Building effective communication and interdepartmental partnerships are essential components of strengthening services, policies, and procedures to meet the individual information needs of students, faculty, and the college community. Despite major advancements in library services for users with disabilities, there are ongoing challenges, which need to be addressed. It is essential to develop inclusion and accessibility frameworks that serve mutual departmental interests to share and document lessons learned along the way. This article explores the evolving shared leadership between an Architecture Librarian/Liaison to the AccessAbility Center; and the Director of Student Disability Services at the City College of New York to examine strategic methods of managing, enhancing, and integrating, universal inclusivity and diversity in library services. The Librarian Liaison must take an active role in matters of accessibility policies and practices to meet user needs with cultural sensitivity. Merging the individual experiences, both authors deliver tangible solutions in creating more accessible services and environments, including an assessment checklist to demonstrate whether the Libraries have barriers and/or accessible spaces. The collaborative observations and strategic methods may be applicable to similar academic institutions that are considering transformative outreach initiatives to aid underserved populations such as library users with various disabilities.
We higher education administrators and practitioners in the world of postsecondary disability services experience the ever‐evolving transformation of accommodations and services for college students with disabilities. Just a few years ago, providing “flexibility with assignment deadlines case‐by‐case” was considered an infringement on essential academic standards. We all know that these changes in terms of what is deemed an accommodation and/or service have benefited our students in giving them access; however, there is a dearth of information on the transition from the postsecondary level to reasonable accommodations in the workplace.
About four years ago, when I was a newbie at my home university, The City College of New York, I requested a copy of the university's emergency procedure, which was not posted to the university's website. I was forwarded a copy of it via email, and it appeared to be a poor textual document that was photocopied a million times over. The document had not been revised for nearly a decade — and it did not mention people (visitors, faculty, staff, and students) with disabilities. As a professional social worker, I felt this was morally wrong. I attempted to determine what responses would be required for people with disabilities in the types of emergencies the document outlined.
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