Good morning, afternoon, everyone. My name is Dr. Dara Hoffman. I am the program coordinator for the Master of Archives and Records Administration, as well as an assistant professor here in the School of Information. And I am delighted that Mara is able to co-host this webinar with the CPGE Academic EDI Committee, and that we're able to have Dr. Aisha Johnson, who is an incredible archivist, librarian and scholar, share her work and her experience with us today. So it's my pleasure now to hand the hosting over to Dr. Viagran. Thank you, Dr. Hoffman. I'm Dr. Viagran, CPGE EDI Academic Committee Chair, co-hosting this with Mara. So welcome, everyone. We're really excited for this webinar. I'm just going to do a brief introduction about Dr. Aisha Johnson's talk today around diversity for representation. She will discuss her path to librarianship, archives and the discovery of the Julius Rosenwald Library Fund. And I don't want to take any more much time of her time, so I'm going to turn it over to you, Dr. Johnson, to kick us off. Hello, hello, everyone. Let me know you can hear me and see me. I am Dr. Aisha Johnson. As mentioned, I hope all is well and you are having happy holidays. So during this discussion, if you will, not a lecture, please feel free to put anything in the chat. I'll ask any questions along the way. I'm absolutely okay with that. If you have questions and you don't want to, you know, feel like you're interrupting, you can also wait till the end. We'll save a good 10 to 15 minutes for questions at the end. So I see former students already. That's awesome. So hello, hello. We're going to talk about diversity for representation in this beautiful profession. I love librarianship. If you don't know anything else about me, you have to know that I love all things, archives, museums and libraries, and you don't have to pick a side. So no, don't let anyone tell you that you do. You can love it all. But I love this profession and it's something that I like to call a warm blanket. Right. There's not a single profession that does not need information literacy. So library and information science is that warm blanket, you put us over any profession, and we make things that much better, right. So welcome to all the lovers of libraries, archives and museums, but because we have such an important role in society that being information access and information literacy. You have to know and understand the importance of representation within such a profession that impacts our society in all of our communities, right. So this is why often we are talking about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility belonging because libraries are indeed for everyone. So this is why we talk about diversity for representation. Diversity is so far beyond race, right. Of course, that's just what the eyes can see. But we're also talking about education, background experiences, perspectives, all of those things make us different and more representative of the communities in which we serve. Well, my journey to librarianship is going to have to start as a child, like most of us, where, you know, my parents would take me to the library and enjoy and I had a library at home, right. And then of course, growing up, I wanted to, of course, I say, of course, like this is so natural. Of course, growing up, I wanted to be librarian of Congress. And seeing doing my research and seeing that I would never be a white man. I knew I could never be librarian of Congress. And that hurt me so bad I was just torn that day my parents talk about it still, but I didn't see anything that looked like me. Because I didn't see anything that looked like me, I immediately denied my own self that dream. So the goal in which we operate and to do things is to counteract that. So no one actually experiences such things. Obviously, I wonderful Dr Carla Hayden has turned that around for many, many people to which I've shared this story with her when I met her. So she's turned that around for many, many people but think about the impact of the lack of representation does to the psyche does to your ability to even fan on what you can do as people of color. And as members of marginalized communities, we have to see it to know that it is absolutely possible. We have to be able to touch it. So for me, that is where my journey to librarianship has led me throughout my master's program I've always focused on diversity within the field or the lack thereof. And that of course bled into my platform for all things diversity equity inclusion and African specifically African American history and the development of Southern public library so that's where we are now. Well, during my master's, excuse me, during my doctorate program. I took on a fellowship funded by the IMLS for increasing African American diversity in archives, I became a trained archivist during my doctorate program, doing research because I wanted to do my research in the archive so naturally, I wanted to understand archives and end up loving that as well and became a trained archivist while also being a formerly educated librarian. So I took on this, this fellowship. And I was hosted by fifth University who has the one of the most beautiful and legendary archives in this country. I mean it's almost like a who's who of American education and African American history and just a beautiful collection of historical rare and unique materials. And I was assigned this collection. I was assigned this collection that had been sitting there for quite some time, and it turned out to be the Julius Rosenwald fund library program. So it's the SL Smith collection standing for Samuel Leonard Smith, personal papers and professional papers. And the collection is where I found the information that had been hidden, like so many valuable and impactful stories in our archives. And I talked to my committee and I'm like have you guys heard of this program. And if you have people in the south of your grandparents great grandparents were reared in the south, and they went to school in the south nine times out of 10 they went to a Rosenwald school. Now, Rosenwald, the Julius Rosenwald fund built a limit over 5300 schools in 15 southern states this was the primary way that African Americans were educated during that time period of course you had other other other initiatives like gene supervisors of course the AMA American Missionary Association, but when we're talking about impact in the spread of African American literacy, we have to know about the Julius Rosenwald funds rule school program right well out of this program. One of the southern directors SL Smith says to Julius Rosenwald these schools agree. However, they don't have libraries. They don't have literature, they don't have access to additional literature, you know as though they were reading already what they had. And that is what sparked the Julius Rosenwald fund library program. Well when I asked my committee members about it and I mean this was 10 years ago.  It was absolutely nothing published on the Julius Rosenwald fund library program while you could find a number of publications and some books on the school program. So, you know, I took on the wonderful like great Tony Morris's advice of if there's a book you want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. So I did. I wanted to know more I wanted to learn as much as I could about this story and about this program and what it did for not only African American literacy, but the south, the intellectual development of the south. So, library philanthropy was indeed the primary way for the development of southern libraries, you know, the South had this this this unlawful marriage with segregation and discrimination to the point where big businesses didn't even want to come south, because they didn't want the moral, the moral discriminatory practices or they didn't want to be associated with such practices, because it just wasn't good for business, but the south was married to this custom to this way of life. So the development of Negro institutions happened in the community, charitable organizations, and philanthropists right a lot of grassroots movements, what's happening for the actual development, why is that beyond economical. There's this misconception that if any institution for African Americans for Negroes was to develop it had to significantly lag behind that of white Americans. Like that was the business plan. That was the strategy. You know, and if you think about the time period. Americans barely had access to education, let alone libraries but even rule whites didn't have this access. So for that to be the mindset in the business plan, it was not only detrimental to African Americans, it was detrimental to the entire American South, but that's not what people saw. They wanted to keep and prevent this one particular culture from rising and that's something that we have to recognize even today how African Americans break through and open the door or break a glass ceiling for other cultures. It's a benefit of all right by pop marginalized communities and members of these groups we help each other. Right. But by targeting. They really hurt the economy and the society right of the entire American South because the more educated a society you have the better economy, you have as well. So the Julius Roosevelt fund focuses on four different areas. Education, which also is going to include library services, health and medical services, fellowships and scholarships and of course race relations, which we refer to as social studies today. We want to operate between 1917 and 1948. Now, of course, we know of two main key contributors. I know everyone has heard of Andrew Carnegie, but rarely have heard of Julius rose along and we'll talk about why that is. So if we want to think about Carnegie develops about 2000 libraries nationally and a few international throughout his time, you know, well, I would say his focus on library development, the problem or issue there is with Carnegie's model. Money was given to the African American. The African American library, the African American community and then money was given to the white community. Where's that issue. The issue is it was usually about 10% for the colored library versus what was given to the white community. So for example, classic example, Carnegie gives $100,000 in 1901 to four white library in Atlanta. Well he gives $10,000 to the black community for black or colored library. One that's a that's a problem with the funding right. Well it takes the black community 20 years to open that library. 20 years because of such a discriminatory practice, right and nobody bad in an eye at the difference in the funding because that was the custom right, but think about that 20 years to open a simple library for the black community. It's problematic in itself and it sends the wrong message or really continues to fuel the wrong message right of value in people over other humans. To use rolls and wall fund library program the goal is to improve literacy and enhance educational opportunities, specifically for African Americans, we have to understand the value and impact that literacy has on society that literacy and access has have on communities. So 1927 to 1941, we're going to see a distribution of about 9400 libraries. Now we talk about libraries throughout this discussion. Libraries will also include library sets or book sets so we really actually get up to about 10,000 right and we'll discuss that. Now, there's 43 black colleges and normal schools better known today as HPC use historically black colleges and universities that actually benefit will talk about the significance of that. And in 29236, there's a library County demonstration that changes what we now consider county or public libraries it changes the entire landscape for us. And normal schools of course there's going to be. Remember we have 15 participating southern states. So each of those libraries are going to get 10. Excuse me library sets with up to 150 titles there's 10 libraries that are actually going to participate in each of those 15 states right. So up to 150 titles it depends on the the school in the class size. Remember, you know the multi generational in one classroom model comes from this. So African Americans would be in 123 room school houses but initially one room school houses, and there was multiple generations in these schools. It's so funny how history is cyclical because now we have 34 generations in a classroom right. So, but the problem is here, they're going to school around harvest how we go to school now is is not how obviously they went to school right. They went to school around harvest. So those books were a variety of topics from African American contributions to different subject matters that would build knowledge. You know, and educating the principal in the teachers about the library about the value of the library about the impact of the library but about the reading material itself. So we do reader advisory services today you know the traditional reference interview. The officials were teaching the principles and the teachers about the things we talk about about the things we teach in our high schools right our schools of library and information science. And of course it was free access and use of the books and why was this so important, because these libraries were oftentimes the first level of exposure that community members even had to this day. Most of the time people are initially exposed to libraries is in the school library, which is why the school library is so important. You know it is that introduction I still remember my school library and Mrs Brown and the impact that she had as a black librarian in my magnet school. So this was significant because not only are we focused on the education of the students in the community, but we're focused on the education of the people at home. And this this this notion that black children could not read or did not read because their parents could not read or did not read and that wasn't the case. When they sent these books home with the students it was recorded statistically that the book would be read by at least five people before it was returned to the library. So we're being able to defunct these notions or these misconceptions and really understand that it wasn't a lack of desire. It was just there was no no food to feed the desire. There was no access to to successfully feel the need or the desire for books for reading for literacy. Right. We have to understand that it wasn't that black children could not read or did not read because their parents could not read or did not read. It was simply because they did not have the supply. So now we're focused on collection developments, or as they note in the documents in the historical documents a consistent edition of new books that's collection development. You're going to see a lot of the traditional librarian themes and library and information science foundational, you know, pieces and principles in this program. And a lot of them are coming out of understanding the very core of what we do information needs of people. Again, it served the community residents as well. And the beautiful thing about this entire this entire program in the fifth University archives is that there's annual reports from administrators from the teachers, how, you know, of course statistical, but also qualitative and eager and grateful and excited the students were to, you know, tell visitors about the books they're reading and the new stories and answers the questions, you know, that the visitors may have because officials from the front also visited the different schools to really see how the programs was going to see how it was building out. We're also going to have reading encouragement is what I call it reading encouragement is when you are providing access, when you are constantly developing the collection when you are engaging the students with the books. It's a feed it's a pool, you know, so we want to see that especially in our youth, you teach children how to read young you're going to create readers and lifelong learners. The African American colleges and libraries and be very clear I'm using the titles found in the documents but yes we do refer to the African American colleges normal schools today is historically black colleges and universities if they qualify for that federal designation. So the thing you need to understand about the Julius Rosenwald fund program is that it all started with experiments. Rosenwald is a very wise businessman and extremely wise businessman who really likes to test the waters before he dives in. He really enjoys testing the waters before he dives in and testing the waters for him is going to look like a year, a year experiment with X amount of dollars focused on particular institutions and seeing how that plays itself out and if it's successful then expand it. And I guess it's just so happy to be very lucky and business oriented, you know business savvy for him that these experiments worked using this model, you know, and it wasn't just okay I'm going to throw this money out there and let's see what happens. No, it was a business plan for philanthropy. There was a business plan for these organizations to succeed. One, no organization whether it was a rural schools the high schools the black colleges, the county libraries, no one was just giving money. There was a match and it depends on what level it could have been $1 to $1 or $1 up to $4 depending on the size of the organization in which he was helping or the division in which these libraries fell under. And so what you have there is a buy in. Now what I want you to really understand is these were rural black communities. They barely had anything. So for them as a community to come up with this money and help build the buildings survey and maintain the land. That's desire. That's how much they wanted this right. So, when the African American colleges division comes along, we're going to do five experimental colleges of course, what is now known as Tennessee State Southern University Tuskegee University, Virginia State College and Winston Stalem State University. Those were the initials. The problem is, you had African American schools, African American colleges, they're often teacher training colleges and didn't have children's literature. How do I sufficiently teach someone to become a teacher without the literature without training material. How do I do that sufficiently and then expect them to be able to get a teacher job. Pretty difficult, right, but you also have to understand the impact of accreditation. You also have to understand the impact that libraries have on accreditation, still to this day, especially during this time period, libraries can make or break accreditation. And many of these colleges and we'll talk about the high schools but many of these colleges lacked accreditation because they didn't have adequate libraries. And let's be clear, while accreditation standards and things of that nature may change over time, a library is required. So these institutions, what I call a disadvantage by financial design, because academia is a business. It's a feel good business and we love what we do, but academia is a business. Right. So these institutions, some of them were really legit set up to fail. So but we're going to see a complete turnaround with the African American colleges right this division is deemed the most successful because not only does it build library facilities. They're going to give them a collection like we've never seen in libraries we're talking about hundreds of books covering a variety of subjects. But perhaps most importantly, depending on how you feel is kind of a chicken or the egg debate. You know there's a library come first or does the the librarian. At this time, we're going to get Hampton Institute, which also comes out of this program between the Julius Rosenwald program the al a and others build out Hampton Institute library school, which is the first. At an HBCU. So we're going to take teachers from these institutions exemplary teachers we're going to take them from these institutions and send them to Hampton for a year of study they're coming back as librarians. This is why I always tell people we get a lot of people who find this profession as a second or third career. And they're like why was a teacher before so I got to unlearn all of that and I'm like no you don't. No no no no no bring all of that in your tool belt, bring all of it. Those are vital skills to what we do. So we're going to see a reading encouragement we're going to see massive amounts of books that we've not seen before we're going to see children's literature libraries for teacher training colleges and you know this. This division was probably it's definitely what was deemed the most successful, but it probably was also one of the hardest divisions for me to write about. Because the Curtis Florence Lawrence Curtis would send the list to a professor in Chicago and say hey this is the book list that I want to put in the black schools of black colleges down here this is the book list. It's literally in black and white. It says, there's no way the southern Negro is reading on a college level. This is for a college. It's for college, and they're saying no way is a southern Negro reading at the college level, perhaps you need to dump this down to elementary or grade school as it was called.  It is quite heartbreaking to see with no shame. The discriminatory thinking of college level students simply because of their race and the geographic location. So we're really significant as well now we're going to see that large quality and quantity of beautiful subjects and all the literature right no problem. This is great we're on the same path. But don't you know library is places where this comes from library is place focuses on not only the facility but what the library brings. I'm literally going to see an outline of what a library should look like feel like from the furniture to the carpet to the location of where the books are even to the lighting. The temperature, the library facility guidelines are studied because Smith and colleagues had a background that focus on buildings and facilities. The beautiful thing about this is a lot of these Negro or African American high schools were not accredited. Because again they didn't have the libraries that they need it right. Well the level in which the library upgraded to school. They were actually able to get accreditation. Now, if you don't work in academia. Let me tell you why accreditation is so important. If I'm in high school and I'm coming from an accredited high school an unaccredited high school. How do I get into an accredited college, or if I'm graduating from an unaccredited college. How do I get a job. Because what accreditation says is that you know at least the minimum of this field those policies those guidelines that theory that you need to understand and conduct the practice. Right. See education gives you the ideal education gives you the theory education accredited education says this person is at minimum ready to enter the practice. There's no grip on the theory of what it is they're supposed to be doing. Without that accreditation. Your personal accreditation isn't there. So the fact that these institutions lacked accreditation was the economical problem for African Americans being able to come up. Change things for their family and potentially generations to come again. A design by financial disadvantage. Now the library demonstration is so wonderful is so beautiful the Julius Rosenwald fund puts $500,000 this is 1929 please understand the money that was put towards this program would translate into the millions today. Okay, Julius Rosenwald businessman former CEO of Sears and Roadbug really put his money towards African American literacy because he wanted to better mankind. He understood what literacy and education could do for society. Right. So the beautiful thing about this county library demonstration is unlike the other divisions. He didn't have to do this one alone. See, he wanted to do the libraries and build on them for HBC use and African American colleges, but nobody wanted to help him. He proceeded on because he understood the need and more so the impact of what that could do for African Americans. So here in the county, he puts half a million dollars up, and then Carnegie comes in and extends this five year program to two years with more money. So that's wonderful right. So we have some support happening here, but the county library demonstration is really want to focus on service and a different level of service for that time period but more so very modern. So this is what we're doing today. So this is innovation in 1929. Now I want you to pay attention to the states. Now I want you to pay attention to the counties. See, in order for these, these counties to qualify one there had to be state legislation for library services per capita. And they also had to support to be able to match because remember, Rosalind doesn't want to do anything long term on his own. What he's doing is trying to set up the community to be able to sustain beyond his philanthropy. Right, just an initiative a Kickstarter if you will. Now, the per capita, you have to have at least the goal was to get it to 50 cents per capita. There were states. Pat is low like Florida. Pat is low is two cents per capita for library services. Who's that helping. Who's like they the states had to agree now we're going beyond local the state itself had to agree. The state had to agree to raise the per capita order to participate in this program. The goal was 50 cents. You notice the southern states are some of the bloodiest states that we have read about during the civil rights movement 54 to 64 right. Excuse me 54 to 68.  Let me tell you what is so significant about this county library demonstration. There was those financial stipulations but there's this one particular stipulation. That changes the game, honestly, it is the stipulation that no matter who it is. If it is a county resident, black, white, urban or rural, they were required to be granted access. It was this program that actually caused people to desegregate for books for access for literacy for seven years. What happened between those time periods. We don't know. I'm going to say that this program was perfect because even the statistics, they had to really rectify some discriminatory practices by some of the library workers and librarians because a train librarian was required in order for them to also participate. There was some discriminatory discriminatory practices and collection development, though you can naturally see that African Americans and some of these counties were checking out more books than others. But that's why these reports were so important because, you know, the fund wanted to make sure its intention was actually happening. But that stipulation was so significant because never before had this happened. Remember, I mentioned that Carnegie would give money to the white community for a library and then separately maybe 10% to the colored community for a black library. It was segregation. He honored that, right? But Rosenwald, the Rosenwald Fund, defied it. And they said there's no need for us to put two libraries in one county where we can follow all that money and all those resources into one county library for everyone. So you actually specifically had African Americans and white people. And we're talking the South so we have to recognize, you know, Hispanics and also Native Americans and the everyone in the county had to have access, had to utilize and accountability was there in the reporting. So the county demonstration is focused on rendering services. We're talking about education, recreational and cultural, the things that a library has placed still operates as today. We're going to see pay collections and regular circulation of books and a variety of special programming, public programming. We're going to see provisions for adult education programs and all types of arts and music programs as well, even some traveling exhibits. And again, this is all documented within the quarterly reports. Because we have libraries, practices of Rosenwald libraries, meaning Rosenwald funded libraries, we recognize those practices, right? But those libraries were also set up to influence those who could not qualify in positive ways. It was a demonstration of what was possible and how libraries really benefited the community and society as a whole. So we're going to see cooperative efforts and increasing the amount of materials available in accessible collection development and cooperation and professional training for teachers and librarians and a cooperative study of those regional problems. And that's going to be deemed race relations, social studies and class impact problems. So what about others, right? Well, whenever you do research, you have to stay open to whatever the archives, whatever the books are going to offer you. Yes, you have your inquiry. Yes, you have your research set your questions, all of that good jazz that we teach you. But if you stay open, the materials will offer you way more than you bargained for. So that's what I do as a scholar. I stay open and going in there, focus, but also why eyes wide open. The materials bless me with a number of what I call emergent codes. We were able to actually code. We meaning myself and the researcher me was actually able to code these areas that I was not focused on. And the impact in which the Julius Rosenwald fun had on state library commissions, library schools, scholarships and fellowships training institutes and meetings because again, before Hampton. There was no Africa. We do have to recognize, of course, Thomas Thomas fountain blue right in his training program at Louisville. But formally, degree wise or certification wise Hampton income about until 1925 extended library services to predominantly heavy populated African American cities in libraries from military services. Between 1927 and 1947 the fund spent nearly $900,000 on library service. That translates into the millions today, tens of millions today. Okay. Now let's talk about the need for black librarianship diversity for representation of course, you know, Daniel there and I recently attended a lease and a lease the Association for library and information science educators in Pittsburgh last month. And one of the presenters was talking about the breakdown. Well we know significantly that the profession itself is about 90% white. Right. And it's a joke at this point right and the profession jokes about a stereo typical librarian. That's unfortunate truth. 5% African American and everyone else, all other cultures and race less some even less than 1%. Well, let's look at the academic side of that 4% African American PhDs for in this wonderful beautiful profession. We also have to recognize the need for blacks, Hispanics, Latino, Native Americans, Asian, we have to recognize the need for everyone, because it impacts service practice profession curriculum, it impacts everything. We're going to have adequate representation, because library anxiety exists discriminatory practices exists bias exists unconscious bias exists right. I always tell my students at the very beginning of the semester my foundations class. If you're not here to service everyone. This is not the profession for you.  Right. That's under representation. So access to information of course provides an undeniable impact to the I right, because there's different perspectives. People learn differently, we have to understand those information seeking behaviors right. I'll for you to chat and talks about life in the round one of my favorite theories that I love to use. Well, people will seek information from those they're comfortable with first. Or those who look like them. But if I walk into a library and everyone looks like me, do you understand how vulnerable it is to admit you don't know something to someone who does not look like you. Our society does that every day. As a profession, we actually hurt the people we're trying to help. So of course, Rosenwald fun played a key role in advocating, supporting and funding the formalization of black librarianship. I have a question in the chat. Can you speak further on how Hispanic Americans are included in this conversation. I'm a female Mexican American entering the MLIS special sessions program and look forward to increasing the number of Hispanic working in librarianship. Yes, so Hispanic Americans are included in this conversation because let's break down America's class system. A lot of people will perceive discrimination rooted in race and gender discrimination you have to take a step back discrimination is rooted in class. America's built on a class system. So we have an issue with wanting to have classes of people. Right. And while I don't believe people belong in categories. This is how we feel systematic discrimination. So, again, when I'm advocating as a black woman. I'm not just advocating for black people. It is my job to advocate for Hispanic Americans. You're in this profession. You're also less than 5%. So the conversation is focused on whomever your platform is, but you got to understand the impact on access and literacy for BIPOC and marginalized communities. We all play a role. Even the profession that is majority white, we all play a role in this. So if I'm in a Hispanic serving community, or I work at Hispanic predominantly Hispanic serving institution meeting college right. Those students still need to see someone who looks like them. So the very fact that you are a minority entering this field. And I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, Edina. It's going to change lives. It's representation where my librarian of Congress story where I couldn't be. I'm not ever going to be a white man. I can't be library in the Congress. There's no way I should have that thought. But immediately that was my thought. I can't be what I wanted to be. Because I'm not that representation matters beyond what we just see on the surface if that makes sense. Let me know if I answered your question. Geneva says as absolutely Geneva says as for seeking more archives hands on experience. How would you advise a new MLIS graduate students to do so? Are there any HPCU pipelines for postgraduate students? I find most new entry level archives jobs require one or two years. Good question. While I do recommend internships. There's very few of us who could work for free. Right. So just be real. And another thing that I've asked the, you know, profession to do even in my position when we have these entry level positions, librarian one, library archivist one, and it requires two years of experience. Well, that's not an entry level position. And it's actually unfair to, you know, those who are entering the profession. I always ask people, because it's a matter of, do you want to train? Are you willing to train? And when you see that one or two years of experience or three years of experience, it gives the message that one, maybe they're not good enough or two, the institution doesn't want to take the time and do the work and training. And I always speak for me, whereas Associate Dean and Acting for Academic Affairs and Outreach and Georgia Tech Library, you know, I have librarian one, you know, or hiring for that entry level. And we required that two years of experience. I said, hey, we need to remove this. It sends the wrong message. So now we're talking about people. Now, I'm pretty, I do relentless advocacy, right, but I'm legit sticking my neck out on the line when you call out institutional behaviors that counteract practices. Right. I would encourage advocacy from people who are in positions to change policy. I will also encourage you all new graduates make career professionals to seek leadership and management training so you can be at the table where change in policy happens. So, HPCU pipelines postgraduate, you know, there's only one HPCU with the Library of Information Science program, unfortunately, but fortunately they are still strong. So, I would, if you can, I will look at fellowships, I will look at residencies that you indeed pay, but while you're in school, I know, I mean, I work full time while going through my master's program, and I also did a part time internship in the evening in archives and reference area. But a lot of us cannot work for free. Right. So that that will that can indeed be a hiccup, but I am constantly advocating for entry level positions to truly be entry. So, I'm going to pronounce your name wrong. Bishnu, excuse me if I did. I was class defined and how is it different from category. So, class is going to really focus on the have and have nots. Think about the digital divide. The digital divide is not only a geographical issue like we sometimes paint it. It's also a class issue, because there are certain classes of people that have never experienced a digital divide. And category is usually going to be based on some type of common factor within, but class is going to be based on access, opportunity, privilege, and it will gauge up and down that range depending on where society has decided you, or your culture should be, if you will. Thank you for sharing that Michelle I appreciate it. Thank you for the questions. So let's talk about standardizing black librarianship. So one of the conditions of course made by the fund when granting aid was it had the libraries had to have a train librarian. And of course there was there was a library school in the south. The Carnegie Library School of Atlanta established in 191905. The Sean race is a part of the class system discriminatory no problem. Right. Race is a part of the class system. So there was a school the Carnegie Library School of Atlanta in 1905 to 1925 and in 25 and eventually merges with Emory, but that school was only training white librarians. It was only training white librarians. And in the south, you know we have census records to show, you know a couple hundred library workers of color. But they couldn't get training. So Julius Rosenwald fun and the LA they have this what I call chicken or the egg debate that I mentioned earlier. And it's really was the question if the library or the librarian should come first. And out of that conversation came the production of Hampton Institute's library school. Now, there's other library schools of course that come about. Of course we have Atlanta Atlanta University now known as Clark Atlanta, North Carolina Central, Alabama DC, a number of HBC use that have library science programs. Unfortunately, like I mentioned, there's only North Carolina Central now standing strong and focus on educating a variety of librarians right. But the library schools, the fund required the county libraries to have that train librarian, and there was a deficiency in the number of what we call trained librarians, because they couldn't go to these institutions, not because they didn't want to, but because they weren't allowed. Now the fund made financial contributions to Hampton Institute Emory University as well as Atlanta University and a number of training programs. So but there was also scholarships and fellowships to entice promising black men and women to take on the work in the library field. Now the beautiful thing is more than 3035 scholarships were funded for these promising men and women in library administration. So early on, we're also going to understand the impact of library administrators of color. There's a representation that is needed. I've had this conversation before where people of color need to have support built in to any employer. They need to, and administrators of color make a significant difference in representation. There's a different perspective, right. There's a different experience there's a different level of understanding. One is doing something completely separate from the library program and funding scholarships and learning opportunities focused on library administration. You got to see the bigger picture. Vivian harsh who's one of my librarian she rose you know black librarian in Chicago branch named after her amazing beautiful collection. She was a recipient. Of this scholarship one of 35. We have to do more digging and these this information is all available in the fifth university archives but we want to do you know some some more digging on seeing where are they now as well so we can really understand the large impact that happened. I mentioned that the fund also funded you know of course Atlanta University, but the institutes summer institutes training institutes for the southeastern library association, as well as to conference for Negro librarians held at this university. There was also funding provided for the National Institute for library field agents in Wisconsin it was a constant feeding. Even though Hampton had been established in 1925, we still need to fuel funnel that education in the south. Okay. So what's next. Of course we continue advocacy and research we we use the platform and voice our advocacy but we also use research and scholarship to put the advocacy to paper right advocacy is not just about lip service but it's about action. Right so we look at diversity for representation and that's about serving the underserved, looking at the diversity statement and actions of academic public college school libraries, understanding the history, which BC a la the black caucus of American library association reform. There's so many associations. Right. There's representation and those associations exist because of the lack of representation at one point. Extremely important and I encourage you to join the organization that you identify best with hiring practices, we have to review hiring practices such as that one or two years for entry level position. Like how open are we really being because it sends the message that we're really not open and we're not willing to really train people as much as we say we are. But we also have the call the profession to action because that's where our biggest impact can happen is when the profession also and we're very well supported but the profession does more professional organizations does more about you know, such discriminatory practices. You know, and of course discussion and writings on contributions of others within the field outside the field and I mean, not only the scholars, or as academics right. If you're a practitioner. You can be a scholar. I'm a strong believer in what the model I call scholar practitioner. You're doing the work. What you're doing can inform the practice it can inform the profession it can inform the curriculum be a scholar practitioner get involved, publish right. I don't care if it's starting a blog about various experiences, get involved. Be a scholar in the profession because it makes a significant difference and it also helps us produce practical professionals. It's diversity for representation, because our society is diverse. Thank you all, I appreciate you. You can ask any questions or pick up the microphone I know I kind of went to the line but we have some questions in between there so anyone have any questions. That was wonderful Dr Johnson I don't have any questions I'm just checking the chat, and I know Dr Hoffman's checking the chat to. I just want to mention briefly about upcoming webinars so the college CPG or academic EDI committee we've already confirmed one webinar in the spring so far on indigenous data sovereignty. And then we have a second one we're hopefully going to have confirmed on feminist privacy. So stay tuned for those two college ones and I'll put links in the chat to all of our upcoming webinars at the college and the iSchool webcast page. And Dr Hoffman I'll turn it over to you to close. I just want to say thank you so much Dr Johnson this was so it was it was moving and really just reaffirming of the work we all do in this field and I know I feel inspired and recommitted to you know my piece of the work as a white person to make sure that my students are all feel included and are going out and making this this warm blanket something that covers and embraces everyone so we are so privileged to have had you today and I'm so grateful for you sharing your time and expertise with us all. Thank you thank you for having me I appreciate it. Listen, do the work you guys just remember we're here to service everyone those who look like us and most importantly those who also don't. All right. Thank you all so much I appreciate you.


The cloud essentially turned the data center into an API and ushered in the era of programmable infrastructure. No longer do we think about deploying infrastructure in rigid silos with a hardened outer shell, rather infrastructure has to facilitate digital business strategies. And what this means is putting data at the core of your organization, irrespective of its physical location. It also means infrastructure generally and storage specifically must be accessed as sets of services that can be discovered, deployed, managed, secured and governed in a DevOps model or ops dev if you prefer. Now this has specific implications as to how vendor product strategies will evolve and how they'll meet modern data requirements. Welcome to this CUBE conversation everybody. This is Dave Vellante and with me to discuss these seed changes is Ajay Singh, the Chief Product Officer of Pure Storage. Ajay, welcome. Thank you, David, glad to be here. Yeah, great to have you. So let's talk about your role at Pure. I think you're the first CPO. What's the vision there? That's right. I just joined at Pure about eight months ago from VMware as the Chief Product Officer. And you're right. I'm the first Chief Product Officer at Pure. And at VMware, I ran the Cloud Management Business Unit which was a lot about automation and infrastructure as code. And it's just great to join Pure which has a phenomenal all flash product set. You know, I kind of call it the iPhone of flash storage, super easy to use. And how do we take that same ease of use which is a heart of a cloud operating principle? And how do we actually take it up to really deliver a modern data experience which includes infrastructure and storage as code but then even more beyond that. How do you do modern operations and then modern data services? So super excited to be at Pure. And the vision if you may, at the end of the day is to provide leveraging this modern data experience a connected and effortless experience, data experience which allows customers to ultimately focus on what matters for them, their business. And by really leveraging and managing and winning with their data. Because ultimately data is the new oil if you may and if you can mine it, get insights from it and really drive a competitive edge in the digital transformation you're ahead. And that's what we intend to help our customers to. So you joined, you know, earlier this year kind of, I guess middle of the pandemic really I'm interested in kind of your first 100 days what that was like, what key milestones you set and now you're into the, your second 100 plus days. How's that all going? What can you share with us? And that's interesting timing because the effects of the pandemic you came in, you know, kind of post that. So you had experience from VMware and then you had to apply that to the product organization. So tell us about that sort of first 100 days and the sort of mission now. Absolutely. So I, so as we talked about the vision, you know, around the modern day experience going to have three components to it. You know, modernizing the infrastructure and really it's good as with the team out of the work we've been doing a ton of work in modernizing the infrastructure briefly talk to that. Then modernizing the data, you know much more than modernizing the operations. I'll talk to that as well.  So if you think about it from modernizing the infrastructure if you think about Pure for a minute Pure is the first company that took flash to mainstream essentially bringing what we call consumer simplicity to enterprise storage. The manual for the products with the front and back of a business card. That's it. You plug it in, boom, it's up and running and you get proactive AI driven support. Right. So that was kind of the heart of pure. You think about pure again, what's unique about pure has been a lot of our competition, you know, has dealt with flash at the SSD level. Hey, because guess what? All this software was built for hard drive. And so if I can treat man as a solid state drive SSD, then my software would easily work on it. But with pure because we started with flash, we really went straight to the NAND level and as opposed to kind of the SSD layer. And what that does is it gives you greater efficiency, greater reliability and greater performance compared to an SSD because you can optimize at the chip level as opposed to at the SSD module level. That's one big advantage that Pure has going for itself. And if you look at the physics, you know in the industry for a minute, recent data put out by Wikibon early this year, effectively showing that by the year, 2026, flash on a dollar per terabyte basis, just the economics of the semiconductor versus the hard disk is going to be cheaper than hard disk. So this big inflection point is slowly but surely coming that's going to disrupt the hard disk industry. Already the high end has been taken over by flash, but hybrid is next. And then even the long tail is coming up over there. And so to, and to that extent, our lead, if you may, the introduction of QLC NAND, QLC NAND, a lot of a competition is barely introducing. And we've been at it for a while. We just recently, this year, you know, my first 100 days we introduced the Flash Erase C, C40 and C60 drives, which really start to open up our ability to go after the hybrid storage market in a big way. It opens up a big new, you know, market for us. So great in a great work there by the team. Also, at the heart of it, if you think about it in the NAND side, we have our flash array, which is a scale up latency centric architecture and flash blade, which is a scale out throughput architecture, all operating with NAND. And what that does is it allows us to cover both structured data, unstructured data, tier one apps and tier two apps. The pretty broad data coverage in that journey to the all flash data center, slowly but surely we're heading over there to the all flash data center based on the NAND economics that I just talked about.  A lot of recognition in the industry for the team from the likes of Trust Radius, Gartner, you know, named flash array of the Cartempia Insight, a customer choice award and primary storage. In the MQ, we were the leader. So a lot of kudos and recognition coming to the team as a result. Flash blade just hit a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, kind of a leader by far in kind of the unstructured data, fast file and object marketplace. And then of course, all the work we're doing around what we say ESG, you know, environmental, social and governance around reducing carbon footprint or reducing waste, our whole notion of evergreen and non-destructive upgrades. We also kind of did a lot of work in that where we actually announced that over 2,700 customers are have actually done now non-destructive upgrades with our technology. Yeah, a lot to unpack there. And you know, a lot of this sometimes, you know, people say, ah, it's the plumbing but the plumbing is actually very important because we're in a major inflection point when we went from spinning disk to NAND. And it's all about volumes. You're seeing this all over the industry now. You see your old boss, Pat Gelsinger, is dealing with this at Intel.  I don't know, maybe there's two and a half. But so those volumes drive costs down and so you're on that curve and you know, you can debate as to when it's going to happen but it's not an if, it's a when. Let me shift gears a little bit because cloud, as I was saying, it's ushered in this API economy, this as a service model. A lot of infrastructure companies have responded. How are you thinking at Pure about the as a service model for your customers? What's the strategy? How's it evolving? And how does it differentiate from the competition? No, absolutely, a great question is kind of segues into the second part of the modern day experience which is how do you modernize the operations? And that's where automation as a service because ultimately, you know, the cloud has validated and the other service model, right? People are looking for outcomes or they care less about how you get there. They just want the outcome and the as a service model actually delivers these outcomes and this whole notion of infrastructure as code is kind of the start of it. Imagine if my infrastructure for a developer is just a line of code in a Git repository in a program that goes through a CI CD process and automatically kind of is configured and set up fits in with the Terraform, the Ansible all that different automation frameworks. And so what we've done is we've gone down the path of really building out what I think is modern operations with this ability to have storage as code, this ability in addition, modern operations is not just storage as code but also we've got recently introduced some comprehensive ransomware protection. That's part of modern operations. You know, there's all the threat you hear in the news on ransomware, we introduced what we call safe mode snapshots that allow you to recover in literally seconds, you know when you have a ransomware attack. We also have in the modern operations pure one which is where we are the leader in AI driven support to prevent downtime. We actually call you 80% of the time and fix the problems without even knowing about it. That's what modern operations is all about. And then also modern operations says, okay, you've got flash on your on-prem side but I even maybe using flash in the public cloud. How can I have seamless multi-cloud experience in our cloud block store? We introduced it on Amazon, AWS and Azure allows one to do that. And then finally, for modern applications if you think about it the whole notion of infrastructure as code as a service software driven storage the Kubernetes infrastructure enables one to really deliver a great automation framework that enables to reduce the labor required to manage the storage infrastructure and deliver it as code. And we have, you know, kudos to Charlie and the pure storage team before my time with the acquisition of Portworx, you know Portworx today is really delivers true storage as code orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes and in a multi-cloud hybrid situations that can run on EKS, GKE, OpenShift, Rancher, Tanzu recently, you know, announced as a leader by GigaOM for enterprise Kubernetes storage. We're really proud about that asset. And then finally, the last piece are pure as a service. That's also all outcome oriented. What matters is you sign up for SLAs and then you get those SLAs very different from our competition, right? Our competition tends to be a lot more around financial engineering. Hey, you know, you can buy it OPEX versus CAPEX and but you get the same thing with a lot of professional services. We've really got it, I'd say a couple of years lead on actually delivering and managing with SRE engineers to the SLA. So a lot of great work there. We recently also introduced Cisco flash stack. Again, flash stack as a service, again as a service for validation of that. And then finally, we also recently did an announcement with Equinex with their bare metal as a service where we are a key part of their bare metal as a service offering. Again, pushing the kind of the other service strategy. So yes, big for us, that's where the bucket skating half the enterprises even on-prem wanted to consume things in the cloud operating model. And so that's, we're putting a lot of investment. I see, so your contention is it's not just this CAPEX to OPEX, that's kind of the, you know, during the economic downturn of 2007, 2008, the economic crisis, that was the big thing for CFO. So that's kind of yesterday's news. What you're saying is you're creating a cloud-like operating model, as I was saying up front, irrespective of physical location. And I see that as your challenge or the industry's challenge. Hide the, if I'm going to affect the digital transformation, I don't want to deal with the cloud primitives. I want you to hide the underlying complexity of that cloud. I want to deal with higher level problems. But so that brings me to digital transformation, which is kind of the now initiative or I even sometimes call it the mandate. There's not a one size fits all for digital transformation but I'm interested in your thoughts on the, you know, must take steps, universal steps that everybody needs to think about in a digital transformation journey. Yeah, so ultimately the digital transformation is all about how companies gain a competitive edge in this new digital world or that the companies are and the competition are changing the game on, right? So you want to make sure that you can rapidly try new things, fail fast, innovate and invest, but speed is of the essence, agility. And the cloud operating model enables that agility, right? And so what we're also doing is not only are we driving agility in a multi-cloud kind of data infrastructure, data operation fashion, but we're also taking it a step further. We're also on the journey to deliver modern data services. Imagine on a pure on-prem infrastructure along with your different public clouds that you're working on with the Kubernetes infrastructures. You could with a few clicks run Kafka as a service, TensorFlow as a service, Mongo as a service. So me as a technology team can truly become a service provider and not just an on-prem service provider but a multi-cloud service provider. So I said these services can be used to analyze the data that you have, not only your data, your partner data, you know, the third-party public data and how you can marry those different data sets, analyze it to deliver new insights that ultimately give you a competitive edge in the digital transformation. So you can see data plays a big role there. The data is what generates those insights, you know, the ability to match the data with partner data, public data, your data, the analysis on it, services ready to go. As you get the digital, as you get those insights, you can really start to separate yourself from your competition and get on the leaderboard a decade from now when this digital transformation settles down. All right, so bring us home, Ajay. Summarize, what does a modern data strategy look like and how does it fit into a digital business or a digital organization? So look, at the end of the day, data and analysis, both of them play a big role in the digital transformation. And it really comes down to how do I leverage this data? My data, partner data, public data to really get that edge. And that links back to our vision. How do we provide that connected and effortless modern data experience that allows our customers to focus on their business? How do I get the edge in the digital transformation by easily leveraging, managing and winning with their data? And that's the heart of where Pure is headed. Ajay Singh, thanks so much for coming inside the cube and sharing your vision. Thank you, Dave, what a real pleasure. And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.


five minutes five minutes I'm on my way I just left the house I'm almost there five minutes yeah yeah yeah I have the location like you sent me the address but I'm scared I'm gonna get lost I can never get lost and you wonder what are you saying I always get lost in every African country that I go to no is there anyone selling tomatoes behind your house or maybe anyone selling credits in front of your house street food maybe it's easy because I love food I can easily find oh yeah I'm making phone call oh sorry hello can I help you Mr. Lee hold on hold on you're the man I know you from YouTube yes I watch your videos thank you man so how are you I'm good you're living in here yeah just this place where are you going I'm going to see someone I wanna do some meet up meet so someone offered his house for me so I'm just going there to find it out but I'm scared I'm gonna get lost here how do you say you're going lost in Kigali yeah I don't wanna get lost here because I always get lost everywhere I go to here in Kigali you can't get lost I can never get lost what are you saying even heaven people get lost no way you can't get lost here in Kigali why have you seen your house there's number here every house and every street they have numbers so which means I can find the place I'm going you can find the place you're going really sure let me show you the address if you can find it oh hold on hold on Mr. Lee this one okay I can help you you can help me but I don't have money to pay no problem man rocks rocks rocks you're telling me that there's no street food here there's no street food I've been walking for so long I've not seen street food not selling on the street here in Randa why it's just the governments have said that they want the city to be clean so where did they sell food in the market they have built market for people to sell there they want to buy something from there you can use supermarkets or they took everybody who's selling the market everybody who sell on the street have you seen anyone here selling oh this is happening that's Kigali and even along the road you don't see anybody selling street food you can't go away you can't go away you can't buy in the supermarket you come back on the street so they need to get that one over here I need to buy plantain chips on the street wow interesting see this house is on the street amazing all houses every house every house is like wow I'm glad I can never get lost because I keep on getting lost everywhere I go to man you never get lost in Kigali you can never get lost in Kigali even if you are alone street numbers house numbers you can get where you want you are amazing you see the streets you also never want to buy 5 gauges 597 streets I'm going to 601 street that one have you seen it that's the street 601 indeed I can never get lost in Kigali do you have number of the house it's on the street it's number 41 41 okay this is 45 so 41 wow you can even see KG601 street 45 house number 45 so we go I don't think I even need google in this country man you don't need google in this country I don't need google I'm still looking for the house this is 43 okay so you never buy oh you see 41 oh my goodness man 41 yes 41 let me go and come let's go let's go what have you seen it it's KG601 KG601 street number 41 this is house number 41 this is where we're going to have our meet and greet yes man I got to know the location it's in Ukiri where is it it's in Remera this is amazing man like every single house in Kigali whether it's a luxury house whether it's a normal house all those houses has a number in single streets whether it's a tired road even rock roads man this is amazing indeed that's what the guy was telling me I can never get lost in Kigali trust me you can never get lost in here now let me call him is it envision envision media arts collective Kigali so we're going to have our meet and greet today is 2nd December 2019 if you are watching this video and you live in Kigali your boy Mr Maya is doing meet and greets in here I'm also going to have a workshop of which I'm going to teach people how to be a YouTuber make money on YouTube and travel with YouTube for free and the location is KG601 street number 41 all you need to do is to come here 6PM