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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:
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