The multicultural rainbow shelf

Two subjects which have grown constantly larger due to globalization are diversity and LGBTQ. This can be seen since people with different sexualities, religions, ethnicities and much more have become more visible in Sweden. Therefore, one can ask oneself how diverse the literature is at public libraries, especially if a certain genre such as LGBTQ is placed at a special section called rainbow shelves. This issue will be examined in this study. To show how important it is to include and acknowledge everyone and not only some groups, social recognition by Axel Honneth has been chosen as the theory of this paper. In order to see how diverse the literature in rainbow shelves are, a qualitative content analysis, based on four different semi-structured interviews with four different individuals, has been made. Only librarians from libraries which have rainbow shelves has been interviewed, but they were spread all over Sweden, from north to south. The interviews took place during April 2018. The result shows that the libraries have diverse LGBTQ-literature to a certain degree. They can only purchase as much diverse LGBTQ-literature as exists and unfortunately, there is not much diverse LGBTQ-literature available. Due to this, the four public libraries cannot acknowledge individuals who are not included in the white normativity or western standards. The discussion revealed that the rainbow shelves of the participating libraries do not represent a greater diversity. However, there are rainbow shelves where diversity is more represented than in other rainbow shelves. It was also found that there is a limited amount of multilingual LGBTQ-literature and that it is complicated to find. Not enough multilingual LGBTQ-literature is published to enable public libraries to find and make this available to a wider extent. All participating libraries work in some way to support the diversity of the rainbow shelves and make them more representative. This work is mainly done by getting inspiration from other libraries’ rainbow shelves or by searching for diverse LGBTQ-literature