Diverse Book Finders: Diversifying a Children’s Picture Book Collection by Integrating Acquisitions Into a Classroom Experience

Two recent trends in collection development include finding new ways to bring patron voices into collection development and developing strategies for increasing the diversity and representation within collections. Indiana University Southeast (IU-Southeast) Library recently developed a project that combined these two strategic directions by embedding an acquisition experience that used students enrolled in a sophomore block elementary education course to use the Diverse Book Finder (DBF) to select diverse picture books for the IU-Southeast collection. While diversification strategies and projects around children’s picture book collections in academic libraries are nothing new, IU-Southeast’s project is unique in its incorporating of students to participate in the selection and diversification of a collection, rather than relying on more traditional strategies driven by librarian or faculty selection. This case study focuses on the design of the project, the integration and embedding of the acquisition project into the education course, how the DBF and its collection were leveraged to enhance the learning experience, and the effect this experience had on the diversity of the IU-Southeast Library collection and on the faculty, librarians, and students that were involved.