Digging into Diversity

“It’s been a growing thought in the library community, that we need more diversity in our collections,” said Rebecca Moore, Librarian. Rudine Sims Bishop famously wrotethat books act as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for students. The mirrors allow them to see their own experience but the windows and sliding glass doors allow them to see the experiences of others and build empathy.

“Animals have more mirrors than any other ethnicity, it’s really sad. But it’s getting better slowly,” Moore said. “We want to represent our student body and have books represent them and let them see into other cultures.”

Lead by Moore, the Overlake Library team has completed its first ever diversity audit of the Middle School fiction books over the last 18 months. Inspired by a conference she attended a few summers back, Moore felt that this was an important task for Overlake to undertake as a part of maintaining and cultivating a rich collection.

“It’s a part of our mission. It’s in bronze in the Owls Nest and we thought, how can the library contribute to that?” Moore said.

Getting Started

When thinking about auditing an entire collection, the task can get very overwhelming, very fast. The staff decided to start with the Middle School fiction section, which contains about 2600 books.

To help narrow down the research, the staff decided to just look at the catalog record to determine the content of each book. As they worked, the staff discovered a seemingly infinite number of possible categories and ideas on how to catalog the information. “It’s easy to get really granular because you end up getting lost and aiming for the ‘perfect’ rather than the ‘done’,” she said. “You setup your categories and then halfway through you go, ‘oh I should have added this or that’, then you have to go through all the books you’ve already done.”

The team plans on moving forward to audit the young adult fiction and e-book collections next, as well as refining their current research. One additional lens they plan on using is to look at books dated 2010-2021 to see if that changes their findings based on efforts of the library staff to expand the collection in recent years.

“This research is a snapshot in time, the collection is always a work in progress,” Moore noted.

The team hopes to utilize this research to see the gaps in the catalog but also get student voices on how to best utilize the findings of their research and get the books into student’s hands. “Now that we have them, it doesn’t do any good if they’re just sitting on the shelves. Kids need to read them,” Moore said.

Click here to read a copy of their current findings from the Middle School fiction research.