Community Library

 Task: Organize a community library for ease of use

Part of the fiction section in the library at the Guilford Green LGBTQ Center

Description: My job is to organize the library at the Guilford Green Foundation's LGBTQ center. The library contains approximately 500 items, mostly DVDs and books, that have been donated by community members. I plan to categorize the items by genre, add correctly to Guilford Green's organizational system Library Thing, organize them on the shelves to make it easy for patrons to find items, check them out using Tiny Cat, and put them back in the correct order.

Tiny Cat main page for Guilford Green's library

Library Users: The primary groups the LGBTQ center's library intends to reach are the LGBTQ+ community in Greensboro and surrounding areas in Guilford County. But who is considered part of the LGBTQ+ community? From my spring 2020 community center research paper:

A simplistic way to define who are members of the LGBTQ+ community is to say that the community consists of people who do not consider themselves to be heterosexual and/or those who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. However, I have found that members of the LGBTQ+ who try to define it too narrowly often become exclusionists and gatekeepers and exacerbate the anti-LGBTQ+ bias that members, advocates, and allies are working to eradicate. Therefore, to avoid gatekeeping and exclusionism, I embrace the idea of self-identification: if someone says they are a part of the community, I believe them (Eash, 2020).

Members of the community are varied and have different needs, necessitating a wide variety of items in the library in order to meet those needs. I discussed the subgroups among the community here, in spring 2020 community center research paper:

Different subgroups with the LGBTQ+ umbrella, have different needs. For example, lesbian women in the 20s will have different needs than senior citizen gay men. Transgender people of all ages will face different problems than the LGB, and youth and children often need more support if they face bullying at school or an unsupportive family (Eash, 2020).

Allies of the community, such as families, educators, and other interested members of the community are considered proxy seekers. Proxy seekers will still wish to access the library but may have different needs than the LGBTQ+ community members. From my spring 2020 community center research paper:

The four percent statistic of those who identify as LGBTQ+ does not encompass all the people who would like to know what services should be provided for the community. Other subgroup of the LGBTQ+ community are the allies and advocates, ranging from teachers, librarians, and business and community leaders, to parents, friends, families of LGBTQ+ people, to people who simply believe that LGBTQ+ people deserve equal rights and protections under the law. All these groups are proxy seekers when they search for information about supporting the LGBTQ+ community (Eash, 2020). 

How many people could an LGBTQ+ library potentially serve? I discussed likely numbers in my spring 2020 community center research paper (emphasis added):

The percentage of people identifying as LGBTQ+ in the United States was to 4.5% in 2018, up from 4.1% in 2016 and 3.1% in 2012, according to Gallup polling (Newport, 2018). From the same Gallup survey, the number of LGBTQ+ people in North Carolina is four percent of the population, or between 50,000 and 200,000 people (LGBT Populations, 2020). The population of Guilford county is 533,670 and the population of Greensboro North Carolina is 294,722 (City of Greensboro, 2020). Therefore, there are about 21,350 LGBTQ+ in Guilford County and 11,800 LGBTQ+ in Greensboro if the 4% is accurate. 

This community library could potentially serve over 21,350 people!

Part of the young adult and juvenile section of Guilford Green's library

Library Importance: The LGBTQ+ community needs a lending library available to them because public libraries are often unable to obtain enough relevant materials for several reasons. One reason is because the LGBTQ+ community is a minority. From my research paper about reaching LGBTQ+ communities in libraries:

According to Jensen (2015), four to ten percent of young people and teenagers identify as LGTBQ. Libraries, especially cash-strapped ones in smaller communities, have used this statistic in the past to justify not purchasing many LGBTQ materials: after all, LGBTQ patrons are a minority, and “money is tight, and no one ever gets everything they want” (cited in Freeman and Symons, 2015). However, Freeman and Symons (2015) provided further statistics to point out the logical flaws in this argument. If four percent of the nation’s population is LGBTQ, Freeman and Symons (2015) argued, this would be about nine million people, about the population of New Jersey, a significant amount of people. Also, 3.9 percent of the United States population belongs to non-Christian religions, but librarians do not argue that those religions should not be represented in the libraries (Freeman and Symons, 2015). In addition, children under the age of 5 are only 6.5 percent of the population, but story times are among the most popular library programs, with no one calling for their removal even though children are a minority (Freeman and Symons, 2015). In conclusion, Freeman and Symon (2015) acknowledged that many subsets of the United States population have less than four percent representation, but they do not have as hard of a time receiving equal library materials and services than the LGBTQ community. 

School libraries often face even more obstacles than public libraries when it comes to obtaining LGBTQ+ materials. Also from my research paper:

Administrators in schools and directors of libraries (especially in smaller, more conservative, often rural communities) tend to choose materials that they figure will not cause conflict among their patrons and or students. In fact, Oltmann (2016) discovered via her research that 70 percent of the teachers interviewed would not buy or would hesitate to buy books with content with which parents could object. Over half (19 of 31) expressed strong opinions about the importance of LGBTQ in their libraries, while the remainder did not feel as strongly. Many, according to Oltmann (2016), compared LGBTQ materials to books about cultural minorities, expressed interest in making students feel included no matter their sexuality, and talked about libraries as safe spaces and antibullying zones. However, the concept of sexuality and LGBTQ materials seemed to generate more self-censoring among the librarians than books and materials about other minorities.

If the materials are not available in school or public libraries, then a LGBTQ+ lending library is vital for the community.

For an example of how some patrons can react negatively to LGBTQ+ see the video "What Would Librarians Do?" on the Videos Page.

Image from "What Would Librarians Do?" video

Taking stock of the collection: Donations come in frequently for the library; over 100 books have been donated since I started working on this project nearly a year ago. My first job was weeding through the books to see what did not belong. A handful of items were not LGBTQ+-related, and they were removed. About twenty-five books were moldy or starting to yellow and mold. These books were older and several of them were outdated or belonged on Awful Library Books. 

The books were already loosely divided into the categories of information, kids, transgender, fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, and collections, with several books not in any categories at all yet. 

Part of the fiction section in the library at the Guilford Green LGBTQ Center

Organization and Genre-fication: At the start of the project, I researched to give myself ideas. I have been steadily buying books from Barnes & Noble to review for my blog and then donating them to the library, but the Young Adult section I was donating to was becoming overstocked with books that were not getting much circulation from the Guilford Green patrons. When school is in session again, I plan to work with Gay-Straight Alliance sponsors to see if their young adults would like to borrow books, but right now, junior high and high schools in Guilford County are still virtual so that is not an option. Therefore, I referred to the pages "How to Get Started" on the site How to Organize Your Home Library and the blog post A Simple Guide to Organizing Your Home Library to figure out which books out of my collection I wanted to donate to the LGBTQ+ library and which ones I wanted to keep in my own personal library. After looking through other sites on ALA's Setting up a Library: Small and Home Libraries, I referenced the BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communication) subject headings and tweaked the genres to:

• Biography (and memoirs)
• Collections (short stories and poetry)
• Fiction (adult)
• Graphic novels ("comic-book" style)
• Juvenile fiction (children and kids up to age 12)
• Juvenile nonfiction (true and informational aimed at children and young adults)
• Nonfiction
• Young adult (teenagers)

Nonfiction--To Dewey or Not to Dewey?: I had not problem deciding to categorize biographies and memoirs as genres and make the spine labels similar to the way I was making the fiction genres. However, should I use Dewey Decimal numbers or not? I thought that I should put DD numbers on the books, to be a proper librarian, but then I discovered Tiffany Whitehead's blog Mighty Little Librarian and her posts about Ditching Dewey. She rearranged her school library's nonfiction section from Dewey Decimal to Book Industry Standard categories. The last line from her blog post, "Ditching Dewey: Choosing Genre Categories" really resonated with me. Take out the text about students and curriculum, replace them with community and the community center programs, and I agree. I like the flexibility of making my own categories:

Something that I love about this arrangement is that nothing is set in stone and you’re free to make changes to work best for your students and your curriculum — it’s okay to make some changes your categories and subcategories as you go. Make your plan for your categories, but don’t be afraid to tweak it as you go!

In her post Ditching Dewey: Labeling the Books, Whitehead describes buying tinted labels for each category within her genres. This is also something that I will do either with tinted labels or colored dot stickers, each dot representing a different topic in the LGBTQ+ community; for example:

• Pink dot= lesbian content
• Blue dot = gay content
• Purple dot = bisexual content
• Orange dot = trans content
• Yellow dot= queer (as an identifier) content

Queer Library Sign from the center

How to label the books: I wanted a system that I could do easily, but I could also teach to other volunteers easily. The following directions I also put in a printable worksheet.

 Processing Books for the Guilford Green Library

1. Determine if the book or movie belongs in the collection. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is it LGBTQ+-themed in some way? 
• Is it in loanable condition? Normal wear and tear are fine but beware of water damage and mold. Often, mold on a book will look like speckles of yellow popcorn grease. This type of mold can spread quickly and ruin an entire collection. 
• Do we have multiple copies of the item already? If so, the book can be used in another way—perhaps in gift bags or donated elsewhere, if there is not room in our collection for it.
• If nonfiction, is the book recent? Does it contain current and accurate information?
  
  

2. Determine the age range for which the book is intended. If you know this book is intended for adults, skip to step 3. 

• If you can’t figure the intended age by looking at the book, you can look up the title in Library Thing and look at the tags. For example, if you were to look up the book The Music of What Happens, you would see that it is tagged as young adult and high school: 
  
  
  
  
  
• If there are no tags on Library Thing, you can look up the book on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com:

Amazon.com book information 

Barnes & Noble book information

3. Determine what genre in which the book belongs. The genres are:

• Biography (and memoirs)
• Collections (short stories and poetry)
• Fiction (adult)
• Graphic novels ("comic-book" style)
• Juvenile fiction (children and kids up to age 12)
• Juvenile nonfiction (true and informational aimed at children and young adults)
• Nonfiction
• Young adult (teenagers)

4.  Add the book to Library Thing. Type the username and password given to you by the community center's librarian.

• Begin by clicking on Library Thing:
  
  
  
  
  
• Next, click on "Add Books"
  
  
  
  
  
• Type the title of the book you want to add. You can use the ISBN number (on the barcode on the back of the book), title, or author to find it. Click “Search”
  
  
  
  

·         Select “show all” under categories, and select the genre the book belongs in. Once you have done that, click the correct title from the left-hand column of search results. Your book is now added.

5.  Create a spine label for the book. If the book is juvenile (up to age 13) or young adult (teen), you will start with the age range: either Juv (for juvenile) or YA (for young adult). For other books, begin with the genre and then add the first three letters of the author’s (or editor’s if no author) last name. The example is the spine label for The Music of What Happens. Once the spine label is created, it can be typed in the document, printed, and placed on the book. The book is now ready to be circulated!

The spine labels are printed with a Microsoft Word template onto Demco labels. However, after the initial labeling of the books, the spinel labels can also be printed with a label maker and put on the Demo labels. This will make the process easier for future volunteers at the center who are processing books.

Future Projects with the Guilford Green Library: Unfortunately, the pandemic has stopped some of the volunteering that I would like to do with Guilford Green and its library.

My future plans include:

• Finishing applying all of the spine labels
• Reorganizing the shelves to use the space more effectively
• Starting a book club (for young adults and/or adults. Anyone who wants to participate!)
• Marketing the young adult section of the library to local high schools (I have donated several books and tripled the size of the young adult library. Currently, most of those books are not circulating)
• Applying for grants to buy more books
• Surveys for the visitors to the center
• Books of the month (spotlight books that I have read and reviewed on this blog)
• Updating the Amazon wish list (and switching it to Barnes & Noble or a local, independent bookstore)
• Other volunteer opportunities and marketing ideas to increase circulation in the library

Stacks in the Guilford Green Library

Conclusion: I am very excited about the library and feel very strongly that Guilford Green's LGBTQ+ center is an asset to the community. I hope to grow the library in the next few years and increase circulation. 

Return to Jen Reads the Rainbow.