Hello everyone,
I would like to know what equality monitoring other authorities undertake. Currently all we ask as standard in East Sussex is gender for all customers and date of birth for children.
Completed less often, but able to be entered on our LMS (Galaxy) is date of birth for adults, disability status (using Census categories), ethnic origin and languages spoken other than English.
Compared to other areas of the council we have very little information on our customer base. The recommended equality monitoring characteristics are: gender, gender identity, age, disability, ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexuality.
I would like to know which if any of the above characteristics your authority collects, any examples of membership forms asking for the above information and your experiences in training frontline staff to make sure that the information does get collected where the customer is happy to give it.
A useful resource for explaining why the equality characteristic information is important is the 'What's it got to do with you?' leaflet produced by Stonewall: http://www.stonewall.org.uk/what_we_do/2583.asp#Equal_Opportunities
Responses will be summarised for the list.
Many thanks,
Abigail Luthmann
Equal Access Manager
East Sussex Library and Information Service
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