Person: Freedman, Kate
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Librarian for History and Undergraduate Education
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Freedman
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Kate
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History of Religion
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Publication Publishing Your Dissertations: Open Access / Embargo / Other Options? What’s In Your Best Interest? A Panel Discussion(2013-10-22) Ogilvie, Brian; Quilter, Laura; Wilcox, Bruce; Freedman, KateHeated discussion erupted over the American Historical Association statement urging universities to allow PhD recipients to embargo their electronic dissertation for up to six years while they pursue a book contract. Harvard University Press responded with a blog post that made a convincing case that immediate open access could be advantageous. Some institutions have recently changed their open access and embargo policies. This panel will provide faculty, librarian, University Press, and graduate student views on this timely topic followed by Q&A. Light refreshments will be served.Publication Successful student transfer from community college: opportunities and barriers(2019-05-06) Freedman, Kate; Harrington, LizaDuring this roundtable, attendees discussed the community college to four year transfer experience, and what role libraries, librarians, and information literacy can play in student success. Notes from the discussion are included in the notes field of the uploaded presentation.Publication A TANGLED WEB: QUAKERS AND THE ATLANTIC SLAVE SYSTEM 1625 – 1770.(2018-05) Freedman, KateThis dissertation re-contextualizes the Quakers’ history as anti-slavery pioneers by exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the British West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world. Quakers were driven by their faith to foster a spirit of equality inside and outside of their meetings. They were among the first European religious sects to allow women to preach, to oppose violence and war, and, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth-century, to ban the practice of enslaving other human beings within their membership. Yet the Quakers were also consummate capitalists, a role they took on to gain money and power to protect themselves from persecution by Anglicans and Puritans and to create for their children cocooned environments where spiritual fostering and growth could take place. These conflicting aspects of Quaker culture created competing desires among individual Quakers: to treat all peoples as God’s children, but also to gain the forms of earthly economic security needed to survive as members of a fledging religious sect. This study argues that Quaker founder George Fox’s decision to build upon the “natural” hierarchy of the family to create a paternalistic approach to class division enabled the early Quakers to appeal to upper-class converts and build a culture in which elite Quakers used their resources to protect and nurture the less-resourced Quakers in their Meetings. The early Quakers' appeal to wealthy converts acted in synergy with the concurrent emergence of the sugar-based economy in the British West Indies, enabling Quaker missionaries from England to convert planters in the Caribbean and to give the sect the opportunity to reap the enormous profits of the sugar boom. By the eighteenth century, the Quaker-led colonies of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island were economically viable in large part because of their connection to the West Indies and the slave-based production of sugar and molasses.Publication We've Failed at Diversifying Our Librarian Ranks, Now What ? A Plan for Addressing the "Pipeline" Problem(2018-05-04) Sollinger, Annie; Espinal, Isabel; Smith, Pete; Freedman, KateLike many libraries, at our library, we have tried for many years to racially diversify our profession. One of our librarians even made it to the Library Journal " Movers & Shakers" list for raising awareness of the library profession to students of color through presentations, videos, dinners, and icebreaking activities. But despite our intentions and past efforts, the situation has not improved significantly. Let's face it, we have all failed miserably: currently, the racial composition of librarianship, both at our library and in the librarian profession-at-large, is woefully unrepresentative of the United States’ population. Moreover, despite numerous analyses of this problem over the past decades, the demographics have remained stagnant. For example, for the past decade, our staff of roughly 40 professional librarians has not included any African American librarians. The Institute of Museum and Library Services tweeted a graph in November 2017, showing that the problem is nation-wide (see: https://twitter.com/US_IMLS/status/927922066896146432). Although we might take comfort in knowing that it's not just us — that the profession as a whole has not been able to diversity its ranks — at our library we are not satisfied by the reason that many leaders in our field give for the whiteness of our profession, namely that the issue is "simply" a lack of a diverse MLS holders. At our library, we are attempting to address this problem at the root, by making graduate school in library science more financially accessible to people of color. This past year and a half, a group of library staff have worked out a proposal for a Post-Baccalaureate Diversity Recruitment Fellowship in which participants would have their tuition and educational expenses financially covered while attending library school and working at our library. The aim is to recruit people of color into the field of librarianship, thus increasing the pool of librarians of color both at our library and in the profession at large by removing the financial barrier of the cost of attaining a graduate dress in Library and Information Studies. We will outline the previous approaches as well, so that we can learn collectively about what did not work. For example, over the years, we held recruitment events for students of color; we post our jobs to listservs of the library ethnic caucuses; we have included diversity language in our recruitment and personnel materials. What we have found is that some of the efforts were inconsistent, not fully supported by library administrations, or simply not bold or big enough. There are other reasons that we will also discuss. Takeaways: -A positive new idea – a Diversity Fellowship that has been fleshed out in a proposal template that we will share. -Work on this proposal has established inclusion as a priority for library staff, catching the attention of the Dean who has looked for ways to make this a reality.