Our Unique Tagging System
The focus of our work is on identifying trends in representations of Black and Indigenous Peoples and People of Color (BIPOC) from within the current landscape of ALL diverse children’s and young adult literature, we ask:
In the world of books currently featuring BIPOC:
- Which racial/cultural groups are represented?
- What are the messages they send about BIPOC? Or stated differently, how are BIPOC groups being represented?
To answer these questions we have developed a tagging system with five distinct elements. Taken together, the tags for each book represent a type of summary about the characters being portrayed, the stories being told, and the book’s contributions within the broader call for diverse titles. This tagging system is what makes our collection and data unique!
1 – Our Unique Thematic Categories
We have identified nine unique book categories that capture the dominant messages conveyed by current children’s and young adult literature featuring BIPOC. Each book in our collection is tagged with at least one category but no more than three. Anyone can use our book categories to consider how BIPOC are represented in a story to ensure that no single message dominates bookshelves.
Any Child/Teen
Books featuring BIPOC characters in which race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, culture, im/migration, and/or religious, sacred, or origin stories are not central to the storyline.
Biography/Autobiography
Narrative books (fiction or nonfiction) about the life of a particular person or group of people from a historical or contemporary perspective.
Centering Culture & Identity (Formerly “Beautiful Life”)
Books featuring BIPOC characters in which race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, culture, im/migration, gender, sexual orientation, or religion and/or religious, sacred, or origin myths and stories (and their intersections) are central to the storyline.
Cross Group
Books that portray relationships between main or secondary characters across racial or cultural differences, including but not limited to those depicting peer group and cross-generational friendships. The interactions depicted may be positive, negative, or resolving.
Folklore
Books featuring tales, proverbs, songs, nursery rhymes, lullabies and/or legends that transmit the knowledge, traditions, practices and rituals, and values of a particular group of people. These do not include religious, foundational, or origin stories.
Incidental
Books featuring a racially diverse cast of non-primary characters; or books featuring animal main character(s) with BIPOC as secondary characters.
Informational
Narrative books that present factual information. BIPOC are depicted, but race/culture is not always central to the content.
Oppression & Resilience
Books about group-based injustice & struggles for justice. Includes stories about structural oppressions such as enslavement, internment, imprisonment; persecution in or displacement from homelands; or barriers to basic freedoms such as land, food, housing, education, health, bodily autonomy, sexual or gender autonomy, etc.
Race/Culture/Identity Concepts
Books that explore and/or compare specific aspects of human difference, inviting readers to consider varying perspectives related to race, ethnicity, culture, tribal affiliation or intersectional identities including religion, immigration, gender or sexual orientation.
2 – Character/Protagonist Tags
While our book categories are tagged based on the storyline, our tagging system can also help you pinpoint who is in a book based on the characters’:
- Race/Culture
- Ethnicity/Nationality
- Tribal Affiliation/Homelands (For stories featuring Indigenous characters)
- Gender
- Sexual Orientation
- Disability
- Religion
- Im/Migration Status
So, a book with any of the character tags above indicates that a (main or secondary) character in that story is depicted as a member of that group. We use a separate Setting tag to indicate where the story takes place.
3 – Content Tags
Content tags provide a rich summary of the complex stories represented in the collection. We’re telling stories about stories. Working in tandem with overarching themes and character information, content tags describe what’s going on in the story at a more detailed level, and allow us to give users important information they need to know about the representations in a book. If the character tags describe who is in the book and the thematic categories describe how those characters are being represented, content tags describe what is happening in the book at a more granular level.
With over 200 content tags, there’s a lot to learn about the stories in our collection. To make things simpler, we’ve divided our content tags into the following 19 larger categories:
| Activism/Social Justice Movements | Diverse Families/Family Dynamics | Drugs |
| Governmental Relations | Inequalities | Internet |
| Interpersonal Abuse/Violence | Languages & Communication | LGBTQIAP2S+ |
| Legal System | Medical Conditions/Disabilities | Mind/Body |
| Political Violence & Forced Displacement | Race-Related | Relationships/Sexuality |
| Relocation Narratives | Sacred Belief Systems | School/Extracurricular Activities |
| Traditional Cultures |
When a content tag is indicated it usually means that content was significant to the storyline as a whole and that the content plays a recurring role throughout the book. However, there are some tags which are always selected regardless of their prevalence in the story – those tags include (but are not limited to) the following sensitive topics:
| Deaths (Murder, Suicide, Accidents, Illness, Other) | Domestic Violence |
| Kidnapping | Physical Abuse |
| Gun Violence | Hate Crimes |
| Addictions | Police Brutality |
| Sexual Assault | Miscarriage/Pregnancy Loss |
4 – Creator Lived Experience
Before selecting a book, readers often want to understand the identities of the storytellers and illustrators. Knowing a bit about a book’s creators can help us think about the accuracy and authenticity of the representations we find within the book.
To that end, when we are able to locate information about a book author’s (or illustrator’s) personal background, we note important findings along with the rest of our tagging elements.
We note author/illustrator lived experiences in the following instances:
- Written/Illustrated by someone who self-identifies with the same race/culture and ethnicity/tribal nation/homeland as the BIPOC characters in the book.
- Written/Illustrated by someone who self-identifies with the same race/culture as the BIPOC characters in the book.
- Written/Illustrated by a person who does not self-identify with the same race/culture as the BIPOC characters but who has provided information about the source of their knowledge and connections to the topic area or race/culture/ethnicity/tribal nation/homeland depicted (research, communities consulted, etc.).
- Written/Illustrated by a person who does not self-identify with the same race/culture as the BIPOC characters but who does share another meaningful social identity with the main character(s) of the story. This could include ability, sexuality, gender identity, and/or religious identity.
5 – Unique Contributions
In addition to the more granular tagging we do, we also work to consider each book as a whole and suggest important elements of the text that represent its contributions to BIPOC representation in the field of children’s and young adult literature.
We establish a book’s unique story elements, by noting when the representations/messages in a book address specific gaps in children’s and young adult literature identified by the Diverse BookFinder.
Using our extensive data on BIPOC representation in children’s and young adult literature, we review titles based on their Thematic Categories and Protagonists and note when certain kinds of representation are missing or rare. Then, as we continue to add titles to our collection, we highlight titles in which we see some of these rare kinds of representation.
For example, our data shows that in the majority of books that focus on Cross Group relationships, the interactions highlighted are between white characters and BIPOC characters. Cross Group books that highlight interactions between different BIPOC characters are rare!
Hence, when a series like Every Day with April & Mae (written by Megan Dowd Lambert, illustrated by Briana Dengoue and Gisela Bohórquez) comes along, highlighting a sweet friendship between two girls of color, we tag the titles as offering a unique contribution to BIPOC children’s and young adult literature.
How did we come up with our thematic categories?
We paid attention to the dominant messages that emerged as we read books! First we read existing scholarship identifying particular themes that occur within diverse books. Then we spent months reading through a representative sample of our own collection, asking whether and how those themes still applied:
- Did they capture the messages we were seeing now?
- Did they apply to all racial/cultural groups?
- What fit or was missing?
We redefined, fine tuned, and added categories as necessary, ensuring that they reflected and were grounded in the books themselves — a method called “grounded theory.” This painstaking process resulted in the development of the nine categories above. When the DBF expanded to include books for older children and teens we revisited our thematic categories to ensure that they could still be used to accurately describe the stories being told in these books. We found that with minimal changes, our categories held. To find out more about our original process, please check out our published research.
How did we come up with our tagging system?
Our system was developed by an interdisciplinary team of librarians, educators, and book creators. Building on the work undertaken to capture the content of picture books featuring BIPOC characters during the original iteration of the Diverse BookFinder, the group collaborated to expand existing tags and to capture the content of books for older youth. Specific tag names were derived from a number of sources, including the U.S. Census. For the gender and sexuality tags, useful definitions came from the Homosaurus vocabulary and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki (original and updated links). Otherwise, the group took inspiration from a variety of individual sources. Some examples include The Natural History Museum: Beyond Gender (for gender representation) and The Crown Act (for content tags related to racialized hair discrimination and hair love).
In addition to this work the group sought guidance from experts in various areas. For example, we were assisted by a disability studies expert in developing the disability tagging system. Indigenous librarians and scholars helped augment our system to ensure it honors and respects Indigenous stories.
How do we tag the books in our collection?
The process of tagging a book for the Diverse BookFinder collection begins when our Book Identifiers sort through catalogs to find books that fit our collection inclusion criteria. Once books have been identified, the process moves on to our DBF Coders and Releasers.
The DBF depends on our amazing community of volunteer Coders to do the work of reading and tagging each book in our collection. Every fall we recruit a cohort of volunteer experts (librarians, professors, teachers, etc.) and guide them through an intensive 9-week training program which teaches the ins and outs of our unique tagging system. Coders who have completed the training then spend at least one year being assigned titles, reading the books in detail, and tagging each story and its characters.
Before being published, each book entry is reviewed for correctness and consistency by our team of Releasers thereby ensuring that each entry is ready for the live site. The DBF process is extensive and time consuming but allows us to bring our users one-of-a-kind data on children’s and young adult literature featuring BIPOC characters.
