Ingram iCurate inClusive

CONTENT

Ingram’s iCurate inClusive is a collection development tool and service that provides a diversity assessment snapshot of a library’s adult, teen, and children’s collections. Ingram has a team of 11 experienced collection development librarians who curate customized selection lists for trending topics, Opening Day Collections, and special projects. Along with acquiring publisher updates, reading reviews, and keeping abreast of industry news, the team also uses available publisher metadata and LOC subject headings to add valuable updates to its proprietary database, identifying titles that reflect the diversity of human experience.

Ingram has created a template of categories used as a reference to compare library collections; these include “Asian Interest,” “Black Interest,” “Indigenous Interest,” “Jewish Interest,” “Latinx Interest,” “LGBTQIA+ Interest,” “Mental Health,” “Middle Eastern Interest,” “Multicultural Interest,” “Muslim Interest,” and “Neuro & Physical Diversity.” Here diverse titles are defined as books that reflect the stories, experiences, characters, and ideas of underrepresented populations, as well as books written by authors known to identify with one of these groups.

USABILITY

The service is easy to use and speedy. After a library emails its full list of ISBNs to Ingram, the diversity audit assessment is conducted, and two weeks later, a comprehensive list is sent back. The report compares the library’s current titles to top-selling titles of diverse subjects and categories sold to public libraries in the last 12 months, together with older publications that are replacement orders and Opening Day Collection orders that iCurate inClusive identifies as diverse. As more public libraries complete this service, iCurate inClusive’s audit will go beyond new titles to include the average public library holdings of all diversity titles. Titles that are up to three months prepublication may also be included in the lists if they have unusually high advance sales.

The reports include detailed, clearly designed spreadsheets, graphs, and charts that illustrate for stakeholders how inclusive their library is and where they need to add to the collection to be more representative of the community. The reports identify gaps in the collection that can be readily filled from titles listed in iCurate inClusive’s complimentary, personally curated, and regularly updated lists of diversity categories. Libraries also receive an actionable list of these most recent popular titles, including their estimated costs and top-selling rankings, to help librarians quickly and effectively create more inclusive and representative collections.

The PowerPoint reports and actionable Excel lists are sorted by Dewey classification and broken down into the Ingram-defined diversity categories previously described. The total number of titles within the diversity categories are shown and compared to the total number of books in that Dewey section for the library. Charts display the percentage of diverse titles in the library’s collection compared to the top five percent of diverse titles held by and sold to public libraries in the last 12 months. (As most of the sales of diverse books involve the top five percent of titles, Ingram is confident in using this percentage.) Reports can be sorted and filtered by fields such as publication date, EAN, Dewey number, author, title, publisher, and diversity category or interest group. Ingram gives librarians the option to purchase vetted titles in specific categories to fill identified gaps.

PRICING

The iCurate inClusive diversity audit reporting and list services are available for adult, teen, and children’s collections individually or at a discounted price when bundled together. The one-time fee for iCurate inClusive is $4,200 for adult, teen, and children’s collections combined. For libraries that want to purchase the service for separate age groups, the cost is $1,500 per age group. There is also an option to prepay Ingram for the inclusive service and submit the collection holdings at a later date when the library is ready to see a snapshot of how diverse its collection is. This is useful for libraries that have been consciously working toward purchasing titles to improve the representation in their collection and wish to assess their holdings only after undertaking certain amount of collection development, when gaps have been targeted and filled.

In an attempt to keep the cost affordable, customization of the diversity categories is not offered as part of the iCurate inClusive service. However, if specific features are required, it is worth contacting Ingram to discuss pricing for customization.

VERDICT

Ingram’s broad experience with publishers and reviewers, along with its team of specialized collection development librarians, together position it as a highly reputable group to curate comprehensive lists of titles. As new authors continue to emerge, it is understandable that librarians might overlook a small percentage of titles by doing a physical shelf check. Using this service gives libraries the opportunity to significantly improve the overall diversity of their collections, and it provides recommendations for immediately filling gaps while eliminating the time-consuming and laborious process of a manual diversity assessment. iCurate inClusive will give libraries an edge in establishing well-researched and expertly curated lists of current titles that are highly recommended in an inclusive library collection.

Colleen Wood is a Knowledge and Learning Services Librarian at Darien Library, CT.