Bibliospectrum* is focused on providing resource recommendations for libraries and librarians serving gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersexed, asexual, queer, and questioning teens, young adults, and their friends and family.
Why libraries?
Libraries have often been the first stop for GLBTQIA youth (and adults!) to find information. In providing an introduction to this site, I am invoking the broadly inclusive meaning of the term “queer” to refer to the spectrum of individuals with non-normative sexual identities.
This website was created as a project for a graduate seminar at the University of Michigan in 2010, but it is a project that I hope to continue for the next several years. It came to mind as I was reading Mary L. Gray’s Out in the Country and after I watched the documentary Before Stonewall, both of which made frequent mention of libraries as a meeting place for queer individuals and groups. Out in the Country presented libraries as places where rural teens were able to find information -- either in the stacks or online -- without risk of discovery by a potentially intolerant community. As browser histories at home can be checked and some libraries can release checkout records to parents, libraries are often the safest place for individuals to explore their sexual identities. This is especially true of rural communities, where access to the internet is often limited -- and this is what provided the inspiration for me to create this site, as well as the reason I will be providing printable resource and reader’s advisory guides.
Librarians are, by profession, dedicated to providing neutral, reliable information and ensuring that the information our users seek remains private. This puts us in a unique position to assist queer youth in finding information that may assist them in solidifying their sense of self, finding supportive groups or organizations in local areas or online, and in finding books that expose them to various modes of queer life and was of being through fiction, nonfiction, and other types of media. (Though this project is currently focused on books, eventually I am hoping to expand to music and film recommendations as well.) As an ongoing project, I am hoping to examine the collection development policies of a variety of public libraries to determine the types of language that work best to ensure the inclusion of specifically GLBTQIA materials.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find much literature on what libraries and librarians are currently doing to serve this particular subset of youth. The American Library Association’s GLBT Round Table members have been incredibly helpful in providing suggestions for resources, but even with their combined expertise there is quite a dearth of information relating to programming and program ideas. I am hoping to address this by providing this site as a space to share and archive ideas.
*Many thanks to Peter Kooger for suggesting this site’s title and web address. Thanks also to Victor Mendoza for teaching the class that facilitated its creation, the ALA GLBTRT, the many Twitter librarians, and to Jennifer Trusty and Amy Stilgenbauer for their suggestions and support.