The Blough-Weis Library children’s literature department is getting a lesson in diversity through its upcoming Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) audit.
According to the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a diversity audit is when a library evaluates its existing collection to get hard numbers on how diverse its materials are, meaning that they search for demographics like people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals and those who are disabled. This can either be the author of these stories or the basic content of the book.
Amanda Boyer, the first-year experience librarian, is leading the audit in hopes of making the children’s literature department more useful for education students and professors. She plans to seek input from the education department on how this collection can be beneficial for their curriculum and student teaching.
Although children’s literature is one of the smallest collections in the library, it has a wide range of material from picture books all the way up to young adult novels. Therefore, Boyer was met with the difficult question of, “How do we make sure there is a fair representation across all reading levels?”
Currently, she plans to use a free online collection analysis tool (CAT) called Diverse BookFinder. According to its website, “The Diverse BookFinder is a growing collection of thousands of children’s picture books featuring Black and Indigenous people and people of Color (BIPOC).”
A user begins the process by submitting all the titles of their collection, Diverse BookFinder then cross-references it with their database to provide a report of what racial and cultural groups are represented and what themes predominate each group within the submitted collection. The purpose of these reports is to reveal the gaps in representation present within submitted collections.
However, when discussing how this tool can be used in the Blough-Weis Library, there are some problems that arise.
First, the Diverse BookFinder collection is limited to kindergarten through third grade reading levels, meaning it is almost entirely picture books. Therefore, higher reading levels, like middle grade and young adult, will need to have their data manually entered into a report or spreadsheet.
Additionally, there is a disparity among the types of diverse groups included within the database. The main focus of Diverse BookFinder is collecting BIPOC stories, therefore other distinctions like gender, religion, ability and sexuality are not at the forefront of their efforts. However, their databases do track these distinctions within their reports to see how these identities impact people of color. Regardless, exclusively using Diverse BookFinder will exclude stories regarding any white people that may identify with other minorities, like the LGBTQ+ or disability communities.
As well as tracking diversity, Boyer plans to go through each book in the children’s literature department to check for any harmful material, specifically any themes that may be racist or homophobic.
“We don’t just want to make sure we’re representing all these populations of people,” says Boyer. “We also want to make sure there’s nothing in the collection that may have been obtained in the past, but is not quite up to our standards now.”
However, this also presents a new set of challenges. Since the collection covers such a wide variety of reading levels, some books will be easier to examine than others. For instance, it will take a lot less time to search a 30-page picture book for offensive content as opposed to a 400-page young adult novel. Therefore, Boyer predicts this audit could take the majority of, if not all, the spring semester.
Since this will be the first time the Blough-Weis Library has taken on a DEI audit, so many of the methods used will be on a trial-and-error basis. Regardless, Boyer is determined to not allow any obstacles to limit the success of this project.
“Everybody has implicit biases, and you don’t want that bias to come into your work, especially when you are doing a diversity audit,” says Boyer.
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