A Diversity Audit in Real Life

Claire Parrish, the Public Services Director at the Rice Lake (WI) Public Library reached out to us after our recent post on doing diversity audits. She offered to share their process and experience tackling their juvenile and YA collections. Here's Claire!

While COVID has thrown a wrench in a lot of our plans, one thing that has been nice is it gave us the motivation to dig into some projects that are very time/detail intensive.  One such project is a diversity audit of our Juvenile and YA fiction.  A post was shared a few weeks back giving an introduction of how to complete an audit, so I thought I’d share how we’ve made it happen here at the Rice Lake Public Library. 

 

I kicked the project off by creating the spreadsheet of categories I wanted to evaluate.  You can get as specific or as general as you want with these, so really think about what you’re hoping to learn from the audit when coming up with them.  My main goal was to look at racial diversity, which gave me a starting place with categories.  I also really liked the Any Child and Beautiful Life categories from the Diverse Children’s Book Finder tool, so I incorporated those along with gender/ sexual orientation, author information, and if the character was main or secondary as my sub categories.  Then I pulled in some categories from the wonderful Karen Jensen regarding disabilities, separating them by visible and invisible. Since we all know there are lots of books with nonhuman characters, I threw in those categories as well.  A notes section was added for needed clarification, such as noting if a character was multiple races. 

Here’s a screenshot, because that was a lot!  

Tip: use 1’s so that you can add everything up at the end.

I then ran a list of titles for each collection and was ready to start!  

 

Two of my wonderful library assistants are going through and evaluating each title for the categories listed. They're using the book description in our MORE library catalog, Kirkus Reviews, various blogs, and then grabbing the book if they need more information.  It is time consuming, but it has been a good project to work on with slower traffic due to COVID. We are picking back up with patron visits, so the progress has slowed a little, but I’m confident we’ll finish the project soon.  Another bonus is that it’s gotten my library assistants more familiar with the collection, so think about assigning it to newer staff as a way for them to learn what’s available to patrons. 

Here’s a link to the YA Diversity Audit spreadsheet, feel free to copy and use as a start for your own audit!

You can contact Claire at claireparrish@ricelakegov.org