TCDL 2022

Opening Plenary & Keynote

• Welcome from Texas Digital Library
• TDL Awards Ceremony
• Keynote Address: Elaine L. Westbrooks

Keynote: Reckoning and Transformation: the value of being of and for equity and Inclusion
Speaker: Elaine L. Westbrooks
When Westbrooks launched a call to action to her organization, UNC Chapel Hill Libraries, to actually do something about systemic racism and the inequities that persist in academic research libraries, she had no idea what would happen. In the past two years, the Reckoning Initiative has provided a great opportunity to learn about what it takes to be anti-racist and all of the barriers that make it so elusive and difficult. Westbrooks will share what she has learned about building a strategy for equity and inclusion and the mistakes that were made along the way. Westbrooks will also talk about how the core part of the strategy has to be about understanding and addressing the inequitable components of our library systems (e.g. budget, communications, IT, development) and then coming up with sustainable new policies, practices, and procedures that help transform the organization, individuals, and how people see their work and themselves within the evolving organization.

Elaine L. Westbrooks has been Vice Provost for University Libraries and University Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2017. She leads a library system that includes 10 libraries; nearly 10 million volumes; 270 librarians, archivists and staff; and a budget of approximately $45 million.
Westbrooks has held library leadership positions at the University of Michigan, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Cornell University. She began her career as a cataloger and digital research librarian at the University of Pittsburgh.

Westbrooks is a member of the Association of Research Libraries’ Scholars and Scholarship Committee and the Executive Committee and Governing Board of the Triangle Research Libraries Network. She serves on the boards of the Center for Open Science, Digital Public Library of America and the HathiTrust Digital Library.

She co-edited “Metadata in Practice” with Diane Hillmann (2004) and “Academic Library Management: Case Studies” with Tammy Nickelson Dearie and Michael Meth (2017). She is a frequent speaker on issues of open access, transforming the scholarly communications system and inclusion, diversity, equity and access in libraries and higher education. Westbrooks has a B.A in Linguistics and an M.L.I.S. from the University of Pittsburgh.