Authored by the Library Publishing Coalition DEIA Committee
Background
While the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) has assessed the demographics of its Library Publishing Forum attendees and presenters since 2022, it has never before done so with its volunteers. In 2025, the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Committee (DEIA) decided to document a baseline for LPC community volunteers in an effort to evaluate progress toward the Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice and potentially identify opportunities for more strategic outreach and engagement. Inspired by adages like “you can’t address what you don’t assess” and “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” which is often attributed to Peter Drucker, LPC’s 2025 volunteer demographic survey was the first of its kind for the coalition. It will be disseminated regularly to identify demographic changes and trends over time.
Methods
This year’s survey was constructed in Google Forms and sent out on March 17 to the emails associated with the Library Publishing Coalition Board and the Directory, DEIA, Forum Scholarships, Professional Development, Program, and Research Committees, as well as the Library Publishing Curriculum Editorial Board, the Staffing Survey Task Force, and the Preservation Working Group. A reminder was sent on April 8. The survey was closed on April 18, prior to the Library Publishing Forum (and the launch of the Forum demographic survey).
In most cases, we chose to use similar language to the Library Publishing Forum demographic survey to accommodate future analyses that may wish to use both datasets. The full draft of the survey is available as a Google Doc.
Raw data is stored within the LPC’s Google Drive folder. This raw data will not be made available for public use.
This survey was sent out for quality improvement purposes; no institutional review board review was sought or received.
Results
The survey received 39 responses; the response rate was approximately 60%. All respondents indicated that they are current volunteers. A majority of respondents (32) work for an LPC-member library. All respondents reported that they are employed full-time.
Of the 38 respondents that provided their age, almost half (44.7%) are aged 30–39. 36.8% are aged 40–49 and 13.2% are aged 50–59. One person reported being 20–29 and one person reported being 60 or older.
Of the 37 respondents that provided responses on questions about identity, 16.2% identified as Black, Indigenous, and/or a Person of Color (BIPOC). Most respondents (70.3%) identified as a woman; 14% identified as a man; about 10% identified as non-binary; and about 5% used another term. Approximately 10% of respondents identified as disabled or having a disability. Approximately 19% of respondents identified as neurodivergent.
Most respondents (92%) shared that one reason they volunteer with the LPC is an “interest in contributing to my professional community.” Many respondents also volunteer as a service activity (63%), because of an interest in subject matter (71%), and because committee work aligns with personal or professional goals (53%) (other reasons included time available for service [18%], space available on a committee [21%], or to make connections with other professionals [3%]).
Bar graph: What factors contributed to your decision to volunteer on LPC? Bars include: Time available during my work day (7 respondents, 18.4%); Institutional support for service activities (i.e. through tenure and promotion process) (24 respondents, 63.2%); Interest in contributing to my professional community (65 respondents, 92.1%); Interest in the subject matter (27 respondents, 71.1%); Space available in specific committee (8 respondents, 21.1%); Specific committee work alignment with my personal or professional goals (20 respondents, 52.6%); Connecting with other institutions and professionals (free text answer) (1 respondent, 12.6%).
Discussion
Survey Demographics
Age
The majority of respondents (81.5%) reported being between the ages of 30–49, potentially indicating that the demographic of LPC volunteers is mid-career professionals rather than emerging or early-career professionals. While emerging and early-career professionals may be a potential area for growth and recruitment, it is hard to tell based on the survey where respondents are in their career and how this may or may not correlate to age. Adding a question about career identification may help us understand where members are and how to best support them based on their career stage.
Employment
All respondents reported being employed full-time, with a majority working at LPC-member institutions. Although the majority of LPC’s volunteers work for member libraries, 18% of respondents do not work for a member library. Non-member participation and engagement may serve as an opportunity to recruit new member institutions and/or strategic affiliates.
Identities
Neurodivergence
Approximately 18% of all respondents self-identified as neurodivergent. (Of note: not all people who have a formal diagnosis of a condition typically associated with neurodivergence will identify with the term; additionally, not all respondents who identify as neurodivergent may have a formal diagnosis.) This may indicate a need for more neuro-inclusive information and content provided by the LPC, more support for requesting accommodations (when and if needed), and more ways to contribute to the LPC beyond what is standard in terms of volunteer participation.
Gender and LGBTQ+
Approximately 15% of respondents who answered questions about their identities indicated that they either identified as non-binary or provided another term to describe their identity. This indicates that there is an opportunity to provide more options for indicating gender in future surveys that may better capture the nuances of gender experiences and identifications across our volunteer members.
If we include non-binary and people with other gender identifications (beyond woman or man) as part of the broader LGBTQ+ community, then nearly one-fifth of LPC volunteers are part of this community. Identifying as LGBTQ+ was not a survey question itself, so the percentage of volunteers that identify as LGBTQ+ may be higher overall. Given the current attacks on this community, and the substantial representation of LGBTQ+ people among LPC volunteers, the organization as a whole may wish to consider how to best support this community in future years.
Volunteering
Motivations
Many respondents indicated that there were several reasons they volunteered with LPC, suggesting that there is no single motivator for volunteers. However, most respondents indicated that volunteering is a way to contribute to a professional community. This may reflect the importance of communities in the field, as well as the community that has developed in the LPC.
Barriers to volunteering and recommendations
Respondents were asked if there was anything that would make volunteering with LPC more accessible or welcoming. While many respondents indicated that they felt welcome, several provided comments that reflect several pain points, generally related to committee onboarding. These included difficulty navigating committee Google Drive content, understanding communication channels and procedures, and making the onboarding process more standardized and thorough.
Correlation to Forum Demographics
By and large, the demographics of the respondents to the LPC’s volunteer survey and those who responded to the 2025 Library Publishing Forum (LPF) survey were similar. Comparing these two pools is especially appropriate, because all LPC committee work is virtual, as was the 2025 LPF, which eliminated some of the accessibility and financial challenges that can be imposed by an in-person conference.
However, there are two noticeable differences that may prompt additional discussion or reflection: volunteers are less likely than Forum attendees to identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or a Person of Color (BIPOC), and volunteers are less likely to be over the age of 50 than Forum attendees.
This survey did not collect sufficient data to explain these differences; however, they may indicate that more recruitment efforts must be done to encourage or support older potential LPC volunteers and potential volunteers who identify as members of underrepresented racial and ethnic communities.
It is possible members of these communities may perceive the Forum as being a more welcoming environment compared to LPC volunteering opportunities. It is also possible that community members who belong to these groups may not see as much value in participating in the LPC as a volunteer; for example, older community members may be beyond tenure and/or promotion decisions that might require service to the profession. (This may be a reasonable assumption, given that volunteers’ stated reasons for contributing to the LPC community align with common service expectations in tenure and promotion processes.) Whatever the reason, the LPC may want to explore these differences further in order to better understand them and—if necessary—ensure that committees and other volunteer opportunities are more representative of the library publishing community as a whole.
Recommendations for the 2026 Survey
This was the first time the DEIA Committee attempted to gather information about LPC volunteers through a survey. While we believe there are valuable insights in this report, there are opportunities for improvement.
Feedback on the 2025 survey indicated that we may want to add additional nuance to the 2026 survey in several areas. This year’s survey may want to add options that better capture nuanced gender identities, especially for those who do not align with binary identities. Similarly, there may be opportunities to provide more nuanced options for racial identities, which may lead to results that could support more specific outreach efforts. (Due to the limited number of responses with specific information, we did not feel we could responsibly provide information about more specific identities in this report.) Finally, while we believe this year’s survey provided valuable information about the kinds of disabilities that impact volunteers’ lives and their experiences as volunteers, we may also want to ask questions about specific categories of disabilities in the future to provide better information to the LPC about accommodations that may need to be considered across committees and volunteer opportunities. This type of survey will often encounter tension between the need to categorize people in order to draw conclusions and the desire to allow people to express themselves as individuals, with whatever language they choose; balancing these two needs should be an ongoing discussion.
We recommend adding a question specifically about someone’s career stage, which could allow age to be analyzed as a separate factor.
Finally, we recommend continuing to align demographic questions across both the Forum and Volunteer surveys to support comparative analysis. As 2026 will be an in-person conference, we believe this alignment will allow the LPC to draw more robust and meaningful conclusions from this data.