I didn’t mean to create a sexist library collection when I set out to build one. But in 1994, when I showed Mary the catalog of online books I’d started the previous year, one of her first questions was “Where are the women?”

It was a fair question. There weren’t that many listed. I’d been cataloging sites like Project Gutenberg, which had only 11 books by women in its first 100 releases, as well as other early ebook sites whose author gender ratio was similar, and sometimes worse. Many early producers of online books gave much of their attention to “canonical” works featured in sets like Great Books of the Western World, which in its first edition of 54 volumes featured no women writers at all.

The works featured in Great Books do indeed deserve to be remembered. But so do many other books, including books by people whose perspectives were left out of Great Books sets. It was clear that to build up a suitably diverse and inclusive set of books for people to read online, we’d need to go out of our way to find and provide more books by those people. Books by the more than half of the world’s population who aren’t men. Books not just by colonizers, conquerors, and enslavers, but by those who were colonized, conquered, and enslaved. Books by the poor in spirit, the mourners, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Books not just by those who recognize the imagery in that last sentence from their own religious traditions, but also by those who follow many other religious and philosophical traditions.

This isn’t simply a matter of fairness to those overlooked authors. As I described in my last post, including them makes my collection better for all readers, by widening the range of works readers can learn from, enjoy, and draw on as sources for their research and their original creations. Diverse, inclusive, equitable, and accessible libraries are better libraries for all.

Mary’s done a lot to improve the coverage of my collection. She created, and still edits, A Celebration of Women Writers, which highlights and links to information about women writers of all sorts, from many different times and places. Her work has encouraged people to put books online by those writers and others. She’s also herself put online more than 400 books by women writers, often in collaboration with transcribers and proofreaders from all over the Internet. And she’s not alone in this work. Not only have there been numerous other projects focusing on women writers, but many general collections have also added more books not just by women but also by other overlooked writers and groups. (Project Gutenberg, I should note, includes a notably larger proportion of books by women in its subsequent releases past their 100th etext. One can also find a few years into their listings a string of several books in a row by Indigenous American authors, another group overlooked in its early offerings, as well as an increasingly diverse set of Black authors beyond its initial focus only on Frederick Douglass.)

While I’ve incorporated the selections of these and other projects, I haven’t given fans of male authors, or white authors, reasonable cause for complaint. There are plenty of books by those authors in my collection, and I’m continuing to add many more of them. I don’t deny any reader’s request for a book on account of the authors’ genders or races. But I also don’t assume there’s no need to do any more work to improve the diversity and inclusiveness of the collection. The percentage of books in my curated collection credited to authors I know to be women, for instance, is now in the low 20s. That’s higher than it was when I started out, and better than it would be if we hadn’t proactively worked to improve its collection diversity, but it’s still well short of gender parity.

Gender and race also aren’t the only things I’m thinking about when I’m working to fill in gaps in my collection. For example, if someone suggests a book that was written in response to another one, I often try to include the book being responded to, if I don’t already list it. Doing so not only often increases the diversity of viewpoints on the topic the books discuss, but it also often helps readers better understand the originally-suggested book. Or, if someone asks for an older book on a topic I don’t have much coverage for, I’ll often also look for newer books on the same topic that might have more up to date or accurate information, or provide a broader set of ideas and perspectives. I also will sometimes try to include different copies of works I already list that are more accessible than the editions I first listed, such as those that have a proofread transcription of a text (and not just images and hard-to-read OCR), or that are more easily downloadable across the Internet.

The Online Books Page is a project staffed by less than 1 FTE, and there’s only so much I can do to improve its diversity, inclusiveness, equity, and accessibility. But what I do manage to do makes it a better library for its readers than it would be if I followed the path of least resistance in maintaining it. Full-service libraries with more FTEs can do more than I can. And they should, because as I’ve said previously, both their words and actions supporting diversity, inclusiveness, equity, and accessibility make their libraries better fulfill their missions to their entire communities.