One Staff Member, One Budget, One Community: How Rural Libraries Really Build Diverse Collections

America is its diversity, no matter what executive orders or policies may be passed by federal and state legislators with an agenda. That array of experiences, identities, and perspectives is reflected in libraries nationwide. But how do small and rural libraries build collections that reflect the whole of their community and the broader world around them? This piece from the Association for Rural & Small Libraries explains the power and mission of even the smallest and most remote libraries to manage collections that showcase their community’s–and the country’s–diversity.

One Staff Member, One Budget, One Community: How Rural Libraries Really Build Diverse Collections

by The Association for Rural & Small Libraries Staff and Members

Library censorship surged in 2025, with 4,235 titles challenged nationwide–the second-highest total in four decades. Ninety-two percent of challenges were driven by organized pressure groups and government officials rather than individual parents, 40% targeted works reflecting LGBTQIA+ or people-of-color experiences, and 5,668 titles were ultimately banned outright. That is the national backdrop against which library workers are making purchasing decisions, whether or not a single challenge has ever landed on their desks.

Small and rural libraries face these challenges with a fraction of the staff and budget of their urban counterparts, which is exactly why the Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL) wanted to ask our members what building a diverse collection actually looks like in their communities. ARSL is a member-run nonprofit that supports library staff, volunteers, trustees, and advocates in small and rural communities nationwide. ARSL exists because the day-to-day reality of running a library in a town of 200 or 2,000 or even 20,000 looks a lot different than running a big-city system, and often the people doing that work are wearing every hat from cataloger to custodian.

An unintended side effect of serving small populations in equally small spaces can be a narrowing of the range of interests the collection serves well. When the local book club develops an insatiable appetite for pastry-themed mysteries or ghostwritten thrillers, they can easily come to dominate the library’s limited shelf space. This can leave little room, either physical or budgetary, for experimentation by library staff. The public library in Elkader, Iowa, serves a town where, as director Samantha Schwarz puts it, a book can “hit all the marks” (the right genre, a known author, a unique perspective for the collection) and still sit untouched on the new shelf for months. It is not a protest. It’s just a small, specific community deciding, one checkout at a time, what it wants to read.

“You might say they are ‘voicing their opinion with their checkouts,'” Schwarz says, “and that its lack of movement should tell me that this was a miss and to avoid doing that again.”

That tension between wanting a collection that reflects the full range of human experience in their town and running a library with, for example, a few thousand dollars and two staff members, showed up in nearly every response ARSL collected. Of the member libraries that responded, most of them serve fewer than 5,000 people, and a few serve fewer than 1,000. More than half (56%) named budget as a direct barrier to building a diverse collection.

Forty-two percent pointed to something harder to solve with money alone: local demand that simply is not there yet for certain titles. Of those, only 15% cited a specific law or policy shaping their purchasing, but those few described some of the most serious external pressure in the entire survey.

Furthermore, community responses split almost exactly down the middle: 35% described specific pushback or challenges, while a nearly equal 35% said, flatly, they had faced none at all.

Image courtesy of the Association of Rural and Small Libraries.

Budget is the constant, but it is not the only barrier

Money came up again and again. Materials budgets that have not moved in a decade, insufficient staffing, deferred building maintenance; the list goes on. Library Journal’s 2026 Budgets and Funding Survey, in which rural libraries made up 43% of respondents, found the same instability nationally: grant funding fell by a net 17.1% compared to the prior year, a sharp reversal from an 8.3% increase the year before. Fifty-nine percent of libraries reported plans to grow their materials budgets, but nearly a quarter expected cuts, continuing a downward trend that has been building for several years.

That instability, a shrinking or unpredictable budget colliding with a steady stream of new titles to consider, is the backdrop respondents kept returning to. However, budget alone does not explain the fuller picture respondents described. Several were just as candid about a second, quieter pressure: low circulation in homogeneous communities.

“Our readers (especially adult readers) won’t pick up books by authors with ‘ethnic-sounding’ names or cover art that features mostly non-white characters,” wrote one Iowa director who chose to remain anonymous, describing a small, conservative community where titles by Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, or LGBTQ authors routinely go unread. “A fully-diverse collection of books that sit unread is a waste of funds.”

She kept buying them anyway. So did dozens of other respondents, who described defending a book’s place on the shelf well before its circulation numbers ever catch up.

“To have compassion and empathy, you need to experience other people’s pain through words on paper,” said an Alabama director. “Or you need to be able to see yourself and your experiences in a book to feel like you are not alone.” 

This perspective repeated across dozens of responses; librarians defending a book’s place in the collection. “It is important for folks to see them on the shelves, even if some patrons will not read them,” a Connecticut executive director said.

A Kansas collections librarian put it more bluntly: “Why buy these diverse titles if they never check out?” And then she kept doing it anyway, because a community’s newer or quieter neighbors deserve to find themselves in the library, too.

Image courtesy of the Association of Rural and Small Libraries.

Legislation adds a different kind of weight

For librarians in states with new restrictions on collection development, the calculation weighs more heavily. A Texas school-adjacent librarian described a state law requiring every new title, including donations, to sit publicly posted for 30 days before school board approval. Her strategy: “I try to be as dull as possible in my posting and approval requests, to encourage the school board to rubber stamp my lists rather than take a detailed look.”

An Alabama director was more direct about the potential professional and personal costs facing librarians in their state: “We are unable to promote diverse titles without fear of retaliation from the state agencies as well as groups and organizations that are targeting libraries.”

Even without legislation, several librarians described a quieter version of the same pressure leading to preemptive self-censorship. “Am I not ordering this title because it will not circulate?” one Minnesota director asked herself, “or because I’m afraid of possible complaints?”

What’s working

The strategies librarians described were practical, not theoretical. Most rely on patron requests, review journals, and vendor lists to guide their purchasing, and interlibrary loan programs to fill gaps they can’t afford to buy outright.

One Wisconsin youth librarian, Laura, thinks of a diverse collection in terms of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, a framework she borrows from scholar Rudine Sims Bishop. That is, books that let a child see their own life reflected, glimpse someone else’s, or step into an unfamiliar one. She keeps what she calls a “running diversity audit,” tracking representation data in her library’s ILS by race, sexuality, gender, disability, and neurodivergence, then exporting it to a spreadsheet built to calculate the collection’s balance. It is, she says, “a woefully inadequate list […] but a place to start.”

She also practices what she calls “stealth diversity,” building diverse displays and storytime selections without pointing them out. “It took conscious effort to develop the habit of automatically noticing who is represented in a piece of content,” she said, “but it’s helped me so much.”

Some leaned on relationships instead of systems. In Oklahoma, one director’s response to pushback about an LGBTQ+ display was to ask who the display was for and to remind the patron that the same shelf space belongs to every viewpoint in town. A Minnesota director keeps a running set of calm, one-line answers for the same handful of objections she hears every year. Her rule of thumb: “the beautiful thing about America is that you have the freedom to choose what to read or what not to read, and that this same freedom is extended to all patrons.”

The complicated part

Almost no one described this as settled. A rural Alaska librarian summed up why they keep going anyway: “If someone wrote a book that reflects something you are experiencing, then you are not the only person who has experienced it.” An Iowa director, Tyler Hahn, put the stakes for rural libraries more plainly still: “Your local rural librarian is a vital character within their context and oftentimes more readily trusted than a local mayor or politician.”

That trust is exactly what is on the line in these decisions, not abstractly, but book by book, budget line by budget line, in towns where everyone at the library knows everyone who walks through the door.