Collection Equity Continued: A Story from Region 5

NNLM Discovery

On this continuation episode of the NNLM Discovery podcast, Region 5’s recently retired Outreach & Engagement Coordinator Michele Spatz shares how three more libraries in Region 5 used Collection Equity Outreach Awards to enhance collection equity and support health literacy in their libraries by acquiring more materials by diverse voices.
In a previous episode, Michele shared stories from Alaska, Hawaii and Nevada. This episode highlights California, Oregon and Washington, where recipients purchased non-traditional resources for their collections. Do you know what a Zine is? Learn how Oregon Health and Sciences University augmented their collection with zines to better reflect those patrons the library serves. In California, PlaneTree Health Library produced YouTube videos to boost their online collection. And finally, we visit Washington state where the Walla Walla County Rural Library District developed a program that assembled bilingual resource kits about various health topics.
In total, 27 NNLM Region 5 member organizations received the Collection Equity Outreach Awards, and each member organization submitted a bibliography of purchased materials. Region 5 compiled these bibliographies into the Diverse Voices Toolkit, a freely accessible toolkit of collection development resources for all to use.
All of the artwork for this podcast series has been created with a generative AI text-to-image tool! The text prompt for the episode's artwork was " a diverse group of people looking for books at a library as a dramatic oil painting.”

Join Outreach Services Librarian, Yamila El-Khayat, for new episodes of the NNLM Discovery podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or listen on our website www.nnlm.gov/podcast. Please be sure to like, rate, and review the show!