One of the things the teacher-librarians in my board have been discussing this year is how to ensure that our library collections - the books we have on the shelves - represent the student body in ethnicity, experiences, and lived realities. We’ve started the process of a diversity audit, gathering data about the books in our collections and what sort of experiences are represented in each. I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn that white, straight, able-bodied authors and characters dominate our collections. For example I’ve been trying to feature a book by a Black author daily on our library’s social media this month. I wanted to showcase a graphic novel for a change but we don’t seem to have a single one featuring a Black author & character (own voice - where the author writes about their own group of people and experiences - is important to ensure that the characters & experiences in the book aren’t misrepresented, even sometimes in a harmful way, by an author not of the same background).

So I would like to have access to student data at my fingertips that would allow me to see their diversity on various characteristics in quantitative form; first language spoken at home, country of birth, etc. I know we collect this data as a school. And I wish our library database (we use Alexandria) was better organized to allow the data for our collection to be pulled out as well. At the moment the library database is out of sorts because too many different people have been inputting books over the last 10 years, each using slightly different ways of coding the various data.

If I had both these sets of data I could use it to advocate for a budget from my school or school board to purchase books that would close the diversity gaps in our collection. For example we have a large Arabic population (from Syria for example), a large Nepali population, and Black population as well (with some being of African-American background whereas others are recent immigrants from Somalia or Ethiopia). My goal is to have the authors and characters in our books better reflect the diversity in our student body. This would go a long way towards the equity plan and work being done in our school board.