Week 14 Prompt

This week’s prompt is on whether or not to separate LGBTQ fiction and/or Urban fiction from the rest of the fiction collection. My first response is no, these two genres should not be exclusively separated. However, if the library is considering completely genrefying the fiction section, I would consider supporting this.

To dive into terminology a bit, I was at first confused by the genre “Urban fiction,” but I now realize that Urban fiction is a pretty specific genre, referring to novels in a city landscape focusing on the lower economic circles, often depicting poverty, crime, and financial issues. To me, this seems like way too specific a genre to consider separating. In addition, it feels like separating this small collection sends a very obvious message that this type of story, this type of person is not welcome with the rest of the books. But I also do not work or live in a very urbanized city. Perhaps libraries in an urban location with a much greater number of books that fit into this genre and face a high demand for them, perhaps they would see an advantage for making this a specific collection as they genrefy their fiction.

There are several reasons why I would not support removing LGBTQ fiction or Urban fiction from a collection exclusively. Firstly, I think it sends a message that these stories, these audiences are the “other;” it isolates the genres, and in turn, may isolate the audiences that want to read the books. In addition, if you remove LGBTQ books and a large portion of racially/economically diverse books from the collection at large, you have created a default collection that is full of books with little to no diversity, which is not good at all. Also, some users may feel like segmented collections are only for patrons who belong to that segment. 

Though it is an undoubtedly massive amount of work, genrefying a fiction collection could be a route some libraries choose to take to increase ease of browsing. Either way, a library should always consider what best fits the needs of their community and consider doing a user poll if considering making big changes like this.