Week 14 Prompt: Separating LGBTQ and Urban Fiction?

Consider yourself part of the collection management committee of your local library, or a library at which you would like to work. You must decide whether or not to separate LGBTQ fiction and Urban Fiction from the general collection to its own special place. Some patrons have requested this, yet many staff are uncomfortable with the idea - saying it promotes segregation and disrupts serendipitous discovery of an author who might be different from the reader. Do you separate them? Do you separate one and not the other? Why or why not? You must provide at least 3 reasons for or against your decision. Feel free to use outside sources - this is a weighty question that is answered differently in a lot of different libraries.

 

My answer to this issue is multi-faceted, because it is a multi-faceted problem. How I would organize these genres depends on how the library already organizes its collections. If you go to a library that has all of its fiction books listed under general “fiction” with no subcategories, that is how these subgenres should also be organized. However, if the library has separated categories such as Romance, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Literary, etc. then I do think these categories should get their own sections.

 

Subgenre shelving makes it easier for people to find what they are looking for. I do not think these specific subgenres should be in a totally separate part of the library from other fiction genres because that would other them and could deter new readers if they have preconceptions about the genres. Still, I also don’t think they need to get hyper-specific. For example, I think books should be organized by their genre, not by the demographic of the author who wrote them. There is a slippery slope of getting so specific that every book could have its own shelf. There is also the issue of Young Adult variations of both of these genres. Do we need to have LGBTQ romances in their own location so it would be Fiction->Young Adult->Romance->LGBTQ Romance or can we simplify that?

 

I liked someone else’s idea of keeping all of the books in the “general fiction” genre and featuring them during certain times of year, such as Pride Month and Black History Month. I think this is a great idea because it allows the books to not be othered all year because of the author who wrote them, but does allow a bit of a spotlight for readers who are looking for these specific genres. In this day and age, it is also really easy for someone to find new books without having them be in their own special genre location, because books can be tagged with multiple genres.

 

I also think it is important to consult the communities that these books cater to. What works best for them? We can’t pretend to know all the answers, even though we might like to.