Where books are concerned, collection development practices are implemented through a mix of approaches based on the expertise of subject librarians, coupled with vendor solutions that include approval plans, curated packages, and automated purchase models like patron-driven acquisition (PDA). What happens when new fields of reader interest suddenly emerge? Or when our collective social consciousness prioritizes ideas and voices not so easily captured by known collection development tactics?
The DEI in Collections Committee at Temple University Libraries confronted this very issue in recent years and developed a novel approach to a fundamental challenge: How should a library collect books by underrepresented and diverse authors when standard book metadata presents little or no information about an author’s identity? How can readers determine if the author is of the community being discussed or from the place being described in the book?
The librarians from Temple tasked with addressing this challenge began by surveying all of the selectors across the library and asking how they discovered books by diverse authors. In a number of cases, the DEI in Collections Committee found that selectors used book awards as a proxy. For example, the Association of Black Anthropologists, a section of the American Anthropological Association, offers book awards for “single-authored or multi-authored ethnographies or critical works that advance the theory, method, or general approaches exploring the unique experiences of Black peoples globally.”
For any number of reasons, authors are rarely explicit about their place of origin, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and other identifiers in their texts or author bios. By focusing on book-award-granting associations and organizations, and carefully examining the communities associated with those organizations to ensure authentic connections to the populations studied, the Temple DEI in Collections Committee felt reasonably certain they were making appropriate selections.
The team took several steps to ensure this new collection development process was sound. First, they spent considerable time reviewing the website of each book-award-granting source, assigning them to categories such as “professional association,” “museum,” or “foundation.” The committee also categorized the awards based on whether they required the winning books to be about a certain population or by a member of that population. One critical distinction the team incorporated: if an award did not require winning books to be by a member of a given population, they should at least be selected by an organization focused on that population. This important qualifier extends to publishers in fields like disability studies, who adhere strictly to the guiding principle, “nothing about us without us.”
One of the project’s most interesting findings was that books selected for acquisition through the book award criteria described here were very often published by independent and small presses. In fact, in the first year, over one-third of the books acquired through this program were from independent, mission-driven publishers, suggesting the program also diversifies the library’s holdings by publishers represented. It is important to note that the Temple committee had no interaction with the award-granting organizations; they simply validated the organizations according to the criteria described earlier and then ordered books that met those criteria.
Temple set up the awards ordering initiative through ProQuest, but they are now switching to GOBI Library Solutions since ProQuest stopped selling books on June 30, 2026. The transition will require requesting that GOBI add award-granting organizations to its ordering database, which already tracks many of these book awards as a mechanism for collection development. This allows the process to be automated and enables Temple University Libraries and GOBI to iterate on the ordering criteria, benefitting all libraries.
To implement this search filter, the cataloging team at Temple adds the collection name (Award Winners Honoring Diverse Experiences) to the 973 field and the award name to the 586-note field. This enables a deeper layer of discovery for patrons searching across the libraries’ holdings.
The librarians at Temple interviewed for this blog post reported that usage of the books acquired through the book award selection process has been very good. It is also important to note that, to date, the initiative has focused only on print title acquisition. Even still, these results are promising. Temple has laid the foundation for a replicable model that could be applied to collection development policies in other libraries.
Those wanting to learn more about this effort should reach out to Karen Kohn, Collections Analysis Librarian at Temple University.
This article first appeared on Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE), a DEIA-focused content vertical from Choice, which is a publishing unit of the American Library Association. The original post can be read here. To receive regular updates from TIE regarding DEIA news in higher education and academic publishing, sign up for the TIE newsletter.
