A Tale of Two Audits: Enhancing Diversity in Academic Library Collections

This paper discusses two collection diversity audit projects undertaken by a mid-size university library. For the first project, we evaluated our leisure collection based on the characteristics of the main characters in the books, with the goal of adapting the process for our main collections. For the second project, librarians created a flexible spreadsheet that was used to track diversity metrics for new book orders. This article discusses why the first project did not work well for us, but taught us some valuable lessons about conducting a collection diversity audit, and how the second project better matched our needs.