations
through the National Network of Libraries of
Medicine (NNLM) has been and continues to be a
critical vehicle for social justice librarianship.
Medical librarians partnered with public libraries to
provide consumer health collections and access to
MedlinePlus, computers, and Internet connections
as well as training for public librarians. In 2002, for
example, medical librarians from the Yale University
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical
Library partnered with the New Haven Free Public
Library to develop a Consumer Health Information
Center with collection and information services for
the city’s public library users who are traditionally
from minority and economically disadvantaged
groups. Then Library Director Regina Kenny
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Marone received a recognition award from the city
for her leadership in this project.
Another example is the SPIRAL project from
Tufts University Hirsch Health Sciences Library.
SPIRAL stands for “Selected Patient Information
Resources in Asian Languages.” Partnering with the
Chinatown community in Boston, Tufts University
health sciences librarians and community health
center providers developed a free online website
with patient health information resources in
languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian,
Korean, Thai, and Japanese.
Medical librarians working in international
librarianship in conjunction with health care
providers to expand medical education curricular
and accompanying library resources in countries
such as Liberia speak to our profession’s
commitment to improving health through equal
access to information in a global society. The societal
impacts of diseases such as Ebola on a country like
Liberia are major, threatening the peace process,
causing psychological distress, and resulting in
numerous losses of life for the citizenry and health
care providers, causing a breakdown of the health
care and educational systems. Cultural
considerations such as burial practices and wide
distrust of traditional healers as well as a lack of
basic infrastructure (regular electricity, limited
Internet access) hindered efforts in the beginning to
control the disease. In a country like Liberia, which
was recovering from decades of civil war and whose
people experienced years where educational
institutions could not operate, basic library services
such as print textbooks, a manual check-out system,
and copy cataloging served the medical school
faculty and students well. The Ebola outbreak
resulted in the closing of the medical school, but
post-outbreak that basic library was continuing to
function when the medical school reopened, and
luckily, all the staff we worked with survived the
crises, though some of the students had died.
The Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard
Medical School, is extending the social justice
mindset beyond direct outreach services to
incorporating a public history perspective to its
medical archives and special collections. The project
uses a pubic history perspective to apply history to
real-world problems. The project, “Equal Access:
Stories of Diversity and Inclusion at Harvard
Medical School,” focuses on collecting resources that
fill in the gaps in the history of medical education.
The project includes oral histories and papers from
students and faculty who are underrepresented in
medicine, including the first women and African
American students and faculty. The intention is to
use these collections to create a “dialogical” with
collaboration and input from the community whose
collections are being archived and personal stories
recorded in order to more fully interpret and
understand the issues surrounding barriers to
accessing medical education and why this history is
important.
The success of these and similar projects
depends not on just going into the community and
making resources available. All these outreach
projects involve getting to know the community and
its cultures, developing an equal partnership with
the community, showing respect for cultural norms
and practices, and then tailoring services to these.
Medical librarians’ obligation in providing
consumer health information services to the public is
a relatively recent phenomenon. MLA’s recognition
of the Consumer and Patient Health Information
Section, the subsequent Consumer Health
Information Specialization, and most recent
announcement of nominations for the newly
endowed MLA Consumer Health Librarian of the
Year Award have cemented what was once regarded
as a controversial new role into accepted practice.
CALL TO ACTION
—A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which
is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for
justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for
that which is true. Martin Luther King [38]
If medical librarians are to remain relevant in the
future, I believe we must deal with the lack of
diversity in our profession, actively create our future
using humanistic approaches, and use our
information resources, spaces, and expertise to solve
relevant issues of today. These include addressing
the social and racial injustices in health care. We can
use our library spaces to encourage critical
consciousness conversations about the hard issues
such as racism, sexism, gun violence, health
disparities, climate change, and other societal issues
affecting the health of the nation.
Our libraries can be the community centers
where these conversations, open dialogue, and civil
debate should be encouraged and can occur. In
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addition, we can provide the quality information
and data to help participants in these conversations
critically evaluate and sift out the fake news from
the real news. It is our responsibility to provide
access to accurate, trusted information as well as the
tools and skills to critically evaluate that information
in ways that promote diversity, equity, inclusion,
and social justice. In addition, we need to collect,
preserve, and make available information by, for,
and about marginalized communities and fill in the
gaps in the history of medical education. In 1962,
British librarian Douglas John Foskett wrote The
Creed of a Librarian: No Politics, No Religion, No
Morals, in which he argued “the librarian ought
virtually vanish as an individual person, except in so
far as his personality sheds light on the working of
the library” [39].
I disagree with Foskett. In my opinion, the
notion of library neutrality is a myth. Our buying
decisions, resources, budgets, and even locations are
not neutral. We contribute to certain kinds of
inequalities through our acquisitions decisions, our
cataloging practices, our classification schemes, our
controlled vocabularies, our use of commercial
search engines, and even where we are located in
our hospitals or academic campuses. We regularly
practice self-censorship in book selection by
primarily buying from corporate vendors.
Neutrality is “a code word for the existing system. It
has nothing to do with anything but agreeing to
what is and will always be…Neutrality is just
following the crowd” [40]. A neutral stance does not
care about human rights violations. Neutrality does
not account for social and economic inequalities. The
notion that the medical library is a social institution
that serves as a community center for its users is not
neutral. Medical librarians cannot be neutral and be
trusted advocates for their communities, especially
the underserved. I believe that medical librarians
can be forces for social good. This is crucial to our
future and to the health of our local communities
and a sustainable global community.
What can medical librarians do? We need to
move beyond awareness to action. We must address
the whiteness of our profession and develop real
strategies for doing so [36]. We must acknowledge
that our libraries have never been and are not
neutral. We must bring our libraries closer to the
communities we serve. We need to confront the
societal responsibilities of LIS and develop curricula
that emphasize preparing future librarians for
leadership roles in activism, community service and
engagement, rights, and justice. We need to shift our
focus to the people and communities we serve and
de-emphasize collections. Medical librarians in
partnership with medical educators can and should
provide students with opportunities, resources, and
spaces that encourage open dialogue on social
issues, broaden their horizons, encourage empathy
for patients, and use these experiences to make a
difference. Medical librarians should embrace a
humanistic approach to professional practice, one
that embraces the whole person, not just the
physician scientist, and supports curricular efforts
that expand the humanities in medicine. We need to
offer services, programs, and resources that reflect
the diversity of the communities we serve and
provide outreach to and advocacy for and with
underserved communities in our local communities.
We need to support open access publishing and
advocate for policies that increase access to
information for all [30].
Medical librarians, our professional associations,
and LIS schools can take specific actions to promote
social justice. We can offer open dialogues and
discussions on social justice topics at our library
conferences. We can develop hiring practices that
recognize a variety of experiences, application
formats, and interview styles to encourage diverse
applicants to apply. We can commit to opening the
pipeline into medical librarianship through
innovative pathways for library assistants to attain
the MLIS. We can make concerted efforts to hire
staff from diverse backgrounds that reflect US
census data. We must develop a welcoming and
inclusive environment for all employees and library
users in our workplaces. We must welcome all
comers into our library conferences. We must
develop an approach to professional practice that
considers user needs and experiences first and offer
library services, resources, and programs that reflect
the needs of our users, especially those who may be
marginalized. We can adopt a public history
perspective to building special collections and
archives, filling in the gaps. We can adopt and
enforce practices and policies that show respect for
ALL library users, even when these may be
inconvenient for us. We must implement outreach
and advocacy programs in equal partnership with
underserved populations, respecting cultural norms,
in order to increase access to health information
throughout the world. In the LIS schools or
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programs, we need to add courses into the
curriculum that focus on diversity and social justice
topics; and we need to increase the number of LIS
faculty from diverse backgrounds.
CONCLUSION
—Injustice everywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King [41]
Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish said,
“Librarians must become active not passive agents
of the democratic process” [42]. Social justice and
social responsibility are core values of the medical
profession. Medical librarians have been an
untapped resource for this important work.
Diversity, inclusion, and social justice are the
defining issues for the present and future of the
medical library profession. Positive outcomes from
this work will be cementing the relevance of the
medical librarian as a member of the health care
team. Medical librarians who practice their
profession through a social justice lens have the
potential to have a meaningful impact on
transforming the health of the public, especially the
marginalized.
Medical librarians are no strangers to change
and evolving roles. We have learned new
technologies and adapted them into our library
workflows. We have moved from a focus on print to
electronic resources. We have added online
searching, expert searching, systematic reviews, and
in-person and online teaching to our portfolios. We
work outside the library as informationists and are
embedded into research or clinical teams. We have
learned how to write data management plans and
teach researchers and graduate students how to use
electronic lab notebooks. Social justice medical
librarianship is one more change in the evolution of
our profession. We can do this. We must do this. The
future of our profession depends on it.
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AUTHOR’S AFFILIATION
Elaine Russo Martin, FMLA,
elaine_martin@hms.harvard.edu, Director of
Library Services, Countway Library, Harvard
Medical School, Boston, MA
Received March 2019; accepted March 2019
Articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This journal is published by the University Library System
of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe
Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the
University of Pittsburgh Press.
ISSN 1558-9439 (Online)
Elaine Russo Martin, FMLA
See end of article for author’s affiliation.
This lecture discusses social justice and the role that medical librarians can play in a democratic society. Social justice needs to be central to the mission of medical librarianship and a core value of the profession. Medical librarians must develop a new professional orientation: one that focuses on cultural awareness or cultural consciousness that goes beyond ourselves and our collections to that which focuses on the users of our libraries. We must develop a commitment to addressing the issues of societal, relevant health information. Using examples from medical education, this lecture makes the case for social justice librarianship. This lecture also presents a pathway for social justice medical librarianship, identifies fundamental roles and activities in these areas, and offers strategies for individual librarians, the Medical Library Association, and library schools for developing social justice education and outcomes. The lecture advocates for an understanding of and connection to social justice responsibilities for the medical library profession and ends with a call to go beyond understanding to action.
The lecture emphasizes the lack of diversity in our profession and the importance of diversity and inclusion for achieving social justice. The lecture presents specific examples from some medical libraries to extend the social justice mindset and to direct outreach, collections, archives, and special collection services to expose previously hidden voices. If medical librarians are to remain relevant in the future, we must act to address the lack of diversity in our profession and use our information resources, spaces, and expertise to solve the relevant societal issues of today.
INTRODUCTION
DEFINING SOCIAL JUSTICE
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND MEDICAL SCHOOL CURRICULUM
THE CASE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE MEDICAL LIBRARIAN
THE SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION DEBATE
DIVERSITY IN LIBRARIANSHIP
SOCIAL JUSTICE IN MEDICAL LIBRARIANSHIP
CALL TO ACTION
CONCLUSION
References
Author’s Affiliation
Elaine Russo Martin, FMLA, elaine_martin@hms.harvard.edu, Director of Library Services, Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
Received March 2019; accepted March 2019