The Booher Library on the campus of Seminary of the Southwest has several resources available to students, faculty, and staff, including their LibGuides. LibGuides are librarian-generated web pages created to help the community find information about resources, perform various tasks, and do research.
The library staff partners with faculty and students to create the LibGuides. One particular student, Lissie Rhoton, a senior DAS major, has spent her work study hours developing the LibGuide for Resources for Racial Reconciliation and Justice.
“LibGuides are a way the library can curate resources for our students and faculty on a particular topic,” said Alison Poage, director of Booher Library. “Libraries used to be limited to printed bibliographies, but now with LibGuides the list of resources can be linked to the catalog, eBooks, websites, and more.”
“This particular LibGuide was created to support the work our students, staff and faculty are doing to engage in conversations about race on campus,” said Poage. “It features quotes from our faculty members that connect the ideas in the resources back to our particular community, thus embodying our core value of rootedness.”
“This LibGuide is an extensive and continually expanding resource for racial reconciliation,” said Rhoton. “It is a collection of books, articles, and web resources to further equip and prepare students for the work of racial reconciliation in their contexts. There are pages on topics such as anti-blackness, mass incarceration, prophetic voices, slavery and resistance, the Episcopal Church and race, womanism, and many more. The Libguide is a living document that is updated regularly, so if anyone has additional resources to suggest, please contact the Booher Librarians.”
“Before I came to seminary, I was working on educating myself about racial reconciliation. It has also been a large focus of my time here at seminary,” Rhoton said. “Each seminarian is assigned a librarian to work for, and I was assigned to Alison. I’m not sure if they already knew I had been doing this kind of work or not, but I was glad to dive in. I’ve worked on gathering resources, formatting, and making the Racial Reconciliation LibGuide visually pleasing. Many of the resources were collected by faculty and staff of the seminary, although I researched and compiled many of the spotlights on specific people within the Racial Reconciliation LibGuide. I researched and put together the Legacy of Lynching tab within the Racial Reconciliation LibGuide.”
The library website features 18 different LibGuides on subjects like Latinx Counseling Concentration, Spirituality and Clinical Mental Health Counseling, and links to other Austin Libraries to find even more resources. This newest LibGuide was added in to support the efforts of Black History Month.
The Booher Library also has a special book and media display up in celebration of Black History Month this February. It features this year’s themed book list as well as works by faculty members the Rev. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan and Dr. Awa Jangha, and library staff members Duane Carter and Marlon Patterson. The Black History Month LibGuide is meant to make those books more accessible.
“We created the Black History Month LibGuide to supplement our in house book display because several of the books recommended by the Black History Month committee are held by the library in e-book format, such as Stakes Is High : Race, Faith, and Hope for America by Michael W. Waters,” said Poage.
These online resources are available to the greater public.
