Week 14 Promt

You must decide whether or not to separate GBLTQ 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.

In my past library experience, my direct supervisor bought the Demco LGBT+ stickers for use in our YA section. Honestly, I like the design; I think it's cute. However, we did not use genre stickers on any of our YA books--adult and children's books did get the various stickers. My supervisor's idea was that we had a large group of kids who were interested in books that featured LGBT+ themes, and they were too embarrassed to ask her, so wouldn't these stickers make it easier? 

While my experience isn't the exact prompt, it is somewhat similar. Using these stickers would separate the collection, as none of the other books had them. When we first talked about genre sticker use in that area (long before my supervisor bought them) I was slightly for them. Yet, I was adamantly against them for the following reasons:

• If the kids are too embarrassed to ask for them, why would they pick out a book with the sticker displayed on it?
• What if they need to hide that they're reading books containing these subjects? 
• The kids aren't asking you for these books because they've been asking me (and still are since I've left via email).

For LGBT+ books, I added a subject line within the catalog (and frequently instructed the teens how to search for it) and kept an updated list of all the books with those subjects at my desk for them to look through. 

But in terms of physical separation for both GBLTO+ and Urban Fiction genres, I am firmly against it. I assume that the number of books in either of these categories are very low and in moving to their own 'special place,' the low number of books would make it clear to patrons looking for these items that they are important to the library. Also, sparing a whole bookshelf (if even that) would take up a lot of shelf space that libraries cannot waste. 

However, the 'separation' would depend on the intent of those asking. If it is similar to the Orange City Library situation, absolutely not. But if it so patrons interested in these genres can find them easier, just add the genre sticker. For an adult collection that uses stickers, I'd instead move in that direction.