**Please note the Green Book for Libraries is currently on hiatus. Current pages will remain up and available for rating and review, but there will be no updates or responses for password requests. Reviewer comments will also not be updated. We’d love to see this valuable resource get back up and running under new leadership with the capacity to keep it going. But until then, it’s been a pleasure creating and maintaining such a important tool for our community. ~AH
The Green Book for Libraries is a Black/Indigenous/People Of Color-only crowd-sourced rating and review system for library, information, and archival workplaces. The name “Green Book for Libraries” is a riff off of and homage to the Negro Motorist Greenbook, published by Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966 as a guide for Black travelers seeking safe and welcoming accommodations in Jim Crow America. Our version of the Green Book for Libraries has a similar aim—to help identify those workplaces in LIS that provide safe and welcoming environments where BIPOC can thrive.
This project began as an idea proposed by April Hathcock and developed by a group of us at a symposium in December 2019. We hope to build it up with our BIPOC LIS community as a whole, at a time when it is needed more than ever.
Welcome to the Green Book for Libraries!
Using the Green Book for Libraries is simple:
We want to honor all those who have come before us in doing this work and who continue to shine a light to lead the way. Honor to the Indigenous communities, the original stewards and protectors of the lands and waters on which these institutions are located.
Honor to the Black folks whose blood, sweat, tears, and labor have gone into building up these institutions, often under enslavement, without pay or acknowledgement.
Honor to the queer folk, the non-binary folk, the trans folk, and the women who have been doing this labor unsung for so long.
Honor to Victor Hugo Green whose original idea spurred our own.
Finally, special thanks to all those making this project possible through support, work, ideas, and finances: Trevor A. Dawes, April Hathcock, Jen Brown, Jenny Ferretti, and Sofia Leung, among others.