The Collaborative Blog Post: Lowering Barriers to Access by Raising Understanding

Posted by Community-based Global Learning Collaborative on October 27, 2020

“Lowering barriers to access by raising understanding” was written by Mike Zarafonetis, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship and Research Services for Haverford College Libraries.

Libraries and archives are not neutral institutions. They can and should be agents for equity, inclusion, and justice in the communities they serve. In an information landscape dominated by the interests of capital, libraries remain crucial instruments for creating, disseminating, and preserving community-based knowledge–especially while access to our physical locations are necessarily restricted in order to protect public health. Digital scholarship has proven vital to libraries during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through electronic database subscriptions, we provide access to books and articles to our users without their presence in the building (or even on campus). Through digital collections on the web, we can provide similar access to some archival materials. For digital scholarship projects like Ticha, we continue to connect users to nontraditional, multimodal, and community-engaged scholarship.

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