Week 14 Prompt

Consider yourself part of the collection management committee of your local library, or a library at which you would like to work. You must decide whether or not to separate LGBTQ fiction and urban fiction from the general collection to its own special place. Some patrons have requested this, yet many staff are uncomfortable with the idea - saying it promotes segregation and disrupts serendipitous discovery of an author who might be different from the reader. Do you separate them? Do you separate one and not the other? Why or why not? You must provide at least 3 reasons for or against your decision. Feel free to use outside sources - this is a weighty question that is answered differently in a lot of different libraries.

In considering separating LGBTQ and urban fiction from other collections, I'm initially inclined to say that I would separate things to make things easier, but in giving it more consideration, I would separate urban fiction and not the LGBTQ titles. In the article "Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Fiction: Suggesting New Titles to Make All Readers Feel Like They Belong," author Laurel Tarulli writes about LGBTQ materials stating that "whether you work in a small library, special library, or large public library, the demand for this collection and the information it provides is growing" (Tarulli, 2018, p. 250). Given that perspective, I'd would want to keep in mind a point that has been brought up in a few of my classes: that sexuality can be an uncomfortable topic for some - particularly minors - to bring up with their families or loved ones, so care needs to be taken with that category of books. Therefore, I'd make sure that those types of books would be more discreetly accessible, whether that is through brochures, web links, or other methods. Tarulli mentions in her article that some libraries have used specific categorization in their OPACs to achieve this goal, and I think that could also be a good solution (Tarulli, 2018, p. 249). 

Another reason that I would choose this setup would be because while urban fiction can be more gritty, I do not think there is the same kind of risk to patrons who choose to read it, so it would be okay to separate them from other materials. With urban fiction, I just genuinely do not equate the same level of risk to those books as I would LGBTQ fiction. (Maybe I just need to read more about the genre to make a more informed decision, but from what I've read in the class readings, whatever risk there is with those books does not seem to be equal.) As a third reason, I think that separating out the urban fiction may actually be beneficial because it is "written mainly by, for and about African-Americans" according to "Urban Fiction: Words on the Street" (Munshi, 2015). At least in my community of New Palestine, the community is predominantly white, and so while our library system is still diverse, it can sometimes be a little difficult to find a ton of books that are written for a community that is different than ours. As a result, I would want to separate the urban fiction books out to make them easier for people to find and be able to read, keeping in mind that Neil Munshi's article mentions that urban fiction is "written mainly by, for and about African-Americans," not only for them (Munshi, 2015, emphasis mine). Overall, I think that this would be a good solution and first step to this issue for my community, although it may change upon further research and inspection.

References

Munshi, N. (2015, November 13). Urban fiction: Words on the street. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/08785ece-86ee-11e5-9f8c-a8d619fa707c

Tarulli, L. (2018). Gender, sexuality, and identity in fiction: Suggesting new titles to make all readers feel like they belong. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 57(4), 248-250. https://doi.org/10.5860/rusq.57.4.6701