#25: Some holidays move — Library Accessibility

From Emma:

This tip was, unfortunately, directly inspired by a problem at the Capital Area District Library where I used to work. Right at the front of the library, we had a table with a rotating book display. In December, whoever choose the displays had set up one for winter holidays—Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Day, and, of course, Christmas. To my confusion, I saw there were a couple of books on Ramadan* on the table, even though I remembered that Ramadan had been in the summer that year. I took them off and went to re-shelve them in their proper place, only to discover that our “Holiday” section in picture books appeared to be organized by when in the year the holiday fell, and that Ramadan books had their own tiny little area in between Hanukkah and Christmas.

Presumably what happened was that, when the library acquired its first ever picture book about Ramadan, someone unfamiliar with the holiday went to shelve it, didn’t know where it belonged, and looked up when Ramadan fell that particular year without realizing that those dates would vary from year to year since Ramadan is in fact the 9th month of the Islamic calendar year. The Islamic/Hijri calendar year is lunar rather than solar and is 11 days shorter than a Gregorian calendar year, so Ramadan ‘rotates’ around the Gregorian calendar months (or the Gregorian calendar months rotate through Ramadan, depending on how you look at it). Well-intentioned Judaeo-Christian librarians, not knowing better, might have been including Ramadan books in the winter holidays display for years before I noticed this.

I sent my boss a short little explanation of the problem, asked her to remind everyone to NOT include Ramadan books on our winter holidays display as Ramadan was currently in the summer, and then spent a long, frustrated time staring at the holiday picture books, trying to figure out a way to shelve them in a way that would prevent this from happening again. Ramadan is the main holiday that would be affected, but it’s not the only one—Hanukkah usually starts after Thanksgiving, but sometimes starts before, and Easter gets pretty complicated, especially if you have communities of Orthodox Christians and Western Christians who use your library.

At CADL, I ended up moving the Ramadan books to the very beginning of the section, and leaving Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Easter alone since the level of confusion and inaccuracy was a lot less severe, and because, frankly, I felt I’d already taken on a reputational cost by bringing this up (I am sure my colleagues were happy the change was made, but no one likes to be embarrassed) and I didn’t want to develop a reputation as some kind of PC culture warrior with no perspective. You could instead organize holiday picture books alphabetically, but that brings up its own set of problems (the accepted English spelling of Hanukkah/Chanukah being just one) and also isn’t very intuitive for small children.

The approach I like the most is interfiling holiday books with the regular collection and then pulling them out only as the holiday is approaching. Somewhat ironically, CADL did something like this for their holiday movies and music—the materials for upcoming holidays would be out on display and the materials for the rest of the year's holidays would be in closed storage and only accessible by request. While I was at the Dallas West branch of the Dallas Public Library, I helped our children’s specialist interfile all our holiday picture books with the regular picture book collection, based on her research about ow the collection was used, what circulation numbers looked like, and best practices at other libraries. They were identified by stickers on their spines, and prior to a major holiday she’d look through the collection and pull out enough relevant items to put together a display.

This tip was a tough one to implement for me, because some level of ‘calling out’ of colleagues I respected was unavoidable in order to address it. However, I’m glad I did it anyway. My coworkers reacted well, I learned something useful, and we corrected a pretty glaring indication of lack of consideration for one of the groups of people who used our library. By the way, Ramadan begins April 24 in 2020, if anyone would like to plan an appropriately-timed display or program at their library.

*Minor aside: Depending on how you define “holiday,” Ramadan might not actually be one. You might say that Eid Al-Fitr, which is technically right after Ramadan ends, is the actual holiday, but most picture books I’ve encountered cover Ramadan and Eid-Al-Fitr together, as continuous parts of a single cultural/religious practice.