Groundbreaking tool for finding "good" diverse kidlit- with Krista Aronson

Описание: To watch the full episode with Anne Sibley O'Brien and Krista Aronson of DiverseBookFinder, visit:
https://www.embracerace.org/resources...

EmbraceRace: Do you see yourself having an advocacy role? And are you mostly about showing what's up there? Are you also about saying, "Look, we need more of what's good?"

Krista Aronson: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And it's absolutely. We are advocates within this space. I hope that we bring the data that can support arguments for what we need, and how this work should develop. I think in terms of advocacy that we engage in every day, it's more about accessibility and findability. So we've created our own tagging structure, our own metadata, our own algorithms for kind of thinking about, "Well, how do I find a book?" And it's really groundbreaking, because when we think about traditional structures like Library of Congress search engines or subject headings, they tend to focus on what's happening in the book and not who is in the book.

And so using those traditional search structures which are intended to be colorblind, it makes it very difficult, if not near impossible to surface books with BIPOC character, so my favorite example is a Sandwich Swap. It's a book about an Arab American girl and a white American girl. They're best friends and they get into a kerfuffle over sandwiches. One says she's so sorry that her friend has to eat chickpeas every day. And hummus, it smells disgusting. The other says, "Well, I always thought mashed peanuts was a gross idea," and it devolves into the whole school getting into a food fight essentially, that gets resolved in the end. The Library of Congress subject headings are sandwiches and toleration.

Anne Sibley O'Brien: Whatever that is.

Krista Aronson: Whatever that is, and I can't remember the third. But in there is not a clear understand. So if I'm an educator and I'm looking for a book that might help inform conversations that I'm having in my class, this book is going to be difficult for me to find unless I type in "sandwiches." But you can find it on the Diverse BookFinder, if you were interested in finding books that depicted cross group relationships between Arab and white girls. You can do that. You can select all those facets and see what comes up. So our advocacy right now is in, as Annie mentioned, part of that kind of a conversation with publishers and book distributors and eBooks, to think about, how can you make these books findable?

What are the languages that you can use that fit the needs of those who are looking for those books? If anyone had told me how long we would spend finding these books when I got started, I would not believed them. It's a huge undertaking, and that's one area where I think we can, even with what we have right now, certainly grow in terms of search structures.

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To watch the full episode visit:
https://www.embracerace.org/resources...

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