Measures for Electronic Resources (E-Metrics) (review)

herself was not a member of an underrepresented group, she had had the luxury of not being concerned about minority issues at all. I would venture to guess that this is a quite common experience of academic library staff, but it is refreshing to see white privilege acknowledged. Remarkable also is her willingness and ability to learn about minority recruitment and her enthusiasm and respect for the residents and the residency program as a whole. Brewer’s essay and others also underscore the value that residencies bring to libraries. Linda DeBeau-Melting writes of how residents model “a transition to a new way of working” for the entire library (p.19). Yet the essays in this book also caution against putting too many expectations or burdens for organizational change on the residents themselves or even on the residency program as a fix-it-all solution to the lack of staff diversity. A related theme is the importance of organizational commitment to diversity and of the education of all library staff. It should not fall on the residents to justify their presence. Of course, the residents’ perspectives, both current and past, are immensely important, and my favorite feature of the book. In the tradition of the groundbreaking 1996 anthology In Our Own Voices: the Changing Face of Librarianship, (edited by Teresa Y. Neely and Khafre K. Abif, Scarecrow Press), the essays of Parts Two and Three give valuable insider information that would be of use to anyone in libraries. There are so few opportunities to gather so many perspectives of librarians of color in one place. Unfortunately, in many academic libraries there is only one of us from any particular group. For example, I’ve been the only Latina/o librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for the five years I have been on staff. I cannot possibly represent all Latinos or all people of color. By reading essays in a book such as this, one can educate oneself in a way that just will not happen in our workplaces, given the current demographics of the profession. The book also gives insights that meld cultural and racial issues with generational issues, by bringing in concerns of the Generation X and the Millennials. For example, Alysee Jordan addressed her attraction to librarianship as a career where she could be true to herself: “At that point I had been tattooed and pierced and wore my hair natural, so I knew the last thing I wanted to do was go corporate.” (p. 62) It’s not a perfect book: I would like to have seen a presence of Asian American and Native Americans. There is at least one editorial error (the residency program at UMass gives the wrong campus name although it gives the right address.) Nonetheless it is quite valuable and complements another important book on this topic—Gregory Reese and Ernestine Hawkins’ Stop Talking, Start Doing! Attracting People of Color to the Library Profession (American Library Association, 1999). For those library administrators and staff who ask just how do we in academia “start doing” something about diversity in our libraries, this book provides an excellent answer. Let’s make sure it gets read. It is time we acknowledge an intermediate step for the academy: Stop Talking—Start Reading books like Diversity in Libraries—and Start Doing!