The Reading for Justice Database aims to provide librarians and patrons with better access to YA and children’s literature book subjects centered around social justice. This database began as a project in Dr. David McKoskey’s Database Management course at St. Catherine University. The project then continued to develop through an independent study where the goal was to build a website and user interface for the database. The website includes a search page, report page, and an administrative page for editing.
The presentation will cover the initial stages of the database’s development, the challenges of gathering data, preventing a “default” from skewing our data, and the overall process of connecting the database to our user interface. We hope we have created something that librarians and patrons would find useful for identifying books centered around themes of social justice.