Supplemental Collection Equity Award Y2 - San Diego State University

I collaborated with the Health Sciences Librarian to apply for the Collection Equity Award in 2021. Initially our criteria focused on health-related books by and about minorities. This includes racial and ethnic minorities, people from marginalized gender and sexual identities, and people with disabilities. We purchased 54 titles representing various intersecting underrepresented topics and identities.

The groups and topics include narratives of diverse people with varying positionalities to represent themselves and their conditions. To help library users learn about the topics, it was vital to include narratives of people with direct experience with it. Therefore, many of the titles are authored by the person with the health issue, their caregivers, or medical practitioners. The health topics covered include LGBTQIA++ health, perceptions of people with disabilities, mental health, medical practitioners of color, healthcare disparities, and women’s reproductive health.

Once we received the books, we made a book display explaining the award and how the books fit the criteria. The display allowed users to leave feedback to a prompt asking, “What does health mean to you?” There were 72 notes from library users. For the most part, they mentioned sleep, physical activity, autonomy, chronic pain management, and being social.

            With the supplemental Collection Equity Award, I want to use information from the feedback from our previous display to inform users about new book purchases to further support and represent underrepresented people and topics. I will add the library user health concerns to our previous criteria to expand the scope of the award. I want to add perspectives of how minoritized people are affected by the issues mentioned in the feedback.

I hope that this will demonstrate the disparities of how with think about health and wellness by purchasing materials that connect library user concerns with minoritized communities. For example, the ability to manage chronic pain is not the same for everyone due to the lack of equity in healthcare access. This is to say that I want to use this supplemental award to purchase more books to demonstrate how the lack of equity in healthcare affects the way we think about health.