Grounding diversity: challenges for two Mexican private university libraries to attend diverse community members’ information needs

Abstract

A conceptual framework to understand diversity in two Jesuit private universities in Mexico is proposed. Through the shared experience of a collaborative research group performing grounded theoretical research in libraries, a group of conceptual markers of diversity was distilled from exploratory qualitative data originated in both institutions. Diversity represents an interesting challenge for university libraries, but also libraries in general regarding information collections, services, and access from a perspective of complex communities requiring information access to achieve the UN Developing Objectives 2030. Although the concept of diversity is widely present in literature, Mexican universities face additional challenges to find comprehensive conceptual approaches that expand the theoretical framework of diversity into other forms such as family composition, learning differences, and other relevant factors within the libraries’ role to reduce inequalities among its users and communities. This poster focuses on the challenges that imply recognizing diversity for university libraries through getting to know closely their own student population’s experiences. Both universities are significantly marked by internal migration and financial capabilities of their own populations that need to be considered on how diversity is discussed at academic libraries. We expect this experience can be useful to approach diversity markers to analyze information needs of library users’ communities, information access program design to support UN Developing Objectives 2030 and subsequent evaluation.