Research Guides
Collection guidelines inform all of us on why or why not certain books may be included in this collection. They allows for consistency in decision making when multiple people support the growth of the collection.
Recommended Reads for Equity engages the UW community in critical conversations, reading, critical thinking and community building; all of which are essential to lifelong learning and engaged citizenship.
Guided by the UW community, we collect recommendations for books about equity, diversity, and inclusion and create opportunities to share recommendations and hold conversations and discussions as a whole campus community.
The community’s recommendations are used to build a book collection in Odegaard Library, ultimately creating a lasting legacy of UW’s commitment to and interest in equity.
We collect recommendations for books about equity, diversity, and inclusion. We believe that our definition of equity, diversity, and inclusion should be a reflection of our community. Our collection and our collective definition of equity, diversity, and inclusion, are shaped by the recommendations we are given.
Our definition has purposefully been kept broad, in order to not limit the scope of the collection and how it might support the intersectional experiences that have been represented in the UW collection. We recognize that these definitions are personal to each individual and that the collective definition may change over time. These three terms for our purposes are defined as:
“Diversity is the variety of ways in which people are described at individual levels and as affiliated with socially identifiable groups. There is diversity across groups, and often even more diversity within socially identifiable groups. Common ways to think about diversity are related to race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, national origin, gender identity, etc.” (DeEtta Jones). The intersectionality of these facets of identity further expand divergent representations of our collective human experience. Intersectionality does not exist separately from diversity; diversity is multiplicitous and encompassing.
“Inclusion is behavioral. Inclusion is the variety of choices that can be at individual, group, and organization-wide levels that encourage engagement, enforce safety, set expectations, and create a sense of shared belonging… (DeEtta Jones).”
“Equity refers to the acknowledgment of systems that have prevented people and groups from full access, and in many cases actively excluded them... Equity is about interrogating the systems that have been built over hundreds of years, and all of which have been informed by individual and collective bias. As values and the expression of cultural values change, the systems must be unraveled, reviewed, vetted against current understanding and interpretation, and revised—if not overhauled completely (DeEtta Jones).”
The genres included in the collection are:
Part of how resources are selected for this collection is based on whether or not a recommendation fits within our collection scope.
Any geographical region is welcome. The present collection mostly consists of the United States, especially the Pacific Northwest.
The primary collecting emphasis is in English and English language translations. Materials in other languages are acquired selectively. Most non-English resources are included in the UW Library collection through the efforts of the area studies selectors.
The default format is print books with some titles available as e-books. Exceptions may be possible with a specific request and a provided reason.
Books that would otherwise be collected by other library collection selectors without a clear reason for inclusion will be excluded from this collection.
The majority of the Recommended Reads for Equity collection is housed on Odegaard's Second Floor. Other possible locations of duplicate copies may include the Odegaard Good Reads Collection on the Second Floor, Suzzallo Library, UW Tacoma, UW Bothell, or other branch libraries. Additionally, certain books may also be available through the libraries as e-books.