As students congregate in study groups around the library to try and study for exams or work on projects, a group of staff is working behind the scenes making the space more accessible and inclusive. Penrose Library has recently been awarded the 2025 Library Excellence in Accessibility and Diversity (LEAD) Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine, and is recognized as a stand-out library across the nation among a handful of others who are pushing for diversity work in their programs and spaces.
Bridget Scoles, student success and instruction librarian, explained how a group of staff called PLEIAD (Penrose Library Equity, Inclusion, Anti-Racism and Diversity working group) was started in 2023, focusing their efforts on these issues that they saw in the library. The membership of the group is frequently rotating and includes a variety of staff who work in Penrose.
“We are hoping to keep this going for a long time, as it is important to keep integrating these values into our work, and as a staff it is important to focus on these ideas and implement them as a group and altogether … We are actively doing work and doing teach-ins, making sure we are doing the work needed to spread these ideas,” Scoles said.
This award acknowledges the work that the library has been putting in to combat disparities and inequality in representation, focusing on the content the library loans, the programs it offers and the way its physical space is organized.
“It underscores the work that we’ve been doing and the dedication that we have as the library to connect with both the student-faculty and the staff regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on a broad scope,” said Lindsay Tebeck, the collection strategist librarian and member of PLEIAD.
Sophomore Micaela Brown explained how the library functions as more than just a neutral space, instead providing key access to information.
“I believe that the library is an extremely valuable resource for us to have as students because at its core, it facilitates access to knowledge and learning,” Brown said.
Some of the projects that the library has been doing to work towards this goal require more than just staff involvement, and librarians emphasize that student input is critical in bringing many issues to light.
“We’ve done work with student groups, last semester we did work with the Human-Centered Design students, and we brought them this really broad question of how can we make the library more welcoming, and then gave them specific areas of the library to work on. This semester they gave us pitches on those ideas and quite a few of those ideas are really great, so we are hoping to implement them,” Scoles said. “Some of those looked at accessibility issues and how we can make way-finding better in the library, so really things we had already been thinking about. Bringing in students brings another perspective.”
Brown voiced her hopes for the future, commending the library on its efforts so far.
“Ensuring that this knowledge is accessible to all students should be our absolute priority. I am proud of the efforts that the Penrose Library has taken to foster this inclusive environment, and I hope that we can continue to do so as our study body grows and evolves,” Brown said.
The award also recognizes how collections are purchased and how the library chooses to display works for patrons, focusing on the library’s content as well as its structural organization.
“We are always looking for more ways to represent our community in the collection itself through these displays and within the collection, and the things that we purchase … We were on the forefront of the amount of diverse titles in our collection, so that’s something that we’re proud of,” Tebeck said.
Whilst this award is a great achievement for Penrose and a step in the right direction for diversity, Tebeck also acknowledged that there was still more work to be done, and shared some of the projects that the library is working on currently. One example is improving the library’s cataloging system through a project called Homosaurus, which aims to introduce more inclusive and extensive language into Penrose’s cataloging system.
“Reparative cataloging, which is the act of improving our cataloging … is looking into ways to include LGBTQ+ language into our systems, so into the catalog itself … On top of the reparative cataloging work that has been done, I’d say that our strategic plan has diversity and equity inclusion weaved within it … We are thinking about the library in a structural way and the things that we do day to day, so we are thinking about things like changing our name tags to include our pronouns, [and] there is signage that we are thinking about making more accessible,” Tebeck said.
Scoles explained another project that the library is working on to make neurodiverse students feel more comfortable coming to Penrose.
“[The project] is basically just a document of pictures introducing spaces around the library … which makes it so that people can preview what the space is like before they come in just in case they have some anxieties surrounding the library,” Scoles said.
These projects all aim to further justify why Penrose deserves this award, as librarians and others around campus work to make the library a space that all students can enjoy and use to its fullest potential.
