Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9750-4750

Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

Summer 6-29-2024

Abstract

The goal of the following effort is to move towards a collection that all STEM students at Dartmouth College can see themselves reflected in; not just in books written about diversity in STEM, but in books written by diverse authors in STEM producing scholarship in their fields. An author identity diversity audit was conducted on 154 randomly sampled STEM monographs, individually selected and purchased in fiscal years 2020 - 2023. Methodologies from Toonen & Frank (2021), Frank (2021), and Emerson & Lehman (2022) were used and adapted to randomly sample 10% of titles that met the criteria for the audit, choose identity facets to investigate, and apply a common language to identities for ease of analysis. Google was used to search for each author’s identity facets, totaling 20 hours of searching. Nationalities and pronouns of authors were most consistently discoverable, while race/ethnicities were rarely explicitly claimed, and LGBTQIA+ and disability even less so. Unsurprisingly, most authors were from either North America or Europe and used he/him pronouns. Nationalities and pronouns of authors were analyzed with respect to different publishers and the monograph fund codes, which correspond to departments or majors at Dartmouth. The most diverse publishers were Routledge, Bloomsbury, World Scientific, and Academic Press, while the least diverse were Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. The most diverse collections by discipline were environmental studies, astronomy, and engineering, while the least diverse were biology, math, and physics. The collections that most closely reflected the gender identities of Dartmouth undergraduate students in each STEM major were astronomy, computer science, math, and environmental studies, while the least representative were geology, chemistry, biology, and physics. Gender diverse students were not represented at all, if using author pronouns outside the binary as the comparison. With this baseline, STEM librarians can start to focus their attention on the subject collections and identity facets that don’t reflect STEM student identities and monitor publishers to see if the audit results reflect real patterns.

Comments

This poster was presented at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual conference in the Diversity Fair Poster Session on June 29, 2024.

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