The importance, review and holdings of contemporary African-American women's poetry and fiction in ARL libraries, 1980--1990

This study examines the publication, review and collection of fiction and poetry titles written by African-American women, published between 1980--1990 by Association of Research Libraries member academic libraries located in the United States. It is an examination of institutionalized legitimizing social forces and their influence on the collection and sanctioning of knowledge as expressed through academic library collections. An analysis of discourse of a small set of titles reveals how expressions of social reality by a marginalized social group informs the discourse of larger society inherent in such library collections. A statistical analysis reveals that 70% of the titles written by African-American women during this time frame were poetry and that over half of these titles were published by small publishers. It was determined that there was no statistical relationship between the size of the publisher and the number of these titles a publisher produced. Approximately 40% of the titles received at least one book review, but the six core library professional and book trade review journals did not proportionately review these titles. The factors that were related to holdings of these titles include the total number of book reviews a title received, the number of titles the author published, the presence of an African-American Studies Department at the member institution, and the total number of volumes held by the library.