get the attention of prospective students and raise the profile of the effort with key audiences, including high school guidance counselors. One other recent initiative of note was the launch of our American Indian Center to help strengthen, nurture, and coordinate research and scholarship related to this population. Our state has one of the largest Native American populations in the Eastern United States, so we felt creating the center was an appropriate way for the university to serve as a resource for American Indian communities. This followed the construction of a significant academic building to house the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History in 2004. Completion of that building was made possible by a commitment from the administration and our Board of Trustees to use a significant portion of a major multimillion-dollar bequest for construction. There’s one other campus example that I’d like to highlight today from our University Libraries. As Sarah Michalak says, research libraries cannot wait for schools to make changes in their programs to attract a more diverse student population. Libraries must act. I’ve been pleased to learn that our own libraries have had an active Diversity Committee that has taken on ambitious efforts to survey our staff and think about future needs. Our libraries also recently made an important hire, funded by a private gift to the university from former Duke University President, Nan Keohane, to honor her mother, who attended Carolina and dearly loved it all her life. As a result of that gift, Holly Brown has joined our Southern Historical Collection as the Grace McSpadden Overholser Archival Fellow for African American Studies. This postgraduate, two-year position works with the African American archives in our Southern collection. Among the duties are to reach out to the historically black colleges and universities across North Carolina to strengthen documentation of the African American experience in our state. Our goal is to provide direct assistance in preserving, cataloging, and digitizing especially valuable materials being held in other locations. This is another example of a modest initiative that can help lay the groundwork for continued progress in the libraries. I hope that some of these examples from UNC will prompt you to think of initiatives and ideas from your own campuses that might help other colleagues attending this meeting. It is the cumulative effect of many initiatives that makes the difference we seek. My hope is that each of you will go back home looking for opportunities to RLI 263 7 APRIL 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC Diversity in Research Universities ( C O N T I N U E D )
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