CMLE Mini Grant Report: Equity in Action: Building Diverse Collections

Huyck, David and Sarah Park Dahlen. (2019 June 19). Diversity in Children’s Books 2018. sarahpark.com blog. Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: https://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/literature-resources/ccbc-diversity-statistics/books-by-about-poc-fnn/. Retrieved from https://readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic/

Do you need help funding a project or materials for your school library this year? Check out our Extended Mini Grant Program!

This is a guest post from Jenny Hill, Ed.D. Assistant Professor of Teacher Development (Library Media emphasis) at St. Cloud State University.

Is your school library collection equitable and inclusive?  How do you really know?  Thanks to a generous grant from CMLE, I was able to attend the Library Journal/School Library Journal’s Equity in Action: Building Diverse Collections Workshop in order to learn more about how to perform an equity audit.

As topics were introduced at the beginning of the workshop, there were many great resources provided, some of which were TED talks and articles written by authors about diversity that I’d like to pass along to you:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story

Grace Lin: The Mirrors and Windows of Your Child’s Bookshelf

Jacqueline Woodson: Who Can Tell My Story

When performing an equity audit on your collection, it’s good to get a handle on the demographics of your community around you.  I found this site particularly helpful because of its detail for the specific cities throughout the state of Minnesota: http://www.mncompass.org/profiles

With your audience in mind, you can begin to audit your collection to see if it is representative of your population.  There are many ways to approach this task; there are a few things to keep in mind:

Start with a portion of your collection, maybe even a reading list of selected titles.  Trying to audit the entire library is a herculean task.   Remember the words of Mark Twain, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

Stand on the shoulders of giants!  There are many practitioners in the field who have already started to engage with this work.  Shannon McClintock Miller recently hosted a webinar featuring Baltimore County Public Schools and Denver Public Schools. They willingly share their equity audit tool they’ve created using Google Sheets.

Use the information you discover from your audit to inform your future purchases.  There are many great places to look for books for your collections, especially those that feature #OwnVoices.  Here are just a few to get you started:

Lee & Low Books

The Brown Bookshelf
Rainbow Booklist

Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association

If you are interested in learning more about the equity audit process or if I could help you start to diversify your collection, I would love to sit down and talk to you further! You can e-mail me at: jchill@stcloudstate.edu