Mar 6, 2021
In 2015 only 14.2% of characters in children’s books represented minorities; this number covered four different nationalities while 73.3% of characters were white. Meanwhile, 12.5% of characters were animals or inanimate objects. What does this mean? This means that there were more books about rabbits and bulldozers than about any other non-white race. With that in mind, the Minot Public Library began a Diversity Audit in 2020 to look deeply at their collection of books see if the collection represented diversity in a thoughtful way.
Why does diversity and representation matter for public libraries? Public libraries are intended to serve, and thus represent, everyone within a community. During the Minot Public Library’s November “Sweater Weather” program, staff reached out to local indigenous community members and asked them “When did you first read a book by an indigenous author?” One person responded stating that she didn’t read a book by an indigenous author until she was 20 years old and enrolled in a Native American Studies course in college. This is a striking statement on the materials available to people. In a 2019 article for Young Adult Library Services Journal, Nicole Cooke (a Library and Information Sciences professor) warned that a “lack of perspective and diversity of thought can become dangerous, particularly to impressionable youth who don’t see themselves in books and consequently are at risk of developing a skewed perception of what the real world actually looks like.”