Collection Equity Award

The North Haven Memorial Library has been weeding older/outdated material and working on a full collection audit, with a special emphasis on diverse and inclusive material. Through our analysis, we found that we have a large gap in diverse health-related books, which is apparent in all three of our departments - Children’s, Young Adult, and Adult. As stated in the NNLM’s mission, we would like the North Haven Memorial Library to be able to offer a current and relevant collection that will advance the progress of medicine and improve the public health by providing all U.S. health professionals with equal access to biomedical information and improving the public's access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. The North Haven Memorial Library Board recently adopted an EDI statement, and the library is about to begin work on its first Strategic Plan, which will include EDI components. However, we do not want to wait to improve our collection until the Strategic Plan is complete. We would like to begin this work immediately and have already begun to select books to add to our collection that are written by authors of an underrepresented or marginalized group, and that spotlight the health information needs of those groups.