In challenging times, it’s good for organizations to remember what they exist to do, and what values drive what they do. They may be expressed in a variety of ways, but there are often common threads going through them. There are lots of library mission statements, for instance, including the one for the university library where I work, the public library for the city where I live, and the library that Congress funds for the American people. Their three statements are all worded differently, but they all involve engaging with the communities they serve to provide access to knowledge and promote learning and creativity.

Carrying out that mission is easier said than done. In my last post, I linked to a page the American Library Association posted with core values that help us keep focused on our missions. In this post, I’d like to draw attention to an overlapping but slightly different set of values, values that some have recently called into question but that are crucially important to what libraries do.

Good libraries are diverse. We have to be, to do our jobs well. Our communities are diverse, with all sorts of ages, backgrounds, education levels, ethnicities, language and expressive skills, genders, faiths, interests, and needs for knowledge. To serve them all, we need to have collections that reflect and serve the diversities in our communities, and in those who come into our communities. We need to have staff that have the knowledge and rapport to effectively serve our diverse communities. And we need them to create and support programming that meets our communities’ needs.

Good libraries are inclusive. We can’t serve our communities well in their full diversities if we don’t make a conscious effort to ensure we’re including everyone in those communities as best we can. A town’s public library might have a rich and diverse collection of English-language books for preschoolers and their parents, for instance, but if there’s little in its collections or programs for school-age children, young adults, retirees, or readers of non-English languages, for example, it’s not doing its job as well as it should.

Good libraries are accessible. Libraries won’t be inclusive just by our saying they are. When we invite everyone to use our libraries, we have to make that invitation meaningful by ensuring everyone can reasonably and fairly access them. If we really mean to be inclusive for seniors, for example, we need to make sure that the many seniors who have problems with stairs or small type can use the facilities, websites, and books that our library provides. We need to make sure that our community members who don’t read English well have access to books that they can read, in the languages they know, as well as books that will help people learn English and the other languages used in our communities. When we fail at accessibility, we fail at inclusion.

Good libraries are equitable. Equity is important in its own right as a standard of fairness, and also for ensuring and balancing the other values noted above. Not every specific part of a diverse and inclusive library will be for everybody, or should be for everybody. A book about how to work with the Medicare system will generally not be of use to a preschooler, for instance. Nor should it be if it’s going to effectively serve the needs of the retirees the book is meant for. Likewise, an alphabet rhyming book is unlikely to be of interest to a doctor with no particular interest in children. Similarly, some of the specific programs and initiatives that libraries undertake will be of more use and interest to some parts of their communities than others.

An equitable library ensures that its collections and programs, taken as a whole, fairly balance the needs of the various constituencies in its community. As part of that fair balance, an equitable library also takes into account existing inequities and other deficiencies present in its community, and do its part to alleviate them. A library serving a community with higher than usual unemployment, for example, might devote more resources than other libraries might towards materials and programs that help people get jobs. It might also give special attention to parts of the community that have particularly high unemployment rates.

Good libraries reaffirm and clarify their values when challenged. This can be hard to do sometimes. Some people claim that programs involving diversity, inclusion, accessibility, or equity (or various rearrangements or acronyms of those words) are unjustly discriminatory or illegal. If one of our community members comes to us with a concern like that, it may well be worth listening to. It’s certainly possible to imagine illegal or discriminatory actions being taken under the cover of “DEIA”. It’s also certainly possible to imagine illegal or discriminatory actions being taken under the cover of “combating DEIA”. In either case, we need to make sure that our libraries act in a way that serves our communities fairly, and in line with our values (including the four that I explain above). Putting the word “equity”, say, in big letters on our website does not in itself make us equitable. Nor does removing the word from our website. But explaining what we mean by equity, and putting what we explain into action, can.

Actions mean more than words themselves, but words themselves can be important actions. The keepers of libraries have particular reason to be aware of the power of words, since we’re stewards of so many of them. Words can be promises, both explicit and implicit, and when we speak, others hear what we say, and what we don’t say, and expect us to live up to what they hear. We may shy away from some words when we’re worried about what people who give us funds or support may think about them. But when we do, the people in the communities we serve may also hear our new words and draw their own conclusions about them. In our words and actions, we can decide to protect our institutions with the powerful as best we can. Or we can decide to serve our communities in accordance with our missions and values as best we can. Sometimes those aren’t the same choice.