Weekly Reflection 6

I was sick this week (May 1-7), so I did not do much work on my DFW this week. However, since I was unable to go in to my DFW physically, I emailed my supervisor and asked for any remote work that I could complete that would be helpful. She emailed me back with a spreadsheet of book titles that needed to be filled out with author names, genres, the gender of the main character, and the race of the author.

This spreadsheet is for the next school year, and it is essentially a student and librarian-built list of semi-recent releases that encompass a large range of genres and author ethnicities and races, in order to provide a recommended reading collection that is diverse and has broad appeal.

I added a notes section to fill in relevant details, such as whether a book would count as #OwnVoices. While I was not specifically asked to, I also filled in some of the “Definitely” column with my opinion on whether it would be a good addition to this collection. I left most of them blank, as I did not have strong opinions one way or the other, but I did mark a few as “Maybe,” due to concerns I had after reading about the book (such as poor handling of serious topics such as suicide and mental health), but I did not want to dismiss the book entirely without having read it.

While filling out this list was somewhat simple, it was time-consuming and had some challenges. Since I had never heard of any of these books, I ended up relying on Goodreads, Kirkus Book Reviews, and publisher or author sites in order to determine the appropriate way to fill out the sections, especially the genres and main character’s genders. Wikipedia was helpful with more popular authors, but some of the newer ones were difficult to even figure out what race they were. I did find it quite interesting to research all these books – especially when it came to what awards they had won, and sometimes the author was a local! – and I added several to my want-to-read list.

While I personally would not have been interested in several of these books as a middle schooler, I tried to keep an open mind towards what should be added to the collection, since I have already seen that middle schoolers like books that I would not have expected (re: my experience with shelf-talkers, It, and other more “adult” books). I did, however, note when a book might not interest the age range, such as all the characters being in their mid-twenties, with adult problems like how to pay the rent this month, and working at unattractive, messy jobs like waitressing.

Overall, while I did not accomplish a lot this week, I think this was an interesting exercise in collection development and trying to keep my personal biases out of the collection, though I did note when there may be legitimate concerns. The final decision is up to my supervisor as a more experienced librarian, however, and I am very grateful for that, as I am not sure that I would have come up with such a diverse list on my own at this stage in my learning.