At American University Library, we are committed to fostering an inclusive, accessible, and welcoming environment for all members of our community. We believe that inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) values must be the foundation of our work and how we work together to support students, faculty, and the broader AU community. On this page you can learn more about what we’ve done so far and what more we hope to do.

IDEA values are embedded in our 2023-2026 Strategic Plan and draw from American University’s plan for Inclusive Excellence. In 2024, INSIGHT Into Diversity Magazine honored American University Library with a prestigious, inaugural award for our outstanding commitment to diversity and fostering an environment that welcomes all voices and perspectives. We are grateful for the recognition of our efforts, and we hope this is just the beginning of our engagement with these values.

The Library also hosts an internal DEI Committee that supports and engages our personnel in promoting diversity and building an inclusive environment at AU Library. The committee shares resources, arranges workshops, and hosts our annual Pride Picnic each June. The committee continues to work to build awareness, engagement, and a community at the library surrounding IDEA values.

Our goal is for our community to encounter IDEA values every time they engage with the library. Thus far, we have developed the following practices and initiatives:

• Collection Development: We continue to work to ensure that under-represented voices are included in our collections, enabling them to be part of the scholarly conversation. The collection committee has a functional definition of IDEA that operationalizes these values in a consistent equitable fashion. We also focus significant effort on increasing our non-English language resources and making purchases from international presses and book vendors.
• Reducing Financial Barriers: We strive to purchase all general education textbooks in support of AU Core and many of the most expensive textbooks, over $150, to reduce financial barriers for our students by making these textbooks available through course reserves. The Library continues to seek resources that are not behind pay walls and provide institutional access to key resources that are behind pay walls to increase equity of access in our community of scholarship.
• Accessibility: We engage with space planning through a universal design perspective that seeks to create environments and systems that are accessible, usable, and inclusive for all people without the need for adaptation. As we work towards this standard, we have in place rooms for nursing parents, gender neutral restrooms, and an adaptive technology room.
• Hiring: We will continue to work on intentionally diversifying our personnel to be reflective of our community, seeking personnel through open, intentionally diverse, searches, and evaluating our hiring processes regularly to ensure they align with our values.
• Events and Exhibits: Everyone’s story belongs at the library, and we use our exhibit and events spaces to share those stories with our community. We have highlighted ENLACE, DC’s first gay/lesbian Latino/a activist group, the Trans experience at AU, AU student activism, Anne Frank’s story, banned books, Black authors, and many more through the years. We are always seeking to amplify minoritized voices, provide a platform for people to speak, and find partners to bring diverse unheard stories into the library.

By embracing and championing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, American University Library strives to create an environment that empowers all people to thrive both academically and personally. We invite our community members to actively participate in our ongoing commitment to IDEA values, as we work together to build a library that reflects and serves the diverse needs of our university community.