This one is from a week or two back now
A couple of days ago at the library we got a small number of new junior fiction books, among the rest of the new book deliveries. Was excited to see a couple of books appearing to feature black girls as their protagonists, one I think African American and one Aboriginal Australian. Bit less excited when in attempting to do some research prior to communicating this excitement I find the North American is by Meg Cabot and in fact is a spin-off of the Princess Diary series featuring Mia's sister, and the other covers I am turning up show her as a white girl, and none of the reviews make mention of her race- which, when unmentioned, is often an indicator the character is white at least one says Notebooks of a Middle-School Princess touches on race so hopefully my worries are unfounded. The other one is Flying High by Sally Morgan.
Mostly this got me wondering whether there are any resources which would be especially useful for finding out about e.g. junior fiction titles starring girls of colour which a librarian working in acquisitions might source purchases from. Which, if there are resources available for such, especially if they cover non-US-focused titles, recommendations would be appreciated.
Did while thinking on this imagine push-back of the sort "you should not prioritise subsets of people disproportionately like that". But, let us say for example the library has 5,000 junior fiction titles in its holdings. If we were to collect books in proportion with the Australian population then we would want to have roughly a hundred or so titles starring Aboriginal boys and girls. I'm not sure if there even are a hundred junior fiction books with Aboriginal protagonists. A collection which took pains to match the demographics of its service population would be very different from what we have at present.