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Room for Improvement: Picture Books Featuring BIPOC Characters, 2015–2020

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Abstract

The Diverse BookFinder is a free online resource that provides data about thousands of picture books published since 2002 depicting Black and Indigenous people and People of Color. Using this data, this study looks at the publishing trends from 2015 to 2020 in terms of race/culture and unique categories developed by the Diverse BookFinder that identify how people in these books are depicted. This study found an increasing trend to publish books with illustrations of characters that are racially ambiguous, with no race or culture specified in the text (the Diverse BookFinder tags these characters as “Brown-Skinned and/or Race Unspecified”).

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant LG-95-17-0189-17.

Funding

This study was Open access funded by the Diverse BookFinder.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Diverse BookFinder & Education Library, University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Lisely Laboy

  2. Education Library, University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Rachael Elrod

  3. Diverse BookFinder & Department of Psychology, Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA

    Krista Aronson

  4. Education Library, University of Florida Libraries, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Brittany Kester

Authors
  1. Lisely Laboy
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  2. Rachael Elrod
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  3. Krista Aronson
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  4. Brittany Kester
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Correspondence to Lisely Laboy.

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Laboy, L., Elrod, R., Aronson, K. et al. Room for Improvement: Picture Books Featuring BIPOC Characters, 2015–2020. Pub Res Q 39, 47–60 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09929-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09929-7

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