Ingram Announces A New Service to Help Libraries Effectively Diversify their Print Collection

Nashville, TN (May 18, 2021)--Ingram Library Services®, an Ingram Content Group (Ingram) brand, introduced its new service iCurate inClusive, a one-time assessment service to help Public Libraries diversify their collections by discovering missing titles and underrepresented voices. This effortless and effective diversity audit service will allow librarians to better serve their communities by providing actionable resources and reports to make their collections more diverse.

Diversity is at the forefront of Collection Development, but standard metadata rarely identifies the keywords that make a title “diverse”, which makes library collection diversity audits manual, time-consuming and tedious. For years, librarians have had to individually audit each title in their collections and place these titles into a specific diverse category, a process that usually takes months to years.

iCurate inClusive is a service that helps libraries build a more diverse collection more quickly. With iCurate inClusive, libraries are able to email their print holdings to Ingram and receive a thorough report including 60+ charts regarding the diversity of their collection within just two weeks. The service options include Adult Diversity Audit, Teen Diversity Audit, Children’s Diversity Audit (or a bundle of all three), and each diverse title is marked and counted based on the following diversity codes: Asian interest, Black interest, Indigenous interest, Jewish interest, Latinx interest, LGBTQIA+ interest, Mental Health, Middle Eastern interest, Multicultural, Muslim interest and Neuro and Physical diversity.

“We have been focusing on implicit biases within our library district, and one of our concerns was with staff auditing their own collections. We were thrilled when we got the email that Ingram was providing this service, and after watching the webinar, we knew it would help address our concerns,” said Melissa Nguyen, Business Manager at Oswego Public Library District.

Library customers will also receive comprehensive subject lists with their holdings marked that show which of the most popular diverse titles are missing from their collection. Not only does this service save time and effort, which allows librarians to focus more time on their patrons and communities, but the generated reports can be used for marketing, strategic planning and staff goal setting.

“The most helpful piece of the results so far have been the spreadsheets of recommended titles by collection area…The recommended titles include notations about which titles we already own so we can view them in the context of the larger collections, and our understanding is that they were recommended based on popularity in other public libraries,” noted Karin Michel, Chapel Hill, NC.

To ensure the reports are accurate, the Ingram Library Services team has ingested the holdings from some of the largest libraries in the country to make sure the reporting the librarians receive is