12-5-02 Diversity Committee Meeting notes
Thura Mack congratulated GiGi on her marriage.
We had a brief discussion about the letter from Dr. Schumaker.
The Diversity Committee won the Team Excellence Awrad. It was a campus wide contest and we will be honored with a breakfast with the Provost on Wednesday, Dec. 11th in the Executive Dining Room in the UC.
Tamara Miller discussed a library sponsored Gullah event on April 7th as part of Africa month and suggested that the DC might want to participate in some way in the presentation. There will be a panel discussion and Steve Harris is our contact to the “Africa Semester” website.
Thura reminded us that we did well with the student recognition festival and that Barbara was pleased by the turn out and response from the students.
There was some discussion about when we would hold our meetings—on the 1st and 3rd Thursday or the 2nd and 4th. This was to accommodate as many people as possible. We settled on January 16th as the date of our next meeting.
Thura reiterated that the DC would be helping with the LSA Holiday Party on Dec. 16th.
The next item on the agenda was the Minority Librarian Program. We perused a draft of the ad for this position and made our own suggestions to Jill. There was some suggestion about which “underrepresented groups” would be considered an we all agreed that this should be spelled out very clearly in the posting so that the candidates knew from the start whether or not they were eligible. Jill was concerned that we wouldn’t get a pool of candidates, but only a pool of one. Anne was very helpful with this entire discussion as she had participated in something similar earlier in her career. Tamara suggested that the person may serve on the DC. This suggestion was enthusiastically received.
There was some discussion about where these people will be housed (where would his/her desk be if he/she is traveling from dept. to dept.?). we discussed providing the person with a faculty study at the very least. Next was the question of education—how do we educate staff about this? There was a little discussion about recruitment—when should it start. Barbara wants it to begin immediately so we decided to try to get into the hands of the Dec. graduates and also to recruit at Midwinter. Tiff asked, what if the person gets hired full time after the internship—does the salary decrease? Jill responded no and that the $ is there right now to proceed with this program. We picked over various parts of the statement and agreed to make any additional changes ASAP when Jill e mailed it out so that it could be turned into a flyer and tri-fold brochure for immediate use. Anthony suggested that we sell the candidates on Knoxville as a good location to settle, not just on the library or the University. There was also some discussion about which other libraries are doing this kind of program and how our proposed program stacks up and we think it’s a fairly favorable comparison in terms of cost of living/salary, etc.
To close, we divided into our small groups to work on the following: 1) Goals and objectives, 2) Alex Haley Farm, 3) Timeline, 4) and new webpage.
Respectfully submitted,
GiGi Bayne