#13: Take care with heritage displays →

From Emma:

This is a tough one for me, because it’s meant skipping heritage months on more than one occasion. Sometimes I have evaluated the materials I had available for a potential heritage display and found that our collection was too small, too outdated, too narrow in focus, in too poor condition, or otherwise not in good enough shape to be the core of a heritage display that was respectful and showed that the library valued the community whose heritage it was supposed to be representing. In those cases, putting together a display with those materials would be worse than having nothing, but having nothing isn’t great. People tend to be pretty aware of the major annual heritage celebrations (Black History Month in February, Women’s History month in March) and will definitely notice if you don’t do anything.

I think the best way to mitigate that is to make sure that you’re showcasing diverse books year-round, in context other than heritage displays. If your new books section and your other displays include relevant, appealing books by non-white, non-straight, non-whatever authors, about characters that the people in your community will identify with, people won’t be too concerned if you skip a heritage month. Also, have a good and honest response prepared if someone wants to know why you’re not doing something for a particular month—once or twice I’ve had to say to people “I went to put together a display on X and realized that we really needed to work on our collection of materials about that. We have ordered a lot of new stuff, but it won’t come in in time to be used in the display. If you want, let’s see if we can figure out a few you might be interested in, and we can place requests to have them saved for you once they come in.”

Of course, in a perfect world, you wouldn’t wait until the heritage month was looming to check on how your collection was doing in that area, but instead catch problems early and update whatever you need to update. I am working on getting better at this, but my reality has often been that I just don’t get to it as early as I should. Writing this post has made me realize that we have a bit of money from the sale of donated books right now, so this would be a great time for me to check on titles that we might want to use for Asian Pacific Heritage Month (May) and Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept 15-Oct 15) and order to fill any gaps.

I also think it’s important that the props and visual scheme you use shouldn’t reinforce stereotypes—as a general rule, I avoid any symbols that would come up on the first page of Google search results, and try to use colors that aren’t traditionally associated with the culture in question. I was actually pretty nervous about this aspect the first time I tried it. I did a Hispanic Heritage Month display for the Downtown Lansing library in the CADL system that was going up in the window where passerby would see it. I knew enough to have confidence in my book and DVD selections, but I was pretty sure I had literally never seen a display about Latin American culture and history that didn’t use an orange/red/yellow color scheme, and I was worried that the blue and black colors I chose would stick out like a sore thumb. Not a single person commented (positively or negatively) on the colors, but I got a lot of nice comments on the materials I selected and on a little primer I included on the difference between the terms ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino.’