Walking the Talk: Values-Aligned Decision Making in the Library

Libraries increasingly proclaim values such as equity, diversity, transparency, and privacy in their promotional materials and on web sites, but these values often exist more in theory than in practice. And while a lot of energy has been expended in debating and creating values statements, less has been spent on the practicalities of taking aspirational talking points and turn them into guiding principles for our everyday work, whether that be creating metadata, evaluating vendor contracts, supporting open research and educational resources, curating collections, or assessing infrastructure.

In this talk, Nicky Agate will introduce the idea of values-aligned decision making, demonstrating how seemingly abstract values and principles can actually be embedded in everyday work, from the routine to the strategic. She will give attendees examples of values in action in the GLAM sector, drawing on the work of a range of community-driven initiatives, before opening up the floor for brainstorming about actionable strategies for values-aligned decision making across a wide range of library work.

Register Here

Speaker Bio

Dr. Nicky Agate is a co-PI on the HuMetricsHSS project and the Snyder-Granader Assistant University Librarian for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania, where she heads up a team of thinkers, makers, and doers committed to facilitating data-driven and data-literate research and scholarship across the disciplines. She is passionate about open and equitable knowledge production, research communication, and the interdisciplinary, multimodal possibilities of scholarly work beyond the article and monograph. Nicky holds a PhD in French literature from NYU and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.