Why Can’t People Find Children’s Books Featuring Non-White Characters?
Project Description
37% of the U.S. population is non-white, but 90% of the books published for children during the last twenty-four years contain zero multicultural content. This discrepancy has been called “The Diversity Gap” and, more starkly, the “Apartheid of Children’s Literature.”
This talk examines the role of book metadata in children’s picture book discoverability. It discusses BISAC codes, algorithmic overfitting, book publishing workflows, and Amazon’s unique metadata practices.
It presents two boutique book discovery recommendation systems, OurStory from the grassroots group We Need Diverse Books and Diverse BookFinder, a research collection and database helping librarians diversify their collections.
Presented by Prof. Kathi Inman Berens (Portland State University) and Christina Bell (Digital Humanities Librarian, Bates College).
