The Children's Services Division is offering membership scholarships to develop cultural and geographical diversity in our membership. CSD supports OLA's Equity, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives. Our intention is to improve the recruitment and retention of members from diverse cultural/ethnic backgrounds and/or historically marginalized and underrepresented groups.

For more information and link to application go to our Scholarships page. ​

Going forward, instead of doing more diversity audits of different collections, we decided to focus on making sure that every time we order, we do so with diversity in mind.  In this way, we can address diversity across all of the library’s collections on a regular basis. For most books in the library, the time of purchase is when we are most involved with the content of the book, so that makes it a perfect time to address its diversity (or lack thereof).  Our main selector specifically looks for diverse book lists and regularly uses content from the We Need Diverse Books blog and Lee & Low Books.
 
The final piece that we added to our collections procedures is to take diversity into mind when weeding.  If a high-quality diverse title hasn’t circulated, we give it more time than we would a non-diverse title, and we check to see if we’ve been putting it on display, including it on reading lists and otherwise giving it a good chance to circulate. On the flip side, we try to weed books with harmful stereotypes or outdated, overused tropes as soon as possible.