How can you spot the gaps in your collection and ensure that it reflects the needs of your community? Diversity audits have been a go-to approach for many libraries, but the data analysis can sometimes be daunting. We recently spoke with three library workers who have used self-serve or vendor-provided audit services to gain new perspective and develop collections that represent all people.
Diverse BookFinder Collection Analysis Tool
User: Andrea Stark, director at Monroe (Maine) Community Library
What is the Diverse BookFinder Collection Analysis Tool (DBF CAT)? How does it work? Diverse BookFinder is a comprehensive database of children’s picture books featuring characters who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. It is continually updated and includes books published since 2002. DBF CAT compares your collection with that database to highlight strengths and weaknesses.
How is this tool used in your library? We received a small grant to expand our children’s picture book collection. We submitted a spreadsheet including our books’ ISBNs, and DBF CAT pinpointed areas where our collection was stronger or weaker in representation.
What are the main benefits? The tool is easy to use. Once you’ve identified the strengths or gaps in your collection, there are many ways of searching DBF’s thousands of titles to help find books that meet the needs of your library. Our first reaction to the CAT report was that we have more chasms than gaps. Monroe is only an hour’s drive from Indian Island, the current home of the Penobscot Nation. We have selected books across many categories that offer stories about Native American children, families, and leaders, as well as the importance of intergenerational relationships.
What would you like to see improved or added to the collection analysis tool? Navigating the database of books in the DBF collection can be overwhelming for a small library without specialized children’s staff. That said, I’d rather have too much information and too many choices than too few, and the granular breakdown would be helpful for libraries where the local population is very diverse.
iCurate inClusive
User: Samantha Hodge, collection development librarian at Kent District Library in Comstock Park, Michigan
What is iCurate inClusive? How does it work? Ingram’s iCurate inClusive is a diversity auditing service that identifies 11 underrepresented categories in publishing, including topics related to LGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous and African American communities, and mental health. We sent Ingram a file with the ISBN of every print title in our collection. Ingram’s coordinator sent back graphs and charts showing how our collection reflects diversity categories. There’s even a section that compares our collection with those of other public libraries.
How is this service used in your library? We took the data we received and put it into our MARC records so it’s searchable in our catalog. On top of that, our data librarian created a dashboard that updates daily.
What are the main benefits? The main benefit is how incredibly easy it is. It took our systems librarian minutes to put the file together, and Ingram did the rest of the work. Now we can seek out titles in gap areas to ensure all people are represented.
What would you like to see improved or added to this collection analysis service? As we input the data into our catalog, we discovered that the audit missed some older titles, specifically ones that were reprinted, because Ingram had the most recent ISBNs. Also, some self-published and indie titles were not included in the data.
OverDrive Diversity Audit
User: Alicia Gunther, librarian at Monroe County (N.Y.) Library System
What is OverDrive’s diversity audit service? The Diversity Audit is a report that OverDrive can run on a library’s OverDrive collection. It breaks down held materials into a variety of focus areas that, together, show the diversity of your collection. The audit also compares a library’s collection with the number of inclusive titles in the OverDrive Marketplace database.
How is this service used in your library? We share this report with libraries in our system so they can use the data when considering purchasing materials. The system also uses the reports to track changes in our collections over time and share that data with library boards and various government representatives.
What are the main benefits? The reports offer an easy way to see how diverse our digital library collection is and where there may be gaps and provide another way to see how our collections reflect our communities. They show us a breakdown of the collection by format, recommended age ranges, language, and diverse subject headings, including religion, immigration, and African American and LGBTQIA+ authors and characters.
What would you like to see improved or added to this diversity audit service? We would like see usage data on how often patrons are checking out materials in a category. The diversity audit shows statistics for how many items we hold in a category, but we can’t generate a checkout report for that same category.
