Climb to the fourth floor of UW’s Teacher Education Building on North Mills Street, and you’ll find a library devoted to literature for young people. No, it’s not for kids. And no, you can’t check out the books. But this tiny powerhouse of a library has helped revolutionize the world of children’s literature.
It’s called the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), and it’s a non-circulating library for adults interested in books for young people. With a staff of just four full-time librarians, the CCBC is known across the country for the diversity statistics it collects based on the approximately 3,700 books it receives from publishers each year. When the CCBC began this work in 1986, the data was discouraging: year after year, most new children’s books were by and about white people.
You might recognize the famous “Diversity in Children’s Books” infographics by Sarah Park Dahlen and David Huyck, which made the rounds on social media in recent years. Citing data from the CCBC, the 2015 version of the image shows that 73.3% of children’s books published that year featured white main characters, and that there were more animal and inanimate object characters than all the Black, Asian, Latinx and Indigenous characters combined.
Lack of diversity in children’s books is not a new problem. In 1965, the landmark article “The All-White World of Children’s Books” called attention to an issue that many BIPOC educators, librarians and readers had long pointed to: the overwhelming majority of kids’ book characters were white. But according to the four librarians of the CCBC, things finally started to change about 10 years ago.
“A lot of that [change] has to do with the amplification from We Need Diverse Books around 2014 and the role of social media,” says CCBC director Tessa Michaelson Schmidt, who came to the role in July 2022. (We Need Diverse Books is a nonprofit organization that promotes diversity in children’s publishing. It began as a Twitter hashtag.) According to Schmidt, social media enabled book creators, buyers, parents, librarians and readers to have a public conversation about the importance of children’s book diversity and finally create lasting change in the industry.
To be clear, this diversity conversation has been going on for a long time. “We’re not talking about 20 years or 30 years. We’re talking about decades and decades,” adds Megan Schliesman, CCBC librarian and assistant director. “And so much of that work was happening among educators and librarians of color. There have been opportunities when this message was amplified by white people, but the work has been done by people of color for many years.”
The CCBC librarians are open about the fact that all four of them are white, and they bring that self-awareness to their work. (The American Library Association estimates that nearly 90% of librarians in the U.S. are white.) To help mitigate their own biases, they lean on the expertise of BIPOC librarians, educators, and folks in the children’s literature industry.
For example, Schliesman notes, the reason the CCBC began tracking diversity statistics in 1985 was that then-director Ginny Moore Kruse served on the jury for the Coretta Scott King Book Awards — an award created by Black librarians Glyndon Greer and Mabel McKissick to recognize outstanding books by Black creators. Kruse was taken aback at the mere 18 books eligible for the award that year.
Thanks to the activism work of librarians and educators of color, plus resources like the CCBC’s diversity tracking, the children’s publishing industry began to change. In 2022, 40% of the books received by the CCBC were by a person of color, and 39% had at least one BIPOC primary character.
But simply tracking diversity statistics isn’t the CCBC’s aim. “Our end goal is to identify incredible books from each year,” says Schmidt. “The most important thing is for children and teens to have choices on their bookshelves.”
The four CCBC librarians read hundreds of books throughout the year to curate CCBC Choices, its list of the best books of the year. Librarians across Wisconsin rely on this list to help identify titles to add to their collections.
“Choice is a fundamental concept to libraries, as is the freedom to read,” says Schliesman. “So we hope that all the work we do is helping librarians provide a wide range of choices for the people in the communities that they serve.”
As you might imagine, this job involves a lot of reading.
“I probably read 175 children’s novels per year,” says CCBC librarian Maddie Tyner. Tyner is also the primary librarian responsible for logging diversity data, reading many hundreds of picture books to glean that information.
The four estimate they collectively read between 1,500 and 2,000 books each year. “We’re constantly taking books and reading outside of our actual work time,” says Schmidt.
The librarians look for books with outstanding writing and storytelling, plus books that fill niches that aren’t often covered in books for young people. And though many books on the CCBC Choices list overlap with books identified by other literature awards, that’s not always the case.
“I actually think we’re quite good at finding quiet books that might only reach a smaller audience but are excellent,” says librarian Merri Lindgren. “That’s one of the joys of creating CCBC Choices.”
The CCBC also maintains the CCBC-Recommended Book Search tool, which librarians and educators can use to identify specific types of books to meet their students’ needs. For example, a teacher could use this tool to identify books for grades 3-5 by Black authors with a Wisconsin connection, or books for middle schoolers about cooking. The CCBC librarians are experts in responding to the needs of readers in Wisconsin and recommending books. “That’s something we know really well from years of talking with educators and librarians here in our space, and from our extensive history of doing outreach around the state: What are people looking for?” explains Schmidt.
Schmidt is new in the role of director (though she previously worked as a CCBC librarian), and she doesn’t have big plans to shake things up. For one thing, as it is, the CCBC’s work to promote book choice is vital at a time when reading choice for kids is under attack. Pen America reports that school book bans increased 28% in the first half of the 2022-23 school year, compared with the previous six months. And overwhelmingly, the challenged books are by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ folks.
Though the CCBC primarily promotes the freedom to read through CCBC Choices and diversity data, they do provide confidential consultations to Wisconsin librarians and educators who face book challenges. The number of requests for assistance tripled over the past two years, indicating a huge rise in Wisconsin book challenges. That might not be surprising in a state where Republican senators introduced a 2023 book-ban bill that would regulate Wisconsin students’ access to books deemed “harmful” or “offensive.”
Despite the political climate, the CCBC has no plans to compromise on its mission. “For students who come through, scholars, or just people who come to a book sale and say, ‘I never knew about this,’ they just really see and understand that [the CCBC] is a treasure,” says Schmidt. “It’s a really unique and vibrant and vital gathering space.”
The annual Friends of the CCBC Book Sale fundraiser will take place Dec. 1 (4-6 p.m.) and Dec. 2 (8 a.m.-1 p.m.) at 401 Teacher Education Building, 225 N. Mills St.