Amigos Fellowship-funded Article to Appear in Technical Services Quarterly

Amigos recently learned that a paper funded by an Amigos Fellowship and Opportunity Award has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of Technical Services Quarterly.

The paper, written by Virginia Williams and Nancy Deyoe, Wichita State University – an Amigos member – was the culmination of their multiyear research project that received funding in 2011. Their project, titled "Diversity in Library Youth Collections," sought to learn the degree of diversity in the youth collections at school, public, and academic libraries, and whether youth collections truly reflected the diverse families and life experiences in their communities.

Williams, an Acquisitions Librarian and Associate Professor at Wichita State, said numerous conversations with Deyoe, Assistant Dean for Technical Services who selects children's literature to support the library's teacher education program, led them to select this as a research topic. "I was a school librarian in a rural southern school district for 11 years," said Williams. "We talked about things like the new professor who asked Nancy to buy more Hispanic/Latino picture books, and the friend who mentioned to me that he’d always found it hard to identify with the 'middle-class, white, straight' characters in library books, while handing me a copy of the Rainbow List."

The idea of collaborating on a research project began to grow. Williams said she and Deyoe talked about a project that would explore how selector beliefs and education influence diversity in youth collections. They began to realize they had assumed that libraries in some regions, serving some kinds of populations, wouldn't have diverse collections. They first needed to establish that differences existed before they could look at why there were differences.

Not surprisingly to them, their research showed significant differences in the holdings of racially/ethnically diverse titles, titles portraying individuals with disabilities, and titles portraying LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) individuals, and that public libraries with larger collections and with larger budgets tend to hold more titles with characters representing our three diversity groups. They were surprised, and somewhat concerned, to learn that about 30 percent of public libraries that spend at least $100,000 a year on print collections didn't meet the minimal collection level for either racial/ethnic diversity or representations of diversity on the Conspectus scale they had established, and 40 percent didn't meet the minimal collection level for titles portraying LGBTQ characters. Williams said they were dismayed to find that 15 percent of the 5,002 academic, public, and school libraries they identified as actively collecting youth literature didn’t have a single one of the 116 titles on their LGBTQ checklist.

Williams sees value in their study for academic, public, and school libraries. “We think this project shows a clear need for librarians to assess their youth collections for representations of diversity,” she said. "Libraries should be inclusive, providing children and teens with materials that mirror their own experiences and that serve as windows into the experiences of others." They knew from their own experiences in building youth collections in academic and school libraries that it can be hard to find quality books for some groups. But they firmly believe it is worth the effort to ensure every child and teen can find a book with a family like their own and that every future teacher has a chance to become familiar with books that reflect the diversity they’ll find in today's classrooms.

Williams and Deyoe made a presentation on their project at the National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color, September 2012 in Kansas City, MO. Audience feedback from the presentation, "Reaching Youth through Diverse Collections and Teen/Community-Driven Programming," helped them refine the project and suggested new ways for them to look at the data.

What's next? Williams and Deyoe hope to submit their next paper to a journal in February. This paper will probe the extent to which academic libraries with youth collections that support accredited teacher education programs and/or ALA-accredited programs collect recommended titles with LGBTQ characters. After that? Williams laughed. "We'll be writing papers based on the data we’ve collected for years!"

Williams said she and Deyoe would never have undertaken a multi-year research project – with data from over 5,000 libraries – without the Amigos Fellowship funding, which they used to pay the student assistants necessary to help collect the data. "We learned that our original project was much more complex than we anticipated," she acknowledged. Williams said they are grateful for the funding, and will "gladly acknowledge Amigos' support" on all papers they publish.

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Editor’s note: The article "Diverse Population, Diverse Collection? Youth Collections in the United States" will be published in Technical Services Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 2. That issue is expected to be available online in mid-February and in print in early March. Slides and preliminary data from the 2012 National Joint Conference of Librarians of Color presentation are available at http://soar.wichita.edu/handle/10057/5328.