Seattle Public Library: How the Black Lives Matter Movement Shaped Reading Material
Alexis Petterson & Shirley Lo
The main question we will explore throughout this data set is: What were the ten most checked out titles from the Seattle Public Library over the 2020–2021 year and what insights do they provide into Seattle society during this period?
To determine the answer to the research question, this analysis is derived from the Seattle Public Library Checkout Data for 2020. The complete dataset contains checkout data starting from 2005, but our analysis focuses on January 2020 to January 2021. Within the dataset, each checkout is categorized by usage class (digital or physical), checkout type (Horizon or OverDrive), material type (Book, Ebook, audiobook, etc.), checkout year and month, number of checkouts, title of the work, creator of the work, subjects (fiction, Scifi, biography), publisher, and publication year. In total, there are 34,233 checkout entries, 7,685 unique titles, and 3,225 unique creators in the Seattle Public Library dataset for 2020.
While the Seattle Public Library Checkout Data is quite comprehensive, it would be interesting for them to have also included information pertaining to the day of the week and time of day that the checkouts were made and demographics about the individual that requests library material. By examining the time of checkouts, we could then determine what day of the week and what time of day checkouts are most likely to happen. Looking at the demographics, such as age, race, or gender, of who checks material out would also be interesting to delve into because then we could see if certain groups of people gravitate towards specific genres or titles more than others.
After segmenting the data, this graph was created to display the top 10 most popular titles that were checked out from the Seattle Public Library in 2020. The x-axis shows the ten titles that have been checked out the most, while the y-axis shows the number of checkouts.
The top ten titles checked out from the Seattle Public Library were: (1) So You Want to Talk About Race (Unabridged) [11,700 checkouts], (2) Becoming (Unabridged) [7,900 checkouts], (3) Where the Crawdads Sing [6,500], (4) Talking to Strangers (Unabridged) [6,100], (5) Educated: a Memoir [6,100], (6) Becoming [5,700], (7) Braiding Sweetgrass (Unabridged) [5,500] (8) White Fragility [5,300], (9) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Unabridged) [5,100], (10) How to Be an Antiracist [4,500]. Of these ten titles, five are anti-racist, social justice, or Black-authored biographical works. The peak checkout months for each of these five titles occurred during the summer of 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement was at its nationwide pinnacle. This data suggests an inspiring conclusion that more Seattle residents were actively pursuing channels to better educate themselves on dimensions of privilege, racism, antiracism, and ways to support and empower marginalized communities.
The title that was most popularly checked out is So You Want to Talk About Race (Unabridged) by Ijeoma Oluo, borrowed nearly 12,000 times. The data considers the unabridged version of the book separately from the abridged version and if we combine the checkout data of both, the total rises to about 14,000 checkouts. We can trace the timeline of growing popularity of this title by viewing checkouts per month. From January to May, checkouts remained roughly the same, around 300–500, but beginning in June the title’s popularity skyrocketed, reaching 4,903 checkouts, followed by 2,016 in July, 994 in August, and then a gradual decline beginning in September and continuing for the rest of the year. We can align the significant rise in checkouts to the Black Lives Matter movement, in which powerful protests were carried out within the city over the span of a year, with the movement’s support at its strongest during the summer months of 2020. Within Seattle, the BLM movement maintained an especially strong presence and was notable for the establishment of a peaceful, autonomous community in Capitol Hill in protest of police response to the movement. The peak checkouts of So You Want to Talk About Race (Unabridged) coincide with the peak of the movement and provide insight into the social context of Seattle society in that the data indicates that people were receptive and supportive of the BLM movement and accordingly, took the initiative to educate themselves on privilege, racial biases, and the systemic perpetuation of racism through established institutions. This pattern was not just unique to Seattle, but also occurred on the national level. According to data from Amazon Charts published in the Washington Post, during the week of May 24, there was only one title written by a Black author and no anti-racist books in the week’s top 20 most sold books. On the week of June 7, 11 anti-racist books and five books by Black authors were on the list.
In the future, it would be interesting to conduct the same analysis on data from different libraries around the United States. From our analysis, we saw that the Seattle Library checkouts were greatly shaped by the BLM movement; people wanted to read and learn more about topics that had influenced these major current events. Therefore, it raises the question of whether or not other states and cities saw a similar pattern where the top books that are checked out pertain to anti-racism and Black authors. While Seattle is known to be a more liberal city that strongly supported the BLM movement, it would be fascinating to compare Seattle Library’s data with cities that have different demographics and political stances, such as cities in the Midwest and the South.
