Navigating Barriers

Pathways to Librarianship is a multi-year, multi-phase project between the New York State Library Association and Syracuse University School of Information Studies. It aims to study and address the systemic barriers faced by marginalized people while entering and moving within the library profession. The Pathways Project aims to answer four questions: What are people’s current experiences of pathways into and within the library profession in New York? What are the challenges or barriers people face along their pathways to and within the library profession in New York? How, if at all, do those challenges vary among library types and settings? How can we reduce or eliminate these barriers so as to increase diversity and representation in New York’s library workforce? At the 2023 ALISE conference, we presented the first part of the project, our data collection phase, and our poster focused on how we used the journey mapping technique. This year, we are in our second project phase - Generation and Creation. In this phase, our activities include sharing the data gathered in phase one with key library stakeholders at participatory design workshops and challenging them to dream up actionable solutions for the state. As such, our proposed poster will focus on the outcomes of these workshops and future work. We also will discuss how the recent executive orders regarding the halting of federally funded DEIA work and the dissolution of IMLS have impacted our work and future plans.