Libraries in the News

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

 -Albert Einstein

 10 ways Maurice Sendak defined your childhood
Josh Wolk writes: “The brilliant and hauntingly mischievous works of Maurice Sendak, who died May 8 at 83, are as universal a staple of early childhood as a pacifier or a tantrum. One of our great intergenerational commonalities is the sense memory of sitting either on a parent’s lap or paging through the illustrations on a bedroom floor, both mesmerized and giddily unnerved by Sendak’s naughty protagonists. Herewith, our tribute to a man who never patronized children with worlds with sanded-off corners or reductively callow lessons.”...
Vulture, May 8

D.C. officials feel the heat over school library cuts
A spring proposal by District of Columbia officials to eliminate more than 50 school librarian jobs for the next academic year has triggered a public relations nightmare for the city council, where the proposal originated. Members of the Capitol Hill Public Schools Parent Organization are determined to fight a spring decision by schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson to defund school librarian posts at schools with less than 300 students and let principals of larger schools decide whether to reallocate their librarians’ salaries. “If this situation were to remain unchanged, 58 schools would have no librarian,” grassroots activist Peter MacPherson said....
American Libraries news, May 4

Petition seeks return of Dirty Cowboy
More than 230 people have signed an online petition that seeks to have the children’s book The Dirty Cowboy by Amy Timberlake returned to the shelves of the Annville-Cleona (Pa.) School District. The school board voted unanimously in April to remove the book based on the objection of one student’s parents. Illustrator Adam Rex uses various items, such as birds, a boot, and a cloud of dust, to cover the cowboy’s private parts while he is bathing and then while he is attempting to put his clothes back on....
Lebanon (Pa.) Daily News, May 7

 

Libraries in the News

“Pimps make the best librarians.”

—Opening line of Avi Steinberg’s Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

To Kill a Mockingbird: Enduring at 50 years
July 11 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the endearing and enduring story of racism and redemption and growing up in a small Southern town during the Depression. It is Lee’s only book and one of the handful that could earn the title of Great American Novel. “It has ‘book charisma,’ a term I rarely use,” said Karen MacPherson, children-and-teens librarian at the public library of Takoma Park, Maryland. The Westport (Conn.) Public Library celebrated with a showing of the film version....
USA Today, July 8; Westport (Conn.) Patch, July 12

Old Spice guy talks about libraries
Former NFL player and current Old Spice commercial actor Isaiah Mustafa has a few words to say (0:34) about libraries, thanks to the efforts of librarian Andy Woodworth. “Books are often composed of many many words. And words are the non-pictures that convey many things to other minds, [like] ‘Let’s eat peanut butter.’”...
YouTube, July 14

Libraries must protect the freedom to read
Freedom to Read Foundation President Kent Oliver writes: “Attempts to censor books like J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye often focus on the issues of sexuality and profanity, about which young adults are apparently not supposed to read, despite the fact that we all live through those issues. Herein lies the dichotomy and absurdity of the censor’s viewpoint: While the First Amendment guarantees Americans the freedom of speech and press, the censor asserts an urgent need for protection from our own ideas about the very lives we live.”...
Forbes: Booked, July 8

Libraries in the News

“I’ve never read The Chocolate War, but complaining about nudity in a novel that contains no pictures is like complaining about there being too much sound in a sandwich.”

—Amelie Gillette, writing about ALA’s Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books list, where The Chocolate War ranked 10th in 2009, “Parents Still Hate The Catcher in the Rye,” The Onion A.V. Club, Apr. 15.

2010 Edgar Award winners
The Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of their prestigious Edgar Awards for the best crime and mystery writing at a banquet in New York City on April 29. Edgars went to John Hart for The Last Child and Stefanie Pintoff, whose In the Shadow of Gotham won best first novel by an American author. Dave Cullen took the prize for best fact crime for Columbine, his account of the 1999 shootings at that Colorado high school....
New York Times, May 2

Fond du Lac again
A Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, school district committee has been called together to hear another citizen complaint involving a library book. The reconsideration committee will meet May 13 to consider parent Ann Wentworth’s request to remove the book Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares from the library at Theisen Middle School. Wentworth is objecting to several books she feels contain inappropriate content that are available to middle school students....
Appleton (Wis.) Post-Crescent, May 5

Catalog cards on the catwalk
Amber Gibbs, interlibrary loan librarian at the University of South Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library, won top prize April 23 at the Runaway Runway recycled fashion show with a dress made entirely of cards from the library’s card catalog. The dress was modeled by Aime Dillard (right), ILL assistant and SLIS student. Watch the video (Amber and Aime are at 3:12). The show is sponsored by the Columbia Museum of Art. The USC libraries are saying goodbye to their card catalog with a yearlong series of events called “It’s All in the Cards.”...
University of South Carolina Libraries, May 3; Columbia The State, Apr. 24  

Libraries in the News

Here are some highlights from the American Library Association newsletter that comes out each Wednesday. Happy reading...

Opt out of Facebook’s instant personalization
Riva Richmond writes: “In late April, Facebook introduced the ‘open graph,’ a giant expansion of the ‘social graph’ concept on which Facebook is built. In the open graph, Facebook sees us as connected not just to our friends on Facebook, but to myriad things all over the web. Now, if you click a Like button or make a comment, know that you are authorizing Facebook to publish it on your Facebook profile and in your friends’ news feeds. Here are the instructions on how to reverse this.” Jeremiah Owyang analyzes Facebook’s announcement and points out opportunities, threats, and what no one tells you; and Alex Iskold discusses the privacy implications for users and publishers....
New York Times: Gadgetwise, Apr. 25; Web Strategy, Apr. 21; ReadWriteWeb, Apr. 23

Libraries fight graphic novel challenges
Brigid Alverson writes: “At the recent Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, a librarian from Jessamine County, Kentucky, spoke firsthand about dealing with calls for censorship in his library, and Deborah Caldwell-Stone from the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom discussed how to handle challenges to graphic novels at a panel titled ‘Burn It, Hide It, Misshelve It, Steal It, Ban It! Dealing with Graphic Novel Censorship in Your Library.’”...
Publishers Weekly, Apr. 26

NYPL’s mighty sorting machine
A gigantic new $2.3-million automated book sorter—believed to be the largest of its kind—housed in a renovated warehouse in Long Island City, Queens, has eliminated much of the book-sorting drudgery at the New York Public Library since it was turned on in February. Now, when a library visitor anywhere in the system requests a book located at another branch, the automated sorter does the work of routing it. Here’s how it works. Watch the video (2:10)....
New York Times, Apr. 21

Library in the News - Censorship Watch

As a future librarian, I keep my ear to the ground about what's going on in libraries both in the US and the world at large. Here's an article that came to my attention earlier today about a case of censorship in a school library:

A popular young adult book in the Theisen Middle School Library in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, is being challenged as inappropriate. Ann Wentworth issued a formal complaint with the school district, objecting to “sexual content too mature for 11- to 14-years-olds” in the book One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones. The complaint lists some examples of the inappropriate content from the book, including references to “losing your virginity,” condoms, and a stepmother being called a “controlling bitch.”...

Source: Fond du Lac (Wis.) Reporter, Jan. 29


To all my school librarians out there, do you currently have a selection policy in place just in case a book in your library is challenged? To all my readers, have you ever challenged a book in your child's library? What are your thoughts on this?

Update March 1, 2010: The challenged book is to remain in the library, says the school district. Whoo hoo!