Diverse BookFinder Picture Books: Home

The Diverse BookFinder collection was created in 2022 at the suggestion of Mitchell Scott, Assistant Librarian, Coordinator of Collections, at the IU Southeast Library. Together, with Librarian Melanie Hughes, Library Liaison to the School of Education, and Drs. Cathy Johnson and Niyetta Williams-Hill, School of Education, we engaged elementary teacher candidate undergraduate students in their language arts method class to help the Library select new books for our Curriculum Materials Collection (CULAB). With the support of an internal IU Southeast Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion grant of $2500, received Spring 2023, students selected close to 200 new picture books to help support their instruction in area schools. This patron-driven acquisition model helps students have a service-learning experience and creates ownership, interest, and pride in their Library collections, both at their University and in their future school and classroom libraries, creating collections that are representative of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) students in their future classrooms.

The Mission of the Diverse BookFinder, developed at Bates College:

• To inform the diverse books movement by providing data and translating research so that it is accessible and useful.
• To move the diverse books discussion beyond a focus on increasing the number of books to a deeper consideration of how Black and Indigenous people and People of Color (BIPOC) are represented within diverse books.
• To identify dominant trends in representations of BIPOC by exploring who (which racial/cultural groups) is represented in current diverse picture books and how (what messages are being sent). (diversebookfinder.org)