Diverse Authors in Schewe Library: Claire Peters ('26)

Welcome to Schewe's Diverse Authors LibGuide! My name is Claire, and I spent ten weeks during the summer of 2024 researching the demographics of authors from the 820s section of the library. If you're reading this LibGuide that means you're interested in the diverse titles of Schewe Library, but before you dive into the many selections, there are a few things you should know about diversity in the publishing industry.

 The publishing industry has long been dominated by white, cis identifying individuals. This has left little room for minority groups to get their work published and share their stories, perspectives, and knowledge. As the issues with diversity in publishing have gained more attention, the publishing industry has begun to publish more stories from queer and POC authors, but the rate at which these authors are being recognized is not where it should be. This is where readers come in.

Readers need to be conscious of the books they choose to read and who the authors of those books are. Awareness and intention about diverse reading will broaden the worldview of readers and shift the landscape of the publishing industry to be more inclusive. Reviews and purchases of diverse titles will show publishers that there is a demand for these stories and encourage them to focus on POC and queer authors.

For further reading about diversity and discrimination in the publishing industry refer to these sources:

https://blog.leeandlow.com/2024/02/28/2023diversitybaselinesurvey/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/books/publishing-books-poc-dei.html

https://pen.org/report/race-equity-and-book-publishing/

Have any further questions or would like to recommend diverse titles? Feel free to have a conversation with the librarians at Schewe or shoot them an email!

While working through the large sample size of books from the 820s a few challenges presented themselves to me while looking for information about the authors. However, the research wouldn't have been as much fun without these challenges and I did learn quite a few things. Most of this knew knowledge was relevant to the research and some of it was more... obscure and unusual, but I won't bother you with the details of the irrelevent information. 

The largest challenge I faced was navigating the information, or lack thereof, available to me via the internet. Many of the books in the 820s section are nonfiction, biographies, or literary criticism published before the internet was even a thought. In most cases, unless the author was prolific or popularized during their time, there was little to no information about them on the internet beyond brief career bios. The internet, however, is not the be-all, end-all. 

I found what information I could from the internet and turned to the books on the shelves for help with the rest. From the books, I could glean information from acknowledgements, dedications, and short author bios. This helped to fill in some of the gaps at the end of my internet sleuthing. Even so, there were still some authors that did not have any definitive information about their demographical identity and thus were left as unknowns.

The information from this audit will assist the Schewe Librarians in selecting new books to bring into the collection and determine which books should be culled from the collection with a focus on evening out the demographics present.