librarian.net

Banned Books Week is next week. ALA has nifty little web badges that they have made freely available and, in typical ALA fashion, given a bunch of instructions for how you’re supposed to use them (link to this URL, include this ALT text, etc.). If it were me, I think I’d just put the images on my own server, give people the HTML to include the image on their site and use some handy stats-tracker to keep track of how many people had been viewing the banned books buttons, maybe even in realtime. That would be cool. Oh wait, I can do that.

Want to use it? Copy this HTML (and mind the line breaks): <a href=”http://newprotest.org/details.pl?495″><img src=”http://librarian.net/tempo/bbw.gif”/></a> and thank the folks at newprotest who made it originally.

If it were me, I’d definitely make sure that the main Banned Books Page was a bit better at explaining why Banned Books Week exists, rather than just linking me right to the ALA store. ALA’s Action Guide is probably a better place to start.

Each year, the American Library Association (ALA) is asked why the week is called Banned Books Week instead of Challenged Books Week, since the majority of the books featured during the week are not banned, but “merely” challenged. There are two reasons. One, ALA does not “own” the name Banned Books Week, but is just one of several cosponsors of BBW; therefore, ALA cannot change the name without all the cosponsors agreeing to a change. Two, none want to do so, primarily because a challenge is an attempt to ban or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A successful challenge would result in materials being banned or restricted.

So this is saying two things really: one, they can’t change the name; two, they wouldn’t change it if they could. Couldn’t you just say that? Why is this explanation so obtuse? “none want to do so because…” because why? I’d be much happier if they’d just said “Look, we sank $5000 into t-shirts that we haven’t sold yet. We’re keeping the name” And if this question is asked every year, shouldn’t it maybe be on the FAQ by now? Since ALA talks so much about its cosponsors, let’s look at what they’re doing this year

• American Booksellers Association - nothing on their site (yet?)
• American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression - has a nice banned books week handbook with a lot of nice (free) posters you can print and use. Alas, their five easy ways to participate page is mostly about things that cost money
• American Society of Journalists and Authors - nothing on the site
• Association of American Publishers - sponsoring a very cool event at the Press Club in DC, more of a reader privacy event than a banned books event, they do have the Connecticut Four
• National Association of College Stores - nothing listed on their site
• Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (endorsement) - they did something in 2000, but nothing lately

Since ALA is really the main go-to organization for this “holiday”, maybe it’s time they had more of a destination site (ireadbannedbooks.org is taken, sadly) instead of just cramming all their information into the ALA template and enduring terrible URLs (link goes to “quick and easy” guide to BBW for librarians, wouldn’t you like to write down that URL and share it?) This would beat pseudoparticipatory pages like the Vote for Your Favorite Banned Book page which is clearly geared towards the YA crowd which asks you WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CHALLENGED BOOK (PICK ONE) (emphasis theirs). It also highlights the thing we know about Banned Books Week that we don’t talk about much — the bulk of these books are challenged by parents for being age-inappropriate for children. While I think this is still a formidable thing for librarians to deal with, it’s totally different from people trying to block a book from being sold at all.

My plan is to spend this year’s Banned Books Week reflecting on the nature of intolerance, predjudice and flat-out anxiety, motivators that causes people to want to control the ideas and issues that other people can have access to. Libraries and schools are two places that this happens in the public sphere, but we all know there are many more. So buy a bracelet if you want to, but don’t kid yourself that you can shop your way out of this problem. You can’t buy a ticket to freedom, not one that works anyhow.

update: 1,272 4,785 hits on the image so far!

I’ve been slow on posting lately. There have been big topics that I’ve been chewing on and haven’t known quite what to do with. One of the stories that I keep hoping will get more in the way of legs is the the Scott Savage/OSU story. Savage is an Ohio State University librarian. The undisputed facts of the situation read like this

Scott Savage, an OSU research librarian, was on a committee selecting a book for incoming freshmen to read. Savage, a Quaker, thought the books that were initially suggested all have a liberal bent, so he proposed four conservative ones, including The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian.

More detail is here. What happened next is the subject of the dispute. Two professors objected to Savage’s strenuous support of a book that they felt was antagonistic towards gay people and filed harassment charged against him. You can read the official complaint here [large pdf]. There were a lot of angry reports of censorship mainly on conservative sites but the story didn’t get picked up by national media in any big way. Savage wrote about the incident for American Libraries but declined to edit it when they said they would not publish his article in full. I emailed him to ask him about the situation and the email I got from him was odd and not clarifying. According to Library Journal and American Libraries, the matter is mostly worked out and harassment charges [not sexual harassment] have been dropped, though the ACRL blog claims that Savage is now filing a complaints against his accusers. One participating faculty member has outlined his interpretation of events including stating that this is not the first time that this librarian has provoked controversy by promoting anti-gay literature.

But the news media’s coverage has missed a crucial point: the discrimination reports did not focus on the book suggestion so much as the librarian’s unyielding defense of the book, even after the revelation of its bigotry, his disparagement of faculty expertise and his forwarding of others’ e-mails to an outside organization. The claim that his proposal was tongue-in-cheek is belied by the fact that when he was employed at Lakeland Community College in 2004, he displayed an antigay book prominently, provoking controversy there, as well.

I was sort of waiting to see if the “hive mind” of the blogosphere would chew on the facts of this issue and arrive at some wisdom-of-crowds type conclusions that both sides could get behind but it seems like that is not going to be the case so I figured I’d just link it up and write it down here.

The biggest laugh of my talk was probably when I was discussing classes I’d like to teach but can’t. I mentioned where to find the really good porn and people thoughtit was funny, something about a sort of frumpy library lady saying that made it double-plus-good, even though I really do know where it is… Thanks to Utah’s new censorware law, maybe we can just get the list of good porn sites from them.

I’m out of town until Tuesday. Anyone in the Raleigh/Durham area feel free to come to my talk Monday at 2 pm at UNC, details here.