Shamella Cromartie, associate dean of organizational performance and administration at Clemson University Libraries, was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work to expand outreach, membership, and support for Black librarians in South Carolina. We recently spoke with Cromartie to learn more about these projects.

LJ: When we spoke with you for Movers & Shakers, you had applied for a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to conduct a study on minority support staff in academic libraries.

Shamella Cromartie: We got the grant, and we’re very grateful to have it. It’s an applied research grant for a national workforce study of minoritized academic library support staff. We’re launching a survey. We did a planning grant first to pull it together. We had an advisory board full of amazing members of our target audience, and they helped us design the study.

Basically, what we’re trying to say is minoritized representation in Library Sciences has held steady in spite of the decades of DEI work we’ve been doing. Those numbers really haven’t changed, so we’re thinking about what more could be done. And one promising idea is that the minoritized paraprofessionals or academic library support staff are in higher numbers, around 25 percent of the library population, while degreed minoritized librarians are only 11 percent, and that’s held for quite some time. We felt this is what we needed to study. What are the barriers to getting an MLS for those already working in the library? I call it the missing piece of the DEI puzzle.

What do you think are some of the barriers for those support staff who aren’t pursuing MLS degrees?

Anecdotally, we talk all the time about things like the cost of the degree, family commitments, whether people actually see a career path forward in LIS. We think these things are the case. Our idea is that if we can talk to this group of people, then we can figure it out. We can get more data that says, “This is what the barrier is to career advancement for me in my academic library, my context.” The questions that we’re trying to answer are how do racially and ethnically minoritized library academic support staff describe the work they do in academic libraries, how do they perceive the career ladder within academic libraries, what barriers to they perceive in career advancement, and what incentives or motivations would cause this group to pursue career advancement toward professional librarian positions?

How will the study be conducted, and how long will the process take?

We’ll use mixed methods. We’re going to launch a nationwide survey that will go live on January 15, 2025. That same day, we’ll hold a webinar with the project team discussing the grant at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. People who are interested can register for it ahead of time. After the survey closes, we’ll try to gather people to participate in focus groups with us, trying to do those as much as we can in some regional areas.

We’re going to do the survey for 100 days. We’ll do a campaign that says, “100 days to have your say,” and gather that information. We’ll probably do an additional four or five months of focus groups. It’s a two-year project overall. It will take all of next year and into 2026 before we have results.

Another aspect of the Mover & Shaker award was your work with the Round Table for African American Concerns of the South Carolina Library Association. Can you tell us more about that?

To be clear, the Round Table for African American Concerns is for both public and academic libraries, while the study we discussed is for academic libraries. Our round table did a regroup this year, just drafted some bylaws, and need to get those approved by the membership. Then we’ll start a campaign to make sure we can get everybody involved in that.

We want to facilitate networking and sustainable membership connections. We want to advocate for the recruitment and retention of African American library professionals and support staff to foster inclusive library environments, and ensure representation in library leadership and decision-making bodies. Right now we’re working on advancing professional development and leadership opportunities. That’s our vision and what we want to work on right now.

What would networking and sustainable mentorship in the profession look like?

We all have so much pressure on us, whether it’s a person trying to get tenure or just getting started in their career. We want to try to just open it up and say, “Are you interested in this, and which end of it are you interested in?” As in, do you want to be mentored or do you believe that you have something to give back as a mentor?

I was coming at it from an angle of thinking how to incentivize people. I was talking to someone here at Clemson who does a lot of coaching, and she said that the research shows that it needs to be more organic. You don’t need to try to bribe people with “We’ll give you $500 a year if you mentor this person.” Instead, you need to put it out there, see who wants to be mentored and who wants to mentor, and let them come together organically. We want to facilitate the connection so it’s not just cold-calling for a mentorship.

But if we can, as a group, endorse this mentoring program, networking and facilitating pathways, maybe it will have legs to it and people will join. I should add that I’m not thinking of our target audience as having a deficit. I’m not putting the onus on them. I’m saying there are absolutely barriers to the pursuit of the MLS or MILS. I have an EdD. I wanted a lot of options for myself, including libraries and possibly beyond libraries as far as higher ed is concerned. I just wanted to be able to have the option to sit at different tables and provide my opinions. That brings me full circle back to the study. We want to know what the barriers are for minoritized library workers and how to help them overcome them.