Mike Wolanin | The Republic Patrons wait in line at the checkout desk at the Bartholomew County Public Library in Columbus, Ind., Tuesday, May 30, 2023.
COLUMBUS, Ind. — After several months of research and analysis, Bartholomew County Public Library staff have concluded that its teen department is in need of more diverse materials and should be moved to a new location within the library.
The library’s board of trustees voted on Monday to adopt the teen subcommittee’s final report, which will be available at mybcpl.org, said library director Jason Hatton.
The report contained three main recommendations:
- Make a concentrated effort to seek out diverse materials for the section
- Adopt a policy for book displays
- Relocate and reorganize the teen section
“It’s not really doing anything much different than we have been doing,” said Hatton. “It’s just, I just keep coming back to that word, ‘intentional.’ It’s just really focusing on several key pieces that we kind of thought we were doing, I think, but maybe not quite as well as we thought.”
Since the spring of 2022, there have been a number of library board meetings where some individuals advocated certain teen section books be moved to another area of the library or be banned from the facility, while others decried those sentiments as censorship. Many of the books in question dealt with LGBTQ issues.
Monday’s report was the culmination of several months of work by library staff to examine the department and explore possible improvements. The process included a study of other libraries’ teen collections, a public survey on the local teen department and a title-by-title diversity audit of the library’s teen fiction materials.
Among other things, the audit found that about 75% of authors and protagonists in the collection are white, and only 10 to 15% identify as LGBTQIA+.
Moving forward, staff plan to make diversity a major priority and be intentional about how materials are sourced.
“We will accomplish this by regularly looking at specialized publishing companies whose focus is also on various diverse subject matters as well as ALA’s (American Library Association) annual Youth Media Awards which includes many diverse awards,” library staff wrote. “We will strive to add more books by authors with disabilities, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) authors, authors from a wide variety of religious backgrounds, LGBTQIA+ authors, and more Spanish language titles, especially those originally published in Spanish.”
For the complete story, see Wednesday’s Republic.
