Patricia Sarles, MA, MLS has put together an extraordinary resource; a virtual library catalog of books for children related to various LGBTQ issues. When I discovered that my book,
Rumplepimple, had been included in the
Books for Kids in Gay Families list I was first thrilled, and then intrigued. I decided to ask her a few questions about how the whole thing came about. Here are her responses. I think you'll find her story fascinating.
How did you get started with this effort?
I am a librarian and I became interested in children's books on the topic of assisted reproductive technology when a social worker colleague, who is a fertility counselor, asked me if I could find her any books on this topic. I thought this would be very easy because of my training in how to find information on basically any subject. My colleague, Patricia Mendell, already had a small library of children's books on this topic so I started by searching for those titles in the Library of Congress catalog and discovered that very few were available in their catalog. In addition, they had very strange subject headings, like "infertility -- juvenile literature" or "test tube babies -- juvenile literature" and those subject headings were inaccurate because that's not what the books were about. They were about children conceived via assisted reproductive technologies and about donor offspring. It became apparent that these books would not be easy to find after all. It was also obvious that there were no appropriate subject headings for books on these topics.
This intrigued me tremendously because I was now on a mission to find books on a topic that had no adequate subject headings. This meant they would be nearly impossible to find. I also knew that there were mothers and fathers out there who needed children's books like these in order to share with their children how they came into the world. There was a need but no means for a librarian to find these books should a patron walk into a library and ask a librarian to help them. That's when I started my blog.
Read more here
