Join us on Wednesday, December 9th at 2 pm for a panel discussion with collection development librarians Betsy Bird of the Evanston Public Library and Dontaná McPherson-Joseph of the Oak Park Public Library. They will discuss the process of conducting a diversity audit and the results that led to changes in procedures and new initiatives for their collections.

 

Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of Evanston Public Library. She is the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library and author of Children’s Literature Gems: Choosing Them and Using Them in Your Library Career from ALA Editions. Her blog A Fuse #8 Production is hosted by School Library Journal.

 

Dontaná McPherson-Joseph is a Collection Management Librarian at Oak Park Public Library. Her to-read pile is a tower, so she is almost always reading two books simultaneously. She appreciates books with great cover art.

 

This program is sponsored and organized by the Adult Reading Round Table and hosted by RAILS. You don’t need to be a member of ARRT or RAILS to participate, but spots are limited.

 

 

 

In 2020 ARRT launched the Narrative Nonfiction Genre Study only to be thwarted by COVID-19. We put the Genre Study on hiatus until we felt we had a better handle on all the changes happening in our libraries. Although we are still in the midst of COVID-19, we have decided to re-launch the Narrative Nonfiction Genre Study on Thursday, February 4th at 2pm.

 

Meetings will be via Zoom for the foreseeable future. Please register in order to receive the meeting link. Our first meeting will be an overview of narrative nonfiction and a discussion of nonfiction sure bets and humor. We ask that all attendees come prepared to booktalk (in 1 minute or less) one nonfiction "sure bet" and one book of humor.