 All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today and you can watch it later at your convenience and I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archived recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in other states that would be your state library. So we provide services to all types of libraries in Nebraska. So you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types. Public, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, archives, really anything and everything are really our only focus and criteria. Is it something to do with libraries? Something cool we think libraries could be doing. Book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products. As we have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do presentations about services and programs and things we're doing here in Nebraska. But we also bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. With us today is Laura Pitts. Good morning, Laura. Good morning. Thank you for having me. And she's from the Scottsboro Public Library and she is going to talk to us about collection development specifically from marginalized communities. So I'm just going to hand it over to you, Laura, take it away and tell us all about it. Well, thank you very much again. I'm really excited to be here this morning to talk about something that I feel is not only timely, but something that is great interest to myself. So just a little bit of background about who I am. I'm a public library director of over eight and a half years at the Scottsboro Public Library in Scottsboro, Alabama. I have a wide background of things that I'm interested in. I was originally a journalism major. I always thought I would be one of these newspaper girls that would grow up and work for a newspaper and be an editor, but we all know how life shifts us. And so somewhere in the middle of all that shifting, I ended up at a public library and what they call those accidental librarians. And I know all of you know somebody who is an accidental librarian and then we become librarians and we never get out of it because we realize that's what we were meant to do all along. I'm a current PhD student at the University of Alabama right now. And I'm really interested in sustainability at public libraries specifically, but libraries in general with everything from staff development, funding issues, collection development and more. So the topic that I'm talking about today about why we need to make sure that we're understanding marginalized communities and making sure our collections reflect their presence in our library is something that's very dear to me and something I guess I've also kind of stumbled upon in my research endeavors and different things like that in school. So what we're going to talk about today, score things really. Why marginalized communities? Who are they? Why do they matter? Why collection development? Why do we do collection development? OK, we all know that we spend a lot of time in our various roles, whether we're at a public library, a school library, an academic library. We've got to figure out how to put the books on the shelf and what books we need. So why do we do this? Why is it important? How do we collection develop? What are some promising practices and some things that we can think about to help build our collections and what is our role as a librarian? Sometimes we forget that we have a responsibility in our profession to make sure that our collections have some adequacy to them. So those are the things that we're going to talk about today. So the first thing I want you to think about and I like to pose this question to people because they probably never thought about this before. But have you ever walked into a library or a bookstore and had an issue seeing yourself reflected in the books? Think about that for a minute. Can you find you who you are? What makes you you on the shelf? Is your gender your race? Is that represented? Is your lifestyle represented? What about your heritage and your culture? How difficult is it for you to find who you are or maybe who somebody else in your family is or your friend or a co-worker? Have you seen them in the books that you have on display in a library or in a bookstore? Well, then I want to ask you to ask yourself where you think you might fall in that scale, OK? Do you always find yourself? Is it very easy for you to see your gender and your race and your interests reflected only cover of a book, right? Sometimes I often see it. I have to search really bad to find myself. It's not something that's just sitting out. I have to really look in the stacks. Sometimes I don't find myself at all. You know what, Laura? I've never thought about whether or not I see myself or I see my children or my children can see themselves reflected on books or I never see myself somewhere along this scale when you fall on that. And I think that there is an understanding that we need to realize is that these are internal questions that people have when looking for books in a library that reflect themselves. I read an article a few weeks ago for an assignment in a class that I'm taking, and it was by Langston Hughes and it was about how his mother would bring books to him from their local public library. And he grew up reading all these wonderful children's books. But when he became an adolescent, he realized that none of the characters in their books looks like him. And it made him start questioning, wait a second, there's nothing wrong with the books that I'm reading, but I don't see who I am. I don't see my skin color. I don't see my gender. I don't see those things. And when I read that article, it really brought to light these issues that sometimes people have real issues and real concerns whether or not they can find themselves reflected in the books that they find on the shelves. So let's talk about marginalized communities, who they are and why do they matter. So marginalized populations or groups and communities that experience some sort of discrimination or exclusion. So this could be social, political or economic discrimination or exclusion. And there's these unequal power-balanced relationships that cross economic, political, social, and even cultural dimensions. Sometimes the discrimination and exclusion hits one of these areas. Sometimes it hits two, many times it hits all four at one time. And while this is not an extensive list, there's most definitely could be other groups or even other subgroups that are a part of this. But the ones that I have really looked at and really been able to do some research on have been the LGBTQIA plus communities, the Native American tribal communities, indigenous cultures, African-Americans, people of color. Why do they matter? Have you ever asked that? Why do you matter? Why does any of this matter? Well, the reality is that everyone should be able to find themselves in a library. When I say that it's not just a matter of being able to find a place for them to go or a place for them to interact with something, they should be able to browse the shelves of the public library and be able to find a book that reflects their life. Libraries have for eons and still become viewed as safe places. So this ability for anybody and anyone can gain access to information that fits their lifestyles or reflect their cultures is just kind of part of what we are. I always like to say that libraries are your one-stop shop for everything you could possibly get. We're not just places anymore where you check out a book. You use a computer, you attend programs, you use it as a third space where you share ideas and have meet-ups with friends. And sometimes you get lucky and there's libraries that have coffee shops. And so it's even more of a third place. But within all of this understanding is that people should be able to see themselves in a library. And if we think back to what the pillar of a library was when it was created, it had books in it, right? It didn't have computers. We didn't have programs. We didn't have all those things. Everything really started with library books. So it's really important that we remember how important it is for individuals to see themselves. Another area that I want us to bring attention to in the marginalized community discussion is these invisible groups. Diverse populations sometimes find themselves existing in invisible populations. Where members of their existence are really underreported. So you may be saying to yourself, oh, those individuals don't exist in my community. I have never seen anybody from that gender or anybody that's dealing with that issue. Most of the time, you're not going to know that these individuals exist in your community. I grew up in a very small rural community. I've lived in Alabama in my whole lives. It's very small, very southern rural towns. And I have heard for years on a lot of different areas, oh, that doesn't exist. That doesn't exist here. Well, the reality in librarians, some of you out here listening to this, understand and know that not everybody is going to come up to the front desk and look for a book that has to do with a certain subject that may be sensitive to them. They may be scared that the librarian may pass judgment, which happens occasionally. They may be afraid that if they ask, that it may get back to their family and then other family members may find something else. So we have to understand that these invisible groups exist in these librarians. It is our role and our job to make sure that even though we don't physically know who they are or physically see them, that they're coming in in our libraries, and we need to make sure that there are books on the shelf that reflect them and have their look and their style of visible form. So why do we do collection development? I would love for you to think right now about how much time you take working on collection development. I can remember back when I was in library school, one of the questions was that we had to balance our time, especially as library directors, right? We, as many of us are in small libraries where we may be the manager, the reference person, the program leader, the collection development manager, all of those things, or we may only have a few individuals on staff that do it. But we have to understand also that when we are putting together our collections in the library, it's really what the foundation of our library is about, okay? We go back to that idea of books. So developing a library collection is something that is a continual work in progress. You could spend hours a day working on your collection. You could spend five minutes a day. It doesn't matter, but there is never an end to developing a collection. It should not consume all of your time, but it should be one of your top priorities. And I made a little note here that we don't wanna get on rabbit hole spirals, and you know what that is. You could be searching on Facebook or TikTok or even Instagram and pretty soon hours have gone by and you have delved into one rabbit hole after another and really forgotten what you're doing. And sometimes collection development can become that. We can get stuck on looking at what books we need or books we want, and then by the time we're finished with it, we've put things in our carts. We've put things on a list of paper that may or may not have anything to do with what our library needs. It may have to do with things that we are interested in or things that our staff members or certain individuals have consistently asked for, but we're not really building our collection. We all know that we have to have a plan in place on how we develop a collection. So we either need to do that monthly, quarterly, annually. It doesn't really matter. We all understand the importance of reading reviews, taking suggestions, but we have to have a plan in place when we are working on this in-progress portion of collection development, that sometimes books are past their prom. Have I, did I click off or something? Nope, okay, sorry. It looks like, yep, it looks like yes. Stop sharing the screen for some reason. Yeah, you might have clicked on the, let's see, what would happen? It wouldn't be a normal day here if I didn't mess up something, right? There it is, it's bad, easy. Keeping everybody on their toes this morning, it's not a big deal. I'm making sure everybody's awake. But we need to understand too that there's a time and a place to have certain things on our shelves and there's a time and a place to get rid of them. It is okay, I'm here to tell some of you who are on the fence about whether or not something should remain in your collection or not, that it's okay to get rid of that book. It's okay when the pages are falling out. It's okay when the spine is completely broken and it is okay when the information is extremely dated and we'll talk about that here in a few minutes. It is perfectly okay to get rid of things in our collections that we may or may not be. We also need to understand when we look at collection development, especially when we're looking at hitting those marginalized groups, making sure that people who are of color, people who have different genders, different backgrounds, different races, all of these things, different lifestyles can see themselves that it's not just about buying any book, okay? What does your community need? Who are the individuals in your community that need to see that? Think back to those invisible populations. You may not see them and every one of these groups or subgroups may not even be something that may really not be a part of your community. It may not be, but somebody is there and somebody needs that. Someone needs to see what you have on your shelf. We have to also remember that we can't allow personal assumption about who is or is not living in the community to dictate whether or not we purchase something. Just because I don't think, and I'm not saying that I do, but just for an example, just because I don't think that somebody of Native American descent is growing up in my community does not mean that I don't need to have some books to provide information. Whether or not there are any individuals in my community that fit that category, there may not be or there may just be one. I don't know that, but I do have other individuals in my community and have students growing up and have families that are doing homeschool projects, all of these things that may need to see the cultural history about certain groups, how certain groups came to be, struggles that they've had, all of these different things. So we can't just allow our personal assumption that somebody doesn't exist to kind of dictate what we have or what we don't have on our shelf. So what goes into developing a collection for a marginalized group? So this is important and I know this is a little redundant of some stuff, but I always like to say that I will say the things that people are thinking and sometimes they are afraid to say. And one of these things is that we need to think about relevancy, okay? Are the books on our shelves relevant? And a good example is this, is that I am pretty sure that a book that was published in 1990 that had to do with the book on gay rights or women's right to vote or African-American history, all of these things, of what has changed since 1990? We would all agree on that. I was just making a note or a discussion with my staff the other day about a book on Ukraine. And I said, I bet in a few years this book's gonna be outdated now because of all the issues that are happening between Russia and Ukraine right now. So is it relevant? Is what was published 20 years ago still just as relevant today? Or is there a better, more updated copy that provides new legislation, new information and even new key players in the subject that can provide even more depth to your collection? If you can answer yes to that, then the old book needs to go and you need to figure out how to make sure that you're factoring in getting these newer books into your collection. What is the accuracy of the material? Is the information credible? Now, I am not dissing self-publishing. It is good and it is bad. Self-publishing is great because it allows authors who are just trying to get a break in the world to get their information out, to get their books out, to get their stories out. But sometimes some of the material that may be published is not always accurate or is not always in the best format that it should have been in or maybe doesn't even have the correct imaging or different things like that. So this is why it's always important for us to trust that librarian gut instinct and go back to those reviews that are important, that we have all, you know, Kirkus reviews, school library journal reviews, all of those different things. Usefulness to the collection. That's another question you have to answer yourself. What gap do you need to feel? And so I always use this as an example when I'm talking to people and even talking with other librarians about this is that there may be individuals in my community who are teenagers who are transgendered or going through a transitioning period, right? So if all I have on my collection are books for those teens, okay, I need those books. I need them to have fiction books where they see characters going through things. I need non-fiction books to help them work out different areas of their lives to understand what's happening. But if I have failed to provide any materials for parents who may have a child who is transitioning or transgendered parents who are dealing with this themselves, those are the types of gaps that we need to do. Now, I don't know what the gaps are that you have in your collection, but if you were to sit down and analyze exactly who you pitch, what books you've got and make you a little line out beside it, you're probably gonna realize that you do have some gaps. And so we always wanna take care of the kids. We wanna take care and make sure that the kids are prepared for whatever they need for all of their areas of growing up in these cultures. Well, what about the parents? What about the grandparents? What if there's a grandparent who is having to raise a child who may be coming out? What kind of materials do we provide that person? And so there's just a lot of different gaps that can be filled in the course of this. The other thing to remember is the format. So same book, different format. And I'm not sure if you can see my screen or not, but I have a copy of All You Need Is Love by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, that book. Well, I have it as a board book and I also have it as an easy book. And so this is that my little ones can have access to it and then when they get older and they're reading it on their own, then they go up to another one. That is just one example of that that I have here in my library. But the reality of it is that when we look at building a collection, especially for children and teenagers, they go from 80s to teens in a really small amount of time. If you think about it, 18 years, 19 years is not a lot of time to get them into that adult side. And even kids are able to read way beyond their years and they're already reading higher topics as they get older before they get those higher ages. So when we build a collection, a lot of times we forget that we've got to build that collection for the babies, for the beginning readers, for the middle school students, for the high school students, for the readers who are struggling to learn how to read, for the readers who are advanced, all of that stuff. Books in our collection need to grow with the learner. And I look at pre-K to college and beyond. We have to be growing with our learners. And that can be difficult because it can sometimes be hard to find certain books on certain topics within a certain age range. So I do get that. But I wanna stress that if you were trying to figure out how to make sure that every egg at your library is covered where somebody who is of a different race or a different background can see themselves, you really got to look at it from a board book, an easy book, a juvenile book, a nonfiction book, a big reader book, an adult book, a teen book, all the way up. And that's another, it kind of brings up another issue when it comes to funding that we talk about but we don't wanna talk about because books are not cheap. When up $100 doesn't go very far and even when we're buying one book, especially after you have processed it, put a tag on the back of a security tag in it and done all of those different things. So building our collections when we look at annually, when we look at, we're gonna do quarterly, it may be that you need to say, this quarter we're gonna look at board books, easy books and juvenile books for this area and spend some money on that and make sure that we're consistently going back and helping those areas to develop. So when we start collecting collection development, we have to remember that we've got to be willing to do research, especially within marginalized communities. When we first started making sure that all areas, even the invisible areas in our library was full of books that anyone could find, we couldn't just go to Amazon and Goodreads to find that information. We had to do a little digging because you're not always gonna find what you think you're going to go looking for if you stay in the same places. You need to ask yourself what books are out there, what are the topics, what's old, what's new, who are the people that are writing it, who are the authors that have emerged that are writing or even recommending things. And I will share three areas that have been really helpful for me. Agutopia, social justice books for change and then we need diversebooks.org. Three of these provide not only a wonderful example of different books that are coming out, good oldies, but goodies, classics also, but then new books that new authors are publishing in a way that I would not be able to find on Amazon just by searching diversity in books or social justice in books. I would get a full four of different things, but when I look at these areas because it is made for children, it has really helped me bring out a lot of that information. So this is another fun one that I like to think about too is we cannot rely on the book liar. Now you all know what I'm talking about and I don't, I actually think that I may have one in here. I actually, I don't know if I do or not. I forgot that one today. You know what I'm talking about. Your book publishing company that you get all of your books from every year sends you an annual, new spring titles, new fall titles, new summer reading titles. You know that. You get that, I think you get them every month. You get them from Chrome, you get them from Blackstone Publishing for Audiobooks. You get them from Scholastic. I could go on and on. These are wonderful tools. Do not get me wrong. These are wonderful. They helped me figure out what new books in a series I bought last year have come out. They let me know they have republished something. They are great to help build core collections of non-fiction books when you're looking at science and math and all of those different areas. Animals, for example. I mean, you can just, you can get all kinds of stuff, but there are books that you've never heard of out there and you're not gonna find it by looking in some of these publishing company flyers. You're really going to have to do the work and set out to figure out what other diverse books are out there. I have a co-worker and a lot of times she, I'll say, okay, let's search diverse books and she'll just start searching them on her own. And we will stumble upon some of the most neat and most really cool subgroup of marginalized community books that I never even knew existed that tell a wonderful story. I didn't do it because I saw it on Amazon. I didn't do it because I saw it on Goodreads. I didn't do it because I sat down on my, drinking my morning coffee and read through those book flyers. I did it because I did the research. And so if I had to give you any other really good advice developing your collection for a marginalized group, take the time to do the research. Take the time to figure out what the books are that are out there and accept that some of them may be on subjects that you never even thought of or heard of before. And now the other thing, we can't buy them all. No, you can't buy every book. I would wish I could buy every book. I wish I had plenty of room in my library that I had tons of books that I consistently could purchase every day, every month, every year. But what you can do is make sure that something is offered. So again, how dated are your book collections? Are your books about racism or black history or Native American heritage over 15 years old? Go back and think. Maybe I need some updated ones, right? Some books do remain relevant, but many books become outdated. Look for materials in my opinion that are written within the last three years. Consider information within books over seven to 10 years. How much of that information has changed? I always like to say that an updated collection is a relevant collection and a relevant collection is a used collection. There is nothing worse than having all these wonderful new books on your library shelves. And then you check them years later for how long they were circulated and they weren't circulated, right? So we have to be willing to make sure we are staying with what's coming out and staying ahead of the game on that. What is the librarian's role? That is another important aspect of this discussion too. We oftentimes forget that we have a responsibility to our coworkers, to our communities and to ourselves and to the future of librarians who are coming up to make sure that we are doing our part in all of this. So I want you to look at this and really resonate on the fact that not everyone is going to agree with what you have on the shelf, okay? The subject is going to upset them. The cultural depictions will upset them. The characters will upset them. The title or the look of the book will upset them. Not everybody is going to agree with what you have. I know that book challenges right now are a really big thing going on across our country. There are a lot of really good books that are being challenged by school systems and parents in a lot of different areas for a variety of reasons, but it is our responsibility as librarians to make sure that we are doing our part and doing our role in helping everyone to have access to this. I picked to these books on the screen on purpose because one, they're all wonderful, wonderful books. I absolutely love them. But she's my dad has to do them. A child who's trying to understand what's going on with a parent who is transgender. That subject is not something that everybody is going to be happy about. They're not going to be happy if their child takes it home and reads it. And we understand that, but we have a responsibility to make sure that the people that do need that book are there. The Guncle by Steven Rowley is a wonderful adult book. I think I laughed harder than I have ever laughed reading and listening to that book a few weeks ago, but not everybody's gonna like the lifestyle of the uncle. Now everybody's going to be happy with what happens in that. And that's okay. And we just have to understand that we can't make everybody happy. Subgroups are important. Now this is something that I had not thought about before I really started researching this, but we have these marginalized communities and it becomes very much like an onion, okay, an onion. I remember a teacher telling me this a couple weeks ago that all of these different layers within the onion become all these different subgroups, right? At the core we are somebody or we are whoever we are, but there are all these other subgroups that kind of pile into this. We may be a family with divorced parents or step siblings. And so they need to see those books that are reflected in that lifestyle. Those step siblings may decide that they are going to finally come out to their friends and family. Well, that's another subgroup within a group. Children who have families that are LGBTQ need to see these types of families. They need to understand that they are just like everybody else and they go through all of the same rounds of emotion and lifestyle changes that other kids have. But the need to showcase diversity in a sense is very cyclical because each person has this desire within them to understand themselves and to see who they are represented in the book. And it really overlaps. And again, I'm not sure if you can see my screen or not or see me in the screen, but I had a coworker brought me this book that she had gotten and it's called, I'm Still a Big Sister. And it's by Brittany and Eliza Day. And it is about a girl who is getting all excited because she's just found out she's going to be a big sister and then something happens and they lose the baby. And then her family and they go through the grieving process and it talks about that, but then she understands that it doesn't matter. She's still a sister. She still has a purpose. This is a prime example of a subgroup of another group that somebody needs to read that book. Somebody needs to have access to that. And so you may have families who are comprised of one of these different marginalized groups and they may need to be able to share and show their children how to handle when a parent loses a child, right? I love the images on this book because the kids are all different backgrounds, different races, all these things. This is a prime example of that. And we have looked and looked and looked to try to find more children's books on this topic. And so far we have only found one. So if anybody knows of any others that I have missed, I would love to know on that for sure. You gotta make sure as a librarian that you're protecting the library, but protect yourself. It's a policy, policy, policy. Do you have a good policy in place for challenges? Does your library follow the American Library Association's Bill of Rights? That Bill of Rights is so important, especially to have your library board or your community adopt that as part of your policy. Because it really helps to lay the foundation that anybody and everybody should have access to things, should not be discriminated upon in all of those different areas. Do you have a collection development policy? Within your collection development policy, are you saying that you are not going to limit who can have access to what in your library? Everybody has the opportunity. You may still get hit with a book challenge. I've been talking to a library about this same incident. They're still gonna get hit with a book challenge, but they still have their policy in place. The library has done its part to make sure that they are protecting themselves. So no matter what the outcome ends up being, whether it's a yay that we have won or a nay that we have had to change something or take a book off the shelf, whatever that may be, the library still has done their part and made a good promising practice of having good policy in place. We have to make sure that we avoid as librarians self-centorship. Now, you can ask yourself or say this to yourself, but I would never not put a book on the shelf. Never, never not. I know that I have just used a double negative, but I want you to understand this. I would never not do that. It happens. Substancorship is when you censor something out of fear or indifference as a means to lessen the discussion or the issue that's going on. So when you begin substensoring, sometimes you don't realize you've done it until it's too late, or you don't realize that you've been doing it all alone. A lot of times libraries that I have talked to have said, you know, I just self censor it because I don't want it to cause a problem. We try to avoid issues. We try to avoid a parent getting upset or we have a book that comes in on an auto ship. And we know that, oh, that's going to be controversial. We can't put that in. And we just kind of put it off to the side. We don't throw it away, but we kind of put it off to the side. But you see, librarians have a responsibility. We have to put aside personal prejudice, okay? We have to understand that when we self censor something, it's not only harming the library itself, but it's harming the profession. And it's proving to the diverse cultures and others in the profession that professional obligations cannot be met. So it doesn't matter if we're not comfortable with the subject and we're worried about what somebody may think. It doesn't matter. We're just not going to put it on the shelf. Go back to what we said at the beginning of this talk. Somebody needs to see what you have on your shelf. There is somebody in an invisible room that lives within your community that really needs to see what you have to offer and see themselves reflected in that. Censorship is a growing problem for librarians. As librarians themselves become caught in the crossfire of determining whether or not to put a book that is needed for a particular type of lifestyle on the shelf. Is it worth the drama? So sometimes avoiding book drama can oftentimes lead to book drama. So we have to remember as librarians that it's important we check personal opinion at the door. I have heard stories throughout my career from various librarians where a book didn't get put on if somebody didn't like it or a book got put on and a staff member had a problem where they went and took the book off or had it damaged or something. All kinds of stories. Libraries are publicly funded. Some are privately funded but for the most part they are publicly funded. We need to remember that everybody's taxpayer dollars are paying for what is in the librarian list that is a specific grant that is a private family donation or something like that. We have to be willing to have open conversations with our staff members. If you're the collection development manager at your library and you have a lot of staff members and you have some that do not like some of the books that are being chosen or some of the things that are reflected in the book you guys need to have a staff meeting and you need to really focus on what the public library is and what the process and needs are at that library. Gotta have those open conversations because when you don't have those open conversations that's when censorship, self-censorship all kinds of issues start coming in. And we also have this discussion about not singling out one book. So there's a lot of discussion about whether we label books that are from marginalized groups that have sensitive subjects or not or do we just let them be out there without a label. Now to each their own and to each library as its own. But I do think that the goal when we put individual books on the shelf is not to bring attention and the way that it could inflict harm. And a lot of times a simple sticker that may tell somebody that the book is LGBTQ friendly or anything like that could inflict harm. A kid could take it home and they could be bullied. Their parents could get upset with them. They could get made fun of. And in the small situations that sometimes this happens a librarian could scoff at them when they check it out and ask them, why are you checking something like this out? And so it's just really good practice to make sure that we are putting things out there but we're not bringing so much attention that we are causing individuals who need the book to feel upset, anxious and then in turn they don't come use your library because they're worried about something happening. So it's very simple in that process. We have a responsibility to the profession and sometimes we have to remember what our purpose is and it's hard. We are all in a variety of different areas in our lives right now. We're weary, we've got all of these different things that have happened over the course of the last few years. Our purposes as librarians have changed. Think about all the things that we did post before COVID and now we're doing online, all of our meetings are online programming's online, children take home kits. We're just now as a profession, I feel easing ourselves back into what we were that will never be in that normal again. But we have to remember that we are librarians that serve as a gateway to knowledge information. One stop shop of everything you can need. Where else can somebody in your community have access to what your library provides? And if you're thinking, well, yeah, they need computers and they need programs and stuff, but where else can they have access to library books? Where else do they get this kind of stuff? Where else can they come in and check a book out about how to deal with feelings and see children in a variety of different lifestyles represented on the cover of that? One of these children could be somebody in your community that needs to read a book about how to deal with their feelings growing up and see themselves somewhere on the pages. So where else are they gonna have access to that? People in communities need what we have and we need to make sure that we understand that. There has to be something for everyone. Journeys of book reading and collection development has to start somewhere. And I'll tell you that it starts with children, it goes through into teens. Adults need access to books that reflect their lifestyles and then we get into nonfiction. Even back when I mentioned the importance of something for everyone, last year our library, we were granted some funding to put some new shelves in our children's department and we took it upon ourselves to make sure that our younger children and our older children and our teens, so we had our teens, our juvenile middle school age and then our elementary school age students all had their own area of nonfiction. Because a nonfiction book about alligators for a child is going to be a lot different for a middle schooler and is going to be a lot different for a teenager, right? You could say that same scenario in any context of any book. And so we have to make sure that even after a teen that they have access to it as an adult that they need help with it. And so that was very time consuming and a little expensive but it really helped us realize that somebody has to start somewhere with their reading journey, okay? And they need to start somewhere and getting access to the information that shows who they are. And it's our responsibility as librarians as collection development managers to make sure that we are thinking about this from a really big broad perspective because it really encompasses everything. So I wanna leave you with this. What story is your library telling? What story do the shelves of your library tell? When you get finished listening to this webinar I hope you take a little stroll through your library and I hope you look at what books are on display. I hope you browse the shelf and see if you can easily find something whether or not you will get up in a card catalog a lot of times, especially in a children's department parents look things up in the card catalog but the kids are never there and they just wanna find something, right? So what story are you telling? I believe that everyone's story needs to be visible and then one place where stories are available. So we need to make sure that we are doing our part no matter what that is to help libraries help other librarians, help patrons, help children help adults, help teens, help everybody find what they need to tell their story to live their story and better their lives because at the end of the day our collections are meant to empower people they're meant to increase their education they're meant to provide lifelong learning extensions of the classroom, all of these things. So are we telling that story? Can you go into the library that you're at and find yourself on the shelf? Can your neighbor find yourself on the shelf? What about the seven-year-old child who was sitting in the classroom who was trying to determine what their life is going to can they find themselves? What about the student who has just gotten enough courage to come out to their family? Can they find themselves on the shelf? So answer that question internally and then think about what you need to do to really redevelop your book collection for those individuals. So I wanna thank you for letting me speak about it and talk about it. It's definitely something that is of interest to me and I hope that if you have any questions I would be willing to talk to you you can talk to them here or you're more than welcome to send me an email to either email address and I would be willing to talk to you from there also. Great, thank you so much, Laura. This is great. Yeah, if anybody has any questions right now or comments or anything you wanna share about what you've done at your library or anything go ahead and type into the questions section of your go-to-webinar interface. Oh, we have plenty of time to answer your questions or comments or share anything. This is a great presentation or lots of great tips and tricks about how to do these things at your own library and I think definitely things that some people have not thought about, I'm sure. Especially was thinking about the invisible communities. We talk about, know who your users are, know who your potential users are by doing surveys and look at demographics and all these things that you can find out who's out there but it's not always reflected in those necessarily. You don't always know who is potentially in your community. They may want to be more subtle under the radar, not in all those surveys and things. And you just have to think that there may be somebody there could potentially and just buy the book, put it out there, see what happens. Yeah, and a lot of times this happens in smaller communities too. So, you know, you'll get in larger cities or even more urban areas. This happens, it probably doesn't happen as often but when you get into these really rural communities across America, a lot of times, you know, one person working at the library, those, you know, they may just not feel comfortable asking for something. They may not understand how to look it up in the cart catalog. They may worry that if they look it up in the cart catalog, it may show what they just looked up and somebody could find it. So, there's a lot of things to think about as the collection development manager of why this book needs to go and why somebody may not ask for it. And you're right, a lot of people don't think about those invisible groups that exist whether we realize that they exist or not. And even in the smallest communities, you can assume you think you know everyone and what they're going through, but you might not. There's a good chance that there's things going on and even in the smallest communities that you're not aware of. People that need this support because they're going through these particular issues, they are these type of people or they just want to know about it. They need to learn themselves. Like I've heard about Transgender or anything and I just want to know more about it and how am I supposed to do that easily and for free and with, you said libraries are safe spaces and they are trusted too. People trust us to give them resources that are accurate too. Just going on the internet and searching something is not always the best option unless you're really, really good at evaluating what you're looking at and knowing what's true and what's not. But people trust us librarians and they hope that they know that whatever's been put in the library it's gonna be accurate, yeah. Well, you bring up a good point because somebody may just want information. And I always think about a parent who needs information on how to talk to their child or their child has come out to them, for example and they don't know how to even begin that conversation or their child is dealing with a racism issue at school or something's happened. How do they have those conversations? Well, that's those gaps in our collections, right? We have everything we need to help the child but how are we helping the parent who is the support system at home for the child? So there are a lot of areas and maybe that parent may not be an invisible community but for that particular need they have become invisible because they may not want to go in and ask the librarian where are your books about helping a child with transitioning or understanding what your child's going through if they are coming out or different things like that. They may not wanna ask that question for a variety of reasons. So we need to still make sure that they wanna just go use silently the card catalog or look it up online to see if you have it and go in and get it. Use a self-check machine, right? Get on out of the building and then they feel safe because they've been able to get information. You know, those are areas and gaps that we need to think of. You know, I didn't really talk a lot about the cost of this and it's not a cheap process. I mean, buying books are not cheap anymore. Election development budgets, when somebody says I've got a thousand dollars to spend on books for my school library, I think, well, you're not gonna get much because I know how expensive hardbound books are because they last longer and I know what it's cost to mark them and cover them and get them shelf ready. It's not an easy process. So that's why it's so important when you're looking at your budget too to make sure that you are saying, okay, out of X number of dollars that I'm going to spend this year, I have got to make a priority. The this area this year, we're gonna work on some collection development. You might not be able to hit every one of those marginalized communities in one year for collection development. You can do a little bit at a time. Yeah, yeah. Yes, you can do a little bit at a time. You can say this year we're gonna look at diverse backgrounds of children of color, okay? We're gonna figure out what those new books are and we're gonna figure out those books for parents and grandparents. So don't think that you've got to go do all of it in one stop shop. You can't do that. But it's good practice to figure out, okay, I've got this much. This year we're gonna devote it to this and really try that part of our collection up. And that's what we've done at our libraries. We've really looked every year when we get grant money for books. That's something I was gonna suggest. If you're budget, you don't have the money. That's the cost issue. There are lots of grants out there that are either specifically for libraries to buy books from libraries or just are broad enough that you can use the grant to buy books. That's just what does your library need? We've got a grant here for whatever you need to do. It could be furniture, it could be databases, it could be books, it could be collections. Yeah, definitely look for other funding sources if you wanna do something like this. So there's just a lot to this process, I think. And I think that the key to it is just jumping off somewhere. I always like to end my presentations with a picture of my dog Leonardo in the book How Rock Will Learn to Read. I always love this picture. Definitely seven years old now. But I think about, we have to start somewhere, right? We have to figure out a way to make everything work. And it's not always easy. But somebody somewhere needed to learn how to read, right? And they needed, they had a really cute puppy that helped them figure out that it was okay to start learning how to read it. And they became adults that learned the love of reading for reading something that changed their life. And so we need to remember that we are life changers in this process. And that those individuals that need these books, that need these things, they're out there. We just got to be willing to do our role as librarians to make sure that they have access to it. We do have a question that's come in. Someone wants to know, do you have any advice for when you have some people in your community that don't trust the library? That think by having a diverse collection, you are indoctrinating the youth and pushing an agenda. That's a very timely issue. This is a very timely issue in a variety of different ways. You know, my advice is to memorize, I know this is silly, but memorize to the best of your ability, the Bill of Rights by the ALA, right? Yes. We have had issues where parents have come in and have been upset about a book or the question of a book. I had a parent one time get really mad and hide the book, check the book out, but then come back. I mean, I can tell you all kinds of stories. And other ones in here and other people that listened to this can too. But I knew what I knew the language, okay? I knew the language. And so when someone says, well, you're indoctrinating my kid, you're gonna tell them this is okay. You know, there is a responsibility on the parent. Absolutely. And we also need to make sure that our policies say that, you know, libraries are here for everybody to have access to. We are not policing what a parent or a grandparent or a child checks out. That is on them. We are not here to parent them about what they get. We're just here for everybody. Every single person in the world should have access to whatever this book is. And if you do not want your child to read it, I mean, it's your responsibility. Are these easy conversations to have with a parent? No. This is not something that is easy to have with a parent. I know this. But we have to stick our guns. We have to just kind of remember who we are and what our purpose is. And when somebody is saying, well, you're indoctrinating, you're sharing this lifestyle that I don't approve of. But I'm publicly funded building. So somebody else in my community may not believe like you do. And this may be their life. They need access to it. If you start pulling everything off the shelf because it's upset somebody for some reason, you're probably not gonna have but a handful of books may even left on the shelf. So you have to really just remember who you are, learn that policy and get it memorized. And you have to get your staff to buy into it also because that person may be upset with you, that they don't trust you as the director or you as the collection of element manager. But they may trust another person on your staff. They may have friends with another person on staff or they may really like the children's librarian because that's who they deal with the most. And then that person is an ally and can say, hey, if they bring it up to them. Yeah, I know this is a touchy subject. A lot of people have different things. But just as a reminder, we're a public library and we're here for everyone, libraries for all. And have your staff know that language. If you cannot get your staff to buy in to what you need to help people see that it's a safe place, then those individuals who are upset about it are gonna commit it. They're gonna figure out a way to get through the cracks to really get at you about that. So is there any good way to fix it? No, people are gonna have their opinions of what they think is right or not. You just got to know your policy and you've got to make sure that you know. Just having that collection development policy, something in writing that's always, that seems to sometimes slow down some of these people when you hand them like, well, here's our collection development policy and you can see this is why we purchase the certain things we do. It's not just, you know, they think, oh, you're the librarian and you just make this up as you go along, you just do whatever you want. No, it's in writing, this stuff, this kind of thing is written, it is approved by a library board. It is not just like, we're not just like power hungry, crazy people here. Well, people don't, they don't think about that, right? They think like this and they don't take those blunders off when things are happening and it's really difficult for them to feel any ability to think any different about it, right? Because they have a one-stop mindset on it and for them what they think is right and there's nothing wrong. Everybody has their opinion and most of the time everybody's opinions are okay, but at the end of the day too, somebody else, somebody needs to see this, a book about a girl whose family has lost a baby and they need to see all these different characters, they need to see this, okay? They need to see that it is okay to be if you look different, right? If you're from a different background, religion, if you have a disability, if you're a different race, all of these things, okay? If you live in a different lifestyle, we need to understand all of that and we just have a responsibility to make sure that that's out there. It's available for the people who need to see it, yep, need to learn about it. Absolutely. All right, we're getting close to 11 o'clock here. So if anybody have any last minute, desperate questions or comments, they wanna ask, get typed into the questions section here. I've brought up my screen now just to do a little wrap up here, but I'll keep an eye on the questions too. This is our session page for today's show, of course. And the recording will be available on our Encompass Live website. Click over here to get to our main page. We should be by the end of the day tomorrow as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. This is our upcoming shows. If you use whatever your search engine of choice is and just type in Encompass Live, the name of our show, we're the only thing called that on the internet right now. Nobody else can use that name. But you've got our upcoming shows here and but underneath them is a link to our archives. Most recent ones at the top of the page here. This is last week's show. So today's will appear here when I get everything processed. And Laura, if whenever you have a chance, if you want to share your slides, you can send them to me. It's either PowerPoint, PDF, whatever works for you and I'll add a link to those as well. Everyone who attended today's show and registered for today's show, get an email from me letting you know when the recording is ready. You can go here and to look at it. While we're here, I'll show you, we do have a search feature for our archive shows. If you want to see if we've done something on a particular topic, you can type that in here. You can search the full show archives or just the most recent 12 months if you just want something current and relevant as we've just been talking about. But the reason we have that limiter there that is, this is, and I'm not gonna scroll all the way down because it's way too long. This is the full archives of our show, but going back to the beginning, Encompass Live premiered in January, 2009. So we're working on like 13 something years of shows here. And we will keep them all up here. This is something for archival historical purposes. We'll always keep everything up here as long as we've got somewhere to host them like YouTube or anywhere. But some of the information may become old or outdated. Links may be broken, resources may have changed drastically. So just pay attention to the original broadcast dates of anything. Some of our shows stand the test of time, but some just gotta pay attention to that if you are looking at any of our older shows on here. We do also have a Facebook page over here. We post reminders about certain shows. There's a reminder to log in today's show, promoting our speaker, when our recordings are available. So if you do like to use Facebook, you can give us a like over there. We also use the hashtag Encompass Live to share things out on Twitter and Instagram. So if you're free to keep on things there, you can keep on them there. So it didn't look like any other questions came in while I was chatting, that's fine. Thank you everybody for being with us today. You saw Laura's emails were there on the end of her slides, and they will be available in the recordings available. So if you have any other questions you wanna ask of her or discussions you wanna have with her, reach out. Thank you so much, Laura, for being here. I'm glad we were able to get you on the show. No, I enjoyed it a lot. Like I said, I love talking about this subject. I think it's timely and if you have any questions you wanna chat privately, you've got some issues. You just need to digress on some things going on. Feel free to send me an email and we'll definitely talk about it. Absolutely, yeah, definitely. Oh, we have comments coming in saying, thank you so much. This is good information, great program. I think so too, like I said, things that are happening in libraries right now that are very concerning and the book challenges and everything going on. And it is difficult to deal with but I think having these tips and tricks and resources and just this support saying it's okay. This is what you're supposed to be doing as a librarian. This is what your job is to support these communities. All the people that use your library, not just the loudest ones, I think that's great. Well, and the most important thing is you're not alone, okay? So none of you are alone in this endeavor. A lot of us feel like we're fighting losing battles because we're by ourselves. We're the only person at the library. We're one of two or one of three or we're one of 20, whatever. You're not alone in this. There are other librarians that are facing the same issues you are. And so we're all here to help, okay? We're here to find success. So again, if you need me, let me know. I would love to chat with you about any of this stuff. Yeah, libraries support each other. We share things, we do research sharing and whatnot. So in this case too, absolutely. All right, thank you everybody for being here with us today. As I said, here's our upcoming shows and I hope you join us next week when our topic is makerspaces in small and rural libraries. If you build it, will they come? Absolutely. Here in Nebraska, we are just wrapping up our library innovation studios project where we put collections of makerspace equipment into libraries for a limited amount of time so they could try them out and move them along with about 30, some out of 35 or so libraries. And that is wrapping up. Joanne McManus is in charge of that project and she's gonna do a presentation for us next week to talk about how it all went down. I'll think what's going on now with the project afterwards and two libraries that participated in the grant project. Jessica Chamberlain from Norfolk and Joy Kin from Ravenna are gonna be with us to talk about their experiences in it. So please do join us next week. And for any of our other Encompass Live shows we have coming up. Thank you everybody for being with us this morning and we'll see you on a future episode of Encompass Live. Thank you everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.