In this month's column by Manitowoc (WI) Public Library Youth Librarian Susie Menk, she is thinking about EDI and our holiday book collections. And she's wondering....what do you think?
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
Libraries across the board are focusing on equity, diversity and inclusion. But how does that work when you are cataloging holidays? Our library separates holiday books (mostly picture books) out from our regular collection.
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Valentine’s Day, Easter—these are mostly Eurocentric holidays. What about holidays, festivals or celebrations from other cultures? Is it equitable to have stickers on the Eurocentric holidays and not on other books? What about Diwali or Kwanzaa or Ramadan?
I am thrilled that publishers are releasing more and more books that highlight festivals or holidays or celebrations from other cultures. But, my question is, where to catalog them? We have shelves full of Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween books, but where do I place the 4-5 books on Kwanzaa or Diwali? Should we give them their own category? Should we lump them together in general holidays? Is there a way to catalog them or put stickers on them to make them more visible to the public? Where do books like “Star Festival” by M. Hadley or “Chinese Kite Festival” by Rich Lo get placed? What about books that talk about Mid-Autumn Festival or Day of the Dead celebrations? Do these books go in the general picture book collection or do they deserve shelf space in a holiday or celebration section and receive equal recognition?
So I’m wondering….how does your library handle cataloging non-Eurocentric holiday books?
4 comments:
We have many non-European holidays in our holiday collection, everything is cataloged as Holiday name of holiday. So it all sits together, and has the same location in the catalog, but the call number/spine labels separate them. For example, JP Brown Christmas is a picture book by Brown in the Christmas section. We have Kwanzaa, Diwali, Lunar New Year, Eid, and a couple more, and we add a new one every time we get more than 3 books about it.
Of course they deserve equal recognition and space on the holiday shelf!
We have a Holidays, Celebrations, and Other Observances Collection. In the collection we include New Year Celebrations, Tu B' Shevat, Valentine's Day, Purim, Holi, St. Patricks's Day, Ramadan, Passover, Easter, Earth Day, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Shavuot, Father's Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, 9/11 Remembrance, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Halloween, Diwali, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa.
There is more that we could include and change around but it is an evolving collection.
The holidays are then divided out on the shelves according to holiday with shelf markers.
A holiday sticker is applied and cataloged under Holiday in our ILS, but the spine label simply has the first three letters of the authors last name.
So for the JP Brown Christmas example it would be +BRO in our collection with a holiday sticker on the spine. Shelved by the shelf marker 'Christmas'.
Again, it's not perfect, and it is evolving , but this is how our collection works right now.
I've recently been revisiting our holiday shelves - I'd like more circulation throughout the year, not just once a year. I ended up keeping just the locally popular Western holidays - Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, Valentine's Day, back there since I have a lot of those. I pulled all the generic monster/scary books from Halloween, all the generic grateful/thankful books and put them into my picture book neighborhoods. As I'm building up a more diverse collection of holiday books, I'm putting them straight into the picture book neighborhoods. Most fit into the sections of community/religion, community/places, or seasons. I'm also collecting them on Pinterest. https://www.pinterest.com/elkhornlibrary/browse-picture-books/
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