Career Conversations: Disability and Hiring

In my experience, librarians believe they try very hard to be aware and supportive of people with differing abilities, both physical and intellectual. Our successes in this area tend to be public facing, with detailed attention paid to construction of public spaces, design of accessible online content, and creation of inclusive public programming. We talk about library services and outreach to people with disabilities—the web pages, articles, and blog posts out there are legion. Yet when it comes time to make hiring changes within our ranks, inclusivity doesn’t happen. While I genuinely believe we want to support diversity in hiring, we fall short.