Collection Equity: A Story from Region 5

NNLM Discovery

On this episode of the NNLM Discovery podcast, Region 5 Outreach & Engagement Coordinator Michele Spatz shares how three libraries in Region 5 used Collection Equity Outreach Awards to enhance collection equity and support health literacy in their libraries by acquiring more materials by diverse voices.
We start in Alaska at the Juneau Public Library who partnered with Shéiyi X̱aat Hít (Spruce Root House, a brand-new emergency shelter for runaway and homeless youth) to provide both fiction and nonfiction materials that cover a broad range of health topics and highlight underrepresented groups including Alaska Natives, who are disproportionately likely to need shelter services. Afterward we’ll hear from librarians in Hawaii where the Wailuku Public Library used the award to create book discussion kits for children and families on timely subjects including racial equity, identity & belonging, joy & self-love, immigration & refugees, social justice & activism, and social emotional learning. And finally, we’ll hear from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, School of Medicine Library which improved its Health Humanities Collection with more depth in two key areas: women physicians with a focus on diverse voices, and LGBTQ+ experiences.
In total, 27 NNLM Region 5 member organizations received the Collection Equity Outreach Awards, and each member organization submitted a bibliography of purchased materials. Region 5 compiled these bibliographies into the Diverse Voices Toolkit, a freely accessible toolkit of collection development resources for all to use.
All of the artwork for this podcast series has been created with a generative AI text-to-image tool! The text prompt for the episode's artwork was "oil painting of the diversity inside a library.”

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