This week’s Leader Profile is about Dorothy Parker, a pioneering librarian.

She served as the librarian of Howard University’s Moorland Foundation (1930), a small collection of anti-slavery books that she expanded into a globally recognized collection of black history and culture.

Dorothy fostered a more inclusive, less Eurocentric way of cataloging and organizing books. The famed Dewey Decimal System (Melvil Dewey was known to be racist and to sexually harass women) was not inclusive and grouped all material around black culture in two sections: slavery and colonization.

Dorothy stepped in and created a new classification system that ordered books by genre and author. Go Dorothy!

— Monica Espinosa