 All right, welcome to our next session on Big Talk from Small Libraries, 2022. I am your host for the day, Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. It is 11 a.m. Central Time, and we have our next presenter ready to go here. Allie Stevens is Director at the Calhoun County Library. Good morning, Allie. Good morning. And their population served is, what you said earlier, 5,000? Is that still? Right, 5,000. Yeah, with every census it inches down a little further and a little further, but it's at about 5,000 right now. For the whole county, awesome. And she's going to talk to us about creating supportive and inclusive libraries for all sorts of communities, all sizes of communities, crystal queer. So I'm just going to hand it over to you, Allie, to go ahead and get started. And we do have a link, as she mentioned earlier, to a Google Drive that I'm going to share out, and it will be included when we do have the recording later as well. We will include a link to everyone's presentations, the video of their presentation and their presentations themselves, and any other documents. And she has a Google Drive here that has some resources that you'll be able to access as well. So go ahead and take it away, Allie. All right. Good morning. I don't know about you guys, but after those last two sessions, I have the urge to get up and go rearrange my entire collection. Sorry. I'm hoping that passes by this afternoon, because I have a lot of other stuff I really need to do, but I really want to reorganize. I've been wanting to, and now I have more ideas than time. So Christa gave you guys a pretty good introduction to me. I'm not going to add anything to that, except that for the past two years, I was the coordinator of Yalsa's Best Fiction for Young Adults List, which gave me a good bit of insight in the publishing side of the books that are coming out. So I'm not actually going to get into Reader's Advisory much today, but there are some images in the folder that I shared that have my recommended books in case you're looking to add to your collections. Before I really dive into this, I want to give some content warnings for all of you. There's some information about distressing current events, child abuse, human trafficking, and mentions of suicide and self-harm in this presentation. So I want you to take care of yourselves first. And if you're not in a place where you can safely participate in this, it will not hurt my feelings if you need to step away. The whole presentation is not those things, but they are part of this conversation. So when I did this presentation initially, it was for the Arla conference here in Arkansas, and I started with this recent legislation from last year that highlights why this issue is so important for all of our patrons right now. As I'm sure you're aware, the Arkansas legislature passed quite a few bills that affect LGBTQ young people in particular in this past year, and a lot of these are also on the table in other states. So just to touch quickly on the top two, Act 461 here prevented athletes from competing in school sports with their affirmed gender. They have to participate by their assigned at birth gender. And other states have already enacted these laws, and there are 22 that had them on the table last year. Act 462, which is commonly referred to as a right of conscience law, allows any medical providers the right to not participate in non-emergency treatments that violate their conscience by going against religious or moral beliefs. It applies to doctors, hospitals, nurses, pharmacists, insurers, and anyone involved in healthcare. So they can decide that because their conscience tells them what you're doing is wrong. They don't have to participate in your healthcare. That law was, there are 12 other states that have one like that, and many others have similar laws. And then the one that was really in the news, Arkansas was the first state to enact a ban on gender affirming medical treatment for kids under 18. And that one was temporarily struck down, but there are many other states considering similar laws. So all of this and these issues, which are in the news right now, we've all been hearing about Texas governor who's calling for members of the public to report parents of trans kids for allowing gender affirming medical care. He's calling it child abuse. The Supreme Court is getting right here another case about Colorado weddings. It's like Colorado and the weddings in the Supreme Court for this issue. But this time it's about a website creator who doesn't want to be obligated to create websites for LGBTQ people. 2021, according to Human Rights Campaign and the ACLU was the most anti-LGBTQ legislative season in the history, in like recent history. There were 147 different proposals, and in 2022 there are expected to be around 280. So it's likely to be even worse this year. So all of this leads to some direct effects on our patrons. LGBTQ patrons are going to be at increased risk of crisis in terms of housing, mental health, medical health, food, at increased risk of assault, abuse or being trafficked. They have an increased need for diverse representative collections and spaces, an increased need for competent, compassionate adult interactions, particularly the young people, and a need for privacy and personal empowerment. I know that there's a lot of heavy stuff going on in the news today, not just in this area, but every single aspect it seems like. I came across this tweet a couple of days ago and it really helped me settle down into working on this presentation because I had been kind of all over the place. And so the tweet says, it can be overwhelming to witness experience and take in all the injustices of the moment. The good news is that they're all connected. So if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you're helping to unravel the whole damn cloth. So for the next 45 minutes, I would invite you to work on this corner and see how much of this one corner we can unravel. Okay, so it's not really easy to measure the outcome of all of these laws and all these conversations on young people and LGBTQ patrons in general. But this statistic makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up every single time I look at it. 42% of LGBTQ young people seriously considered suicide. And this says in the past year, this is from 2021, so in 2020. And that includes more than half of transgender and non-binary youth. So just about one in two of every LGBTQ kids who comes in your library have thought about killing themselves in the last year. And if that does not be a need for us to be compassionate, considerate and supportive, then I don't know what does. So our goal is always to find ways that we can use our library services and collections to offer things that reduce those risks and target those needs of our communities. So libraries are really on the front lines in this issue. In Arkansas, so both of these are our Arkansas libraries just because they're the ones that I'm familiar with, but I'm certain this is happening in all of your states. In the past, let's see, last year, no, since 2018, more than half of ALA's most challenged books every year are on the basis of just simply acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people. In the past year, Faulkner-Van Buren's system, specifically the Conway Public Library and the Crackett County-Jonesborough Public Library have had issues with their programming and their materials being challenged. In the case of Crackett County-Jonesborough, it's happening by a member of their own library board. There is a lot of loud opposition to the inclusion of these materials in our libraries, and I think it's not unreasonable for this to come to a head or become a problem at any of our libraries, but there are some things that we can do to be prepared for when it does happen. And we have an obligation to serve all parts of our communities despite the possibility of these conflicts. We can be loud from a position of support, too, and if we are not, then it's easy for reason and compassion to be drowned out by those who would rather LGBTQ people and allies be invisible or non-existent. Neutrality anywhere always benefits the status quo, and I don't know about y'all, but that's kind of antithetical to the work that I'm trying to do here in this library. So if you have not heard me or anyone speak about how to make sure you have a really strong collection development policy, you can check out the LGBTQNU workshop that I did with Ruth Hyatt through the Arkansas State Library. The links to that are on the handout in that Google Drive folder. It's available on YouTube. Anybody can watch it. There's a really good part in there about how to make sure that your collection development policy is as strong as you can make it. So that aside, because that is in and of itself an hour, hour and a half conversation, these are the things that I'm going to go over today that we can do to help support our collections and our patrons and our staff members and our whole communities. Creating representative diverse collections that don't perpetuate harmful stereotypes and cataloging them in such a way that they are easily searchable and don't use any outdated or harmful terminology. We can make sure that we have non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies as well as inclusive identification policies. All of these are fairly simple, non-time-consuming things that give us a lot of underpinning in a policy way for the work that we're doing, which is really important when challenges come or people attempt to censor what we're doing. So, if you're a student of a state-private law, knowing your state-private law is really going to help. Human trafficking signs and what to do if you suspect that that's happening. Crisis and non-crisis, local and national resource lists. Evaluating our own biases, there are some tools online that are really helpful in learning to evaluate where our own biases are and what we can do about them. Learning for justice, school climate assessment, this used to be called teaching tolerance. It is obviously most relevant for a school environment, but there's a lot of it that is still relevant in a public library situation where you're working with young people. There's also safe space training. You can test your computer filters and I'm going to go into a little more detail about that, but a lot of standard computer filters that people are required to use for e-rate are filtering out access to LGBTQ resources that are in no way inappropriate, but because of certain letter strings that may be contained, they get filtered out. So you can check and make sure that those websites are getting through. Being prepared for materials and program challenges in a specific way is something else that I'll talk about and that part is a little time consuming, but worth it if you can tell that these sorts of things are coming down the pipeline. Then the safe folder for yourself or your organization is one that I just added last night because it's an idea that I came across in reference to what's going on in Texas where they're advising parents to create a safe folder that has a lot of documentation about the state of their family and how they have handled the health of their child, but it's a similar idea that I think we can adapt for libraries so that we can collect this documentation to prove that what we're doing is impactful in a positive way. Okay, let's see. All right, so first a few quick tips on representative diverse collections. So it takes a lot of training to be able to pick out problematic content in books. I've been doing specifically evaluation of YA books for years now and I still miss stuff all the time. I read a lot of reviews that are written by real readers that are shared on sites like Goodreads and Amazon. A lot of intellectual and emotional labor is going into those reviews on the part of readers, particularly when they're calling things out. That's not easy to do. It's not easy to put into words and you can learn so much from reading those opinions by people who share the marginalizations in the books that you're trying to evaluate. Do not put external labels on your books that in any way identify them as LGBTQ, particularly in more conservative rural areas. Some of the kids live in dangerous situations and that effectively puts those books off limits for them if they're labeled in such a way that it is very obvious what they are. And you can't do much about like there's a book called The Summer of Jordy Perez that has a really cute rainbow spine label like the whole spine is a rainbow and you can't change that but we don't have to add anything that makes it more obvious what these books are. By the same token, don't create displays that only feature LGBTQ books. If you're doing a display for Pride Months and you want to only feature those books, create a printout, you know get a little get the little sign stands and put a picture of the book but leave the books themselves on the shelf because by the same token that a kid might not be able to take home a book that has a rainbow sticker on it, they might be with an adult that makes it impossible for them to walk up to a table of those books and look at them without having to have conversations that they're not ready for or that are unsafe. So find ways to share your collection with your patrons that don't ever put the books off limits to the readers. Okay I'm I'm promise I'm not gonna spend this whole next however long on my libraries can never be neutral soapbox but it's a false dichotomy that we have to collect both sides of every argument equally. There are not always materials on both sides that are of equal value and that's fine. Our job is to select good reliable accurate information for our collections. Sometimes that means we're not going to buy that self-pubbed poorly reviewed title on conversion therapy that that one patron requested because it doesn't fit our collection development policy. We can facilitate access to just about anything without having to spend taxpayer dollars on it there's ILL there are collections who do service repositories for information like that but it doesn't mean that we have to buy both sides of every single argument even if those materials don't exist in a way that fits our standards. Also keeping keeping an eye on things that are going on Alex Geno the author of George was the previous title has requested that we change the title of their book to Melissa's Story and Alex will send out stickers I didn't I meant to grab them before I started they're buried in piles over here but um Alex sent and sent me an envelope and it's got front cover and spine labels for the copies of Melissa's Story that are here in my library so that I can fix the name um on those books. Very simple very cheap makes a huge difference. I love that I love that that they were the author themselves was said you're this is not right I'm going to facilitate fixing this. Yeah yeah I think that that was a decision that was made um you know and and then as soon as it was published Alex kind of felt like but that character's name isn't George her name is Melissa and it's Melissa's Story so I really love this um yeah and the new copies of the book will be published with the right title but I thought it was really neat to be able to go back and like before I had the stickers I wrote online with a Sharpie and now I have the pretty sticker to cover it up but um and that's what they advocated they said yes just just change it do it and now you know right at the beginning and then then they provided here here's the stickers to officially do it yep that's the way to do it right yeah exactly I think that I put the link to that on the handout if I didn't I will add it um to that google drive file as soon as we're done here so if you guys have copies of Melissa's Story and you want to fix the title you can fill out that form and Alex will send you an envelope of stickers um okay another important thing is cataloging most of us in small and rural libraries are doing copy cataloging and we're not creating all the mark records from scratch but we also aren't part of large systems where there's a lot of red tape and bureaucracy involved in changing what's in our catalog like for me it's as simple as I mean it's me I have one employee here and there are two of us for the whole county so I'm the only one who does the cataloging so I'm also the only one who can change it um and it's as simple as going in and saying batch edit searching for an outdated term and replacing it with the more correct um compassionate terminology and Homosaurus is an excellent resource for finding what the current um most widely accepted compassionate terminology for certain things is and what are some outdated harmful terms that you might want to search your catalog for so that you can replace them um this is from their about page I like this quote homosaurus is designed to serve as a companion to broad subject term vocabularies homosaurus is a robust and cutting edge vocabulary of lgbtq specific terminology that enhances the discoverability of lgbtq resources so along with not creating displays that are just lgbtq books you have to make sure that they are extremely discoverable through your system um and so this is one way to make sure that that that's being done correctly and compassionately in a way that's not going to create any undue harm for your patrons I would encourage you to adopt a non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy you can include it as like an addendum to your patron conduct policy or as a standalone policy but it will give you some backup in case you need to ask someone to leave for incendiary or discriminatory language you have an actual policy like you cannot stand at my front desk and use those words and here's here's like the policy that you're violating um I have seen a lot of these policies that only speak to the protection of staff members from patron commentary but I kind of like the ones that are written to protect everyone in the building um something like this can go a long way toward making your space feel and be safer for marginalized people in your community um full disclosure I do not have one of these policies yet from my own library I am hoping to get my board to approve one at our next meeting but my board is a can of worms for another day um when I when I do the one that I hope to have approved is a combination of these two these are these are two of my favorites but I have combined them so the north freedom library one speaks to many specific protected identities race color religion gender national origin age disability ancestry marital status veteran status citizenship status sexual orientation or any other protected status um the palace heights one also calls out sexual harassment in particular which is a separate issue um but I doubt is unfamiliar to any of us that work in public libraries and I think that there's a there's a potential to sort of create a little umbrella policy here that both um prevents the sexual harassment of staff and other patrons and also tackles this no discriminatory language allowed in the library kind of thing okay in that lgbtq and new workshop that I mentioned earlier with um that I did with Ruth Hyatt oh there's an excellent segment on Arkansas privacy law as it pertains to minors but since you guys are from all over the country I did a little digging and I found out that 48 states and Washington DC so everyone but Kentucky and Hawaii have laws on the books um that protect the privacy of library records um Kentucky and Hawaii have attorney general opinions that support the privacy of library records but they don't have actual like codified laws about it I would encourage you to make sure that you are extremely familiar with your state's law as it pertains to library records um and what you can and cannot share with guardians even off minor cards um I know when I learned about how this works in the state of Arkansas there were definitely some surprises for me and I'm really glad to not only know the law but to know it well enough that I can articulate it to patrons who may not understand why I can't just tell you all the kids that I mean all the books that are checked out on your kids library card just because you asked you know there are there are ways around that but they are very specific um but it gives us a lot of a lot of leeway to protecting the privacy of our minor patrons okay um this is the part where it's going to get a little darker and I'm not going to dwell on it but I do want everyone to be aware of all of this because I think awareness is one of our best ways of eliminating it so LGBTQ young people are 120 more likely to experience homelessness than their non-LGBTQ peers more than one in four kids are kicked out of their house for coming out one in two get a negative reaction from their families so um you can see that that lines up pretty well with that statistic about how many of them have had suicidal thoughts in the past year as well now in in conjunction with being 120 more likely to experience homelessness experiencing homelessness makes them 65 percent or 65 percent of human trafficking victims reported experiencing homelessness so they're much more likely to be trafficked if they are experiencing homelessness or housing instability combined these numbers show an extremely disproportionate number of LGBTQ young people who are ending up um as human trafficking victims uh there are two numbers here on the bottom a text line and a hotline if you suspect that someone might be a victim of human trafficking in that instance calling the police may not be the best first line of action um many marginalized people for many reasons may be uncomfortable with police officers and so if the goal is actually to get someone help then these resources might be a better option um often human trafficking is almost impossible to spot in strangers but that gives us in rural communities a leg up context and proximity are keys to being able to see it happening and we have a lot of context and proximity for our communities um in in larger areas the transient nature of people experiencing homelessness can make it more difficult to develop the long term and deep relationships that we need to be able to spot the changes and the warning signs that come with human trafficking but in rural areas we're a little more well equipped to spot it because we don't have as many transient members of our community even you know the the few homeless people here in my community tend to be from here it's um we're geographically distant from many other places so there's not that much transience that occurs um much more common than than being able to see this in one interaction is going to be the sorts of slow personality and behavioral changes that are outlined in the graphic here um the context of someone's relationship with a child and the proximity of us as librarians to the communities we serve helps us really understand the intricacies of the relationships between people and that's a quote from the Polaris project there are also a lot of barriers to getting help for victims of sex trafficking the LGBTQ community has historically not had a great relationship with law enforcement um and fear of those interactions may prevent a lot of victims from seeking help and even more from seeking justice it can also be difficult to admit what's happening even to your own self or to the people who are very closest to you and that's before you even consider the inherent danger of trying to escape a trafficking situation so these are some um situations that can make people more vulnerable to being trafficked this is not an exhaustive or complete list but these are the things that um should make you keep it in the back of your mind just you know to be aware of the potential for someone to fall victim to human trafficking okay now we're gonna switch gears back a little bit to not less important but maybe less immediately distressing distressing topics so singles single stall gender bathrooms should be all gender bathrooms the two that you can see behind me here have wooden signs above them that say ladies and gentlemen and trust me if I could take those signs off that wall and set them on fire I would they were made by the county judge who remodeled this library before I took over and I have tried but am not allowed to take them down um that said I make sure to point out to my patrons that it doesn't matter they're exactly the same on the inside so rather than use all gender restroom signs that have um a man a woman and a half man half woman person by signs that have a toilet on them they're not only clearer and less confusing for gender non-conforming patrons they're also better for non-english speakers because it's pretty clear what's in that room it's a toilet all right we talked about um displays not putting lgbtq books on a display that's all lgbtq books because that functionally puts them out of the reach of children if you're in a big enough system where you have two or three copies of every book and you can do that and still have a copy on the shelf that's available that's different but I can't afford more than one copy of every book so if I put them on that display then they are totally out of reach of any kids who cannot have that discussion with the grown-ups in their lives um another thing that is usually much easier to just change without a lot of red tape and headaches and conversations in small libraries allow your patrons to change the first names on their library cards or their gender but I don't really see why we need to be collecting gender to begin with low note county here in Arkansas recently removed the gender question from their library card sign up we've never asked word on ours I don't really see any reason for it it can create a lot of dysphoria for trans non-binary and gender non-conforming people even to like have to answer that question um so if you can do without that then I would say remove it and oh just allow them to change their first name even if you have to keep a historic record of whatever the name on their driver's license is um it's it's a small thing to allow someone to go by their chosen name or their true name rather than be called something that does not feel like it belongs to them and bonus affirming transgender and non-binary youth and I'm going to go out of the limb here and say people by respecting pronouns and allowing them to change legal documents which your library card is a legal document it's associated with lower rates of attempting suicide so respecting the pronouns of the people around us is a really simple way that you can have a huge positive effect on on your patrons and your community it stands to reason to me that having an outside adult authority figure respect the pronouns is also going to have a positive effect on mental health you can see here this is legal documents but this next slide is going to show the effect here it is if you live with other people how many of them respect your pronouns and then across that what are the suicide attempt rates so you can see that as the number of people in a household who respect someone's pronouns goes up the rate of suicide attempts goes down pretty directly I mean that that's a huge correlation there so um it's a really small thing to allow your patrons to tell you what pronouns they prefer and use those pronouns but we I think we get really used to kind of making those assumptions and we don't even realize when we're gendering our patrons sort of like automatically so paying attention to it can be huge and you may never even know the kind of effect that you've had on someone by not misgendering them so that to me is all the more reason to make sure that we're really careful about not making that mistake absolutely and it's just a small thing and I am thrilled so much that we have this data actual studies you mean yeah it's to me it's common sense that this would be the effect and the the things that are happening but having the data to show to people who are maybe unsure or don't understand or don't believe is well and and having it to share with your stakeholders so if you have a patron who comes in who says why are you putting this on my library card sign up or a board member who says what are we hurting by asking for gender on our library card sign ups you could show them this data you can say look here's what's going on all I want to do is keep my patrons safe from from all of the things that I can possibly keep them safe from mm-hmm so it's a little thing it's a little thing and it makes a huge difference this data is all from the trevor projects 20 I think it was 2020 report and that is definitely linked on the handout and this is just like one little bit of it that I pulled out to use for this presentation but there is an unbelievably huge amount of really great data in that report so I would encourage you to go read the whole thing and we have someone who commented and this I think is is great that their ILS I don't know which one it is maybe they can share that has actually two entries to put in there for a person and it says for their name legal and preferred there are two actual fields for that so that is so the ILSs are actually taking on doing this yeah and it in so many ways it's nothing new I mean my my name on my driver's license is Allison but I barely even respond to that if someone called me that because I don't go by Alice and I go by Ali who is that yeah how many friends do I have that are named Catherine but they go by Kate or Katie and it's it's exactly the same procedure you know it's not you would never say well you can't put Kate on your library card you have to put Catherine like who cares I am who I am yeah autographs first autographs first so is the ILS and someone else's there's also atrium book systems does it as well so it's yeah I love it yeah so like it's not even any extra work for you to put in their it's already there um okay like I mentioned with cataloging terminology changes when I was first introduced to the pronoun conversation when I was probably back in college the way that it was referred to then was your preferred pronouns but more recently that is stop it's we don't call it preferred pronouns anymore we call it personal pronouns because they're not just preferred pronouns like it's I don't just prefer to go by my name that is my name um same thing with pronouns so uh be aware I would say of changing language um not that any of us have time to do more than we're already doing but if you keep an eye to these kinds of conversations then you'll start to notice when things are called something else and if you are still like if your library card says preferred pronouns maybe make it say personal pronouns um little stuff but it's just it shows um patrons that we are paying attention to what is least harmful um y'all is probably my favorite word in the English language when I have groups of students I always say y'all I try to never say ladies and gentlemen or boys and girls um y'all is versatile inoffensive culturally unique and completely agender um another evergreen reminder that I will talk about probably until I die is don't call programs things like mommy and me or daddy and daughter hairstyle day it's very easy to call it something else and not only are you not ostracizing your um lgbtq kids you're also allowing for participation more comfortably for kids who don't have a mom or don't have a dad who live with their grandparents or you know maybe uh like my son has long hair maybe his dad wants to bring him and learn how to braid his hair you know so it's very simple to not gender your programs that way um and it's it serves to benefit a lot of our patrons for various reasons so no genders in the library using the terminology words there and the remittable is something that I know I have personally struck um I don't know if I say struggled with but I'm making a personal concerted effort to not use things like so you guys all know blah blah blah blah because it's something I noticed myself saying it and yeah and with everything that's happening and it just made it graded on myself so I actually have a note to myself on mine because I do a lot of online sessions a lot of online presentations have a note to myself that says because I apparently use the word guys as just like a general so you guys know blah blah blah and it says guys that has a big red circle and line through it so that I remind myself I used a red man don't use that word and I like you all and um because it is it's just or all of you and so it's it's something it's that I've had to really strongly stop doing and I'm trying and I think I think it's it's like it's one of those things like accidentally using the wrong pronouns for someone it is it is not malicious it is um habitual it is instinctual it is a reflex and it takes time to learn to not have that reflex so if you mess up no that's the thing to do is just yeah and I and if I do it wrong I don't make a big deal out of it but I just I fix it right away like if I hear oh whoops I said it I'll just say you guys all of you know you know I'll just exactly don't have to make the more you do it the more you practice it the easier it yeah all right so the most important thing about sharing resources with your patrons is to make sure that you're providing those resources in such a way that patrons can see them in multiple formats and locations um make posters bookmarks bathroom signs put your graphic online hang it up in multiple locations put it um you know like it not so much because it will be more visible but because it will be more accessible so a kid who can't pick up an LGBTQ reading list bookmark off the front desk while their parent is standing right next to them can look at the sign in the bathroom and know which books they might be looking for without having to identify why they're looking for those books um so just always be thinking about all the different ways that you can share this information um don't just include crisis resources either either um not that crisis resources aren't important but there's a lot of non-crisis events like the equality crew in Northwest Arkansas does these really great social events like they have um but I don't remember what they called it I think it was it was either pride prom or queer prom or something like that it was basically like prom for high schoolers facilitated by this nonprofit organization um and it was it was a fun event it was a joyous celebration uh so don't only think about the things that people might need in bad situations but also try and share the good stuff fun organizations um let's see so in altering this presentation for a national audience instead of an Arkansas specific audience I thought about what I was going to do about the resources so if you look here in Transitive Lucy's Place Arkansas Law Help Any Arkansas Crisis Center are kind of specific to our state and Transitive is a shelter in um it's not just a shelter it's a huge organization in Little Rock that's doing a lot of really great stuff and then Lucy's Place is um a shelter and Arkansas Law Help has our kinds of documentation but what I thought was I would keep them in there in the hopes that it will encourage you to seek out similar resources in your state um let's see these in particular so Free Mom Hugs has a chapter in every state I think Arkansas Children's Hospital has a gender spectrum clinic that's amazing and the Children's Hospital in your state might also have one um Trans Families is National Gender Spectrum is National PFLAG is National NWA Equality and Equality Crew are both in Northwest Arkansas but they are like um private non-profit organizations who are doing like Equality Crew is the one who does the the prom thing and they do like a monthly it's not bingo night but it's kind of like a game night or something for LGBTQ young people like just fun opportunities to get together with other like-minded kids that don't have to be stressful that they can just be and enjoy themselves so I ended up leaving the Arkansas resources in so that you can look for similar things um in your area okay these are ways to check yourself project implicit comes from Harvard and that is a way to do implicit bias testing online um I will warn you that the results might shock you so go into this with a very open mind and be prepared for the fact that they may be able to detect bias that you are not aware of um and that doesn't mean that it's wrong so there there may be a little discomfort to sit in for some of us through those project implicit bias tests learning for justice used to be teaching tolerance it's done by the Southern Poverty Law Center and they have the school climate assessment um which like I said is not wholly unapplicable to a public library climate the guide to allyship is a really quick like blog roll scroll page and it's um do's and don'ts and checklists for how to be a good ally it is applicable to allyship not just for LGBTQ patrons but also for patrons of color um and I think that there's a lot of like little chunks of information that are really useful in there and I would encourage you to read it it's a fast one it's not like um you know a long workshop or a half day or anything like that it's very short the safe space training is one that our um state public library coordinator put on my radar last week and it is workshops for um how to ensure that you really are offering a safe space to your patrons uh we talked about this a little bit earlier filtering software's often erroneously block harmless or helpful LGBTQ resources um use the resource list handout from one of your public computers signed in as a patron and see if you can get to all those websites and because I promise there is nothing on that that's even remotely inappropriate and there are a lot of resources that your patrons may need to be able to access so you're going to want to make sure that those things can all get through your filter without someone having to come and ask you about it um in the interest of you know privacy okay uh being prepared for the more and more likely inevitable challenges to programs and uh materials so you can create support documentation for titles that you think are likely to be challenged it's not okay to not buy things because they might create a challenge but you can be aware of which things might create that issue and go ahead and start practicing the creation of the support documentation or just keep a little folder um start reviews from trade publications specific sections of your collection development policy that support inclusion of that title like um I chose it from this vendor it had this many reviews it has this rating on Goodreads it was on this book list and this book list and those are all things that should be outlined in your collection development policy as reasons that a book is appropriate for your collection um another thing that I really love are sticky note reviews if you just put like a blank sticky note in a book and ask people who read it to jot down their thoughts then you have a totally non identifiable but very real anecdotal piece of evidence that the books that you've selected are helpful and loved by your community um I would also encourage you to distill your policy down to one or two sentences so if someone comes in and they say um this is not an LGBTQ book but it is a Roe v Wade book so also maybe one that would get challenged they say you have this book and I don't think you should have this book and I want you to take it off the shelf you should have a very simple straightforward statement that's something like um I appreciate you taking an interest in the books that are in our library the here's a copy of our reconsideration form or maybe you know they maybe better not to mention the form and say we have this form that's available um and outline what they have to do just read the whole book and mark the parts they disagree with and why and then what are they going to do with it do they bring it back to you do they send it to the board but that's it never try to defend a book on the spot doesn't matter they don't care why you selected that book they don't think you should have um but the more you like for me at least you know there there are two of us and I'm the only one who's selecting and buying books so every book that's in this library was hand selected by me specifically for this library so having someone come in and challenge those decisions is um emotionally impactful because I chose those materials with the best interest of my community in mind um so it it's it's hard to have someone come at you and tell you that what you're doing is hurting your community so the more prepared you are for that the more you can rattle off that statement in a very calm cool and professional way that you don't have to react with anger you don't have to react with the justification for why you bought that book which for me is so hard sometimes because I've definitely had parents who were like this book is totally inappropriate for my teenager and I want to be like but there's this and this and this and this they don't care and you're only going to end up getting uh into a more dramatic situation than it needs to be so get somebody to help you practice that response practice it over and over and over and this is the the last thing that I'm really going to talk about and this is what um I mentioned earlier so I saw recommendations for parents of trans kids in state like states like Texas to create these safe folders for their families we're obviously going to have different types of documentation but I think it's a good idea for us to collect a safe folder for our organizations or for ourselves as librarians so I have photos videos drawings letters I have all of these things from young people over the years or from patrons I have copies of applicable library laws and policies from my library I have certificates from trainings and courses that I've done I've now done this is the third time I've done this presentation so I can put all these things together and then if someone comes in and they say well you know what are you doing you're creating this harm for my child who I don't want to be exposed to this and then it ends up at the board then I have this folder that's full of documentation actual hard evidence that what I'm doing is appreciated by the community that I am following the law and I am following the library policy and that I am trained and continually developing my skill at these things um so anyway the the closer all of this gets to home for all of us the more I think it's probably a good idea to have a way to support ourselves like this all right this is a list from the Polaris project and it shows 10 actions that organizations can take to support the LGBTQ people and this one is for employers um a couple of these are specific to human trafficking because that's what the Polaris project focuses on but for the most part I think this is a pretty good starting place for evaluating your own organization so are you training staff on how to create a welcoming space or are you training yourself on how to create welcoming spaces are you um revisiting confidentiality practices and allowing for flexibility in uh library card sign-ups so these are some high level things to think about and maybe come up with some ways that you can shift things um to have more inclusive libraries okay I want to end on a good note so this is a graphic from the Trevor project that shows hundreds or well the original um was hundreds of ways but this is the most common ways that LGBTQ young people say that they find joy and strength and I would just like to invite you to look at how many of these things libraries can and are already provided we can't do much about making sure they have affirming parents but we can provide access to anime art and creative expression connection to other LGBTQ people educational opportunities escape through reading and writing feeling seen online communities space to be with people LGBTQ history online tech groups media representation connection to music rainbow flags and stickers pride from others in being LGBTQ um we can help them embrace their full selves some of us even can provide video game access and access to tic-tac and youtube so um I I don't want you to feel like you have to do absolutely everything or that this is all a thing that needs to happen overnight I think as long as we're all making uh integral steps in the right direction we're gonna have a huge positive effect and our existence and our making sure that we are obviously inclusive safe spaces goes a long way um toward making the LGBTQ members of our communities feel and be safer okay that's all I went a little bit over time I'm sorry about that no I know you're fine you're fine um absolutely I agree agree and um entirely well oh actually you can keep your slides up there if you want to keep your slide here come and type info up yeah go ahead and reshare that um does anybody um we do have a few questions I'm gonna grab here um so um if I we don't get to your questions you can always reach out to Ali there as well um so thank you this was as people are saying a terrific presentation um and I agree with someone else who said this really appreciate your passion on this topic um and all of the great practical tools that you will have are providing to everyone as I said there was a link um to a google drive that I shared out to everyone and it will be included in the recordings when we have it afterwards just so um you all know um so we do have a question about going back to the very beginning you had that um the homosaurus resource um if you can you share any of the terminology that you found that you changed from using that um I would have to go back and look at it I don't know it's been a long time since I actually looked at my catalog to see um there are specifically some words that used to be used to describe transgender people that are no longer the appropriate terminology um I think I've kind of stricken some of the bad old ones from my memory on purpose nothing nothing is coming to mind right now no problem um another good question I have here um you mentioned not creating specialized book lists gendered but then talked about sharing resources um about um lgbtq items um how and when do you use specialized resources like what would be a good situation to actually or how have you actually used them what do you mean like the the resources themselves resources yeah well for the for the um that you put together you know that you mentioned that may be helpful to anyone coming to our library who's you know dealing with this we keep um we keep a list of resources at the front and I shared like the slide that I shared that has all those links in it has all the ones that we I didn't share the links but I had it has like the little images of the logos um we have like a flyer that has you know questions or need help and it has all of those different organizations listed on it all right she's actually saying specifically about book lists you said not creating specialized book lists but you talk about sharing resources like would there be a situation to actually like have a book list I mean would that be like during you know lgbtq month or I don't know I also like I mean I include those books in every genre resource that I create I make certain that there are um a mix of lgbtq books in you know like uh my black history month posts had some lgbtq titles mixed in and with everything else I don't separate them out in any specific way um during June I will do like an lgbtq specific reading list on the facebook page or something like that but otherwise I'm not really separating them out you know I I think as long as the materials themselves are discoverable um people will find what it is that they're looking for mm-hmm and you didn't mention actually at the beginning and this is someone else who's asking about that I think relates to this that not putting out like in June this is like I said I love doing I want to normalize the conversation about these issues so I love making a great big display in June but since we don't have multiple copies of anything you mentioned putting signs out that talk about them but not the actual books leave the books on the shelves is that would be something like this too or like yeah one of those cheap laminators like that's a half by 11 and so you can do a half page of the book cover and then laminate it stick it to a book thing and put that on the table so that it still looks like you know this display it's got all the pretty titles and all that kind of stuff the books themselves are still on the shelf anybody remember um going to blockbuster video exactly a long time ago the DVD the movies were out there right it was a fake case yeah a dummy case same same concept except instead of to keep them from getting stolen it's to make them still be available yeah yeah um this may not like that may not be um on the radar in every community I think there are a lot of communities in different places around the country where it's probably more accepted you know for a kid with a grown up to walk in and pick up a book like that but not here and there yeah and so I I have seen a lot of libraries do it and in a way to me sometimes it kind of seems like virtue signaling on the part of the library rather than true access concern for the patrons so I want to signal to the community that we are open to these things but not at the expense of this kid really wants to read that book and cannot go grab it off of that table because of the adult that is with them does that make sense I'm trying to come at it from a from a position of access rather than a position of um like marketing or how does this look for the library absolutely now in and that link that you shared with um with us um there's the slides are in there there's a handout there's you mentioned there are book lists as well too correct yes there are three there's picture books middle grade and teen and the middle grade and teen ones both have um there wasn't a lot of nonfiction the past couple of years but they both do have graphic they have at least one nonfiction and they have graphic novels and um titles it's just the covers so if for some reason you can't find one of the books or you need more information about it you can send me an email I'm happy to help you out yeah and I sent I shared I should have shared it out again to everyone whoops uh I can send the canvill files to anybody too if you want to take those and change them to match like what you have in your collection or um put your library logo on it or whatever I mean it's a canva template I'm not it's not my copyright I'm not attached to it um and so one last question because I was liking this as well um and like I said anyone else has any questions you can reach out to Ali and everything will be available later um the sticky note idea I love that is too as as an idea you know people coming in saying I don't think this should be here my child should be seeing this and since I'm one of your users I'm telling you to get rid of it well there are other users of the library too you're not the only one um so I love that sticky note idea saying well here is actually some other community member who did like this book so you can see that there's other people with other opinions um but how do you encourage someone to do one of those without drawing attention to what you know I assume it's like an anonymous type thing how do you get someone to write one of these without risking themselves by putting themselves out there with this comment or review yeah I think that's just kind of like an individual thing like if it's too risky don't do it I don't want them to do it for my benefit if it's not safe for them um but it is kind of hidden in the book so if they have just a second they could jot it down and close the book and once it comes through our book drop up there no one sees it no one touches it but us and the sticky note will get removed go into a folder and then be permanently divorced from whatever circulation history or whoever you know when the book gets checked back in you would never know that it had been there so it's just make it totally anonymous so that people yeah and it's just know this is somebody put this in here yeah yeah and I have I mean I have patrons who leave like all the time we have books back in the book drop and it's got like you know a half torn piece of paper that so-and-so is like Jamie sometimes yeah that's true me more like this miss Watson that's my board president who was my second grade teacher because that's kind of telling of it so like getting notes back in books is already something that we're watching out for in every book we get because it happens all the time all right I think we will wrap up here we're at noon so we do have to move on to our lightning round sessions thank you so much Ali this was a great presentation thank you yeah and of us even more personally or someone is saying here thank you from the parent of a trans daughter for all that you are doing ah yeah thank you please let me know I'm happy to do anything anytime absolutely there's anything else I can help with yeah great thank you so much we are going to jump right into