To start off my discussion of 'specialty fiction' (African American, LGBTQA, short stories, poetry), I will say that at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Public Library, when I worked there, these were treated as separate collections. (Though we didn't have much in the way of LGBTQA anything, fiction or non-fiction.) And my experience with having them all split up like that is mixed. Poetry seemed to be very well received in its own space apart from the fiction. It was fairly well browsed and utilized. Short stories basically sat in their shelves and were ignored. The African American fiction was flat out offensive. Not because giving it its own space was offensive, but because whoever split it off into its own collection didn't include all African American authors. Almost everything in our "African American" display was Street Lit. Any book by an African American author that had any type of "intellectual quality" (what I was actually told when I asked) was put in our regular fiction. So, in short, if it was "trashy urban stuff" (again, I'm quoting,) it was in the African American section.
To sum up, nothing could have possibly turned me off to the idea of making separate sections for racial or orientation reasons than that. On a different note, I've heard horror stories of people peeing on, trashing, stealing materials from, and even setting fire to those collections. These mostly came from a blog I follow about a librarian who lives in a very homophobic area who was trying to build an LGBTQA collection. But the point is that by separating these materials you are making them a target.
More importantly, separating poetry makes sense to me, because poetry is a different art form than prose. Just like I wouldn't file the movies with the novels, I wouldn't file the poetry with the novels either. But an action packed novel by an African American author is still a novel and should be with the rest of the novels. Permanently filing it elsewhere is more an exclusion than anything. If you want it to be easy for patrons to track down things by authors of a certain race or orientation, or materials that include stories or characters of a specific race or orientation then it should be in the metadata so they can be searched for. You can also create reading lists or displays on the topic to help highlight that part of the collection. But to split them into groups like that? No. We do that enough with living people as it is. Let's not do it with the books too.
You make a good point about poetry - it is a completely different art form than prose. In my library, poetry is actually cataloged in non-fiction, which is horrible since it relegates it to the back corner where the shadows and dust bunnies keep it company. When we do poetry book displays, they go out like crazy, though, so having a separate section for poetry actually makes a lot of sense to me! Thanks for mentioning it!
ReplyDeleteI agree that separating the sections could make them a target or draw unwanted attention, especially in areas that are not welcoming of these genres yet. It's better to draw attention through displays or education blurbs where it's easier to control how much of the collection to introduce to patrons who might not usually read these types of fiction.
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