Megan Frazer

I’m back in class, which means I get to read all sorts of interesting articles and reports. This fall I am taking “Digital Writing in the Classroom” and we’re starting out with a hard look at how technology has or has not changed writing.

Our first text was excerpts from Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. My classmate, Sherry Brown, nicely points out that Bolter is misusing the word “remediation“, or at best redefining it to mean:

a newer medium takes the place of an older one, borrowing and reorganizing the characteristics of writing in the older medium and reforming its cultural space.

What caught me, though, was a passage that was not even central to his argument:

Critics accuse the computer of promoting homogeneity in our society, of producing uniformity through automation, but electronic reading and writing seem to have had just the opposite effect.

He is arguing that while books tend to be bound (literally) around a given idea and perspective, technology unbinds information and thus offers a greater opportunity to explore different perspectives.

While I cannot take issue that such an opportunity exists, I doubt that it is happening much. Indeed a 2009 study found that people tend to avoid information that contradicts what they already believe. The more personal the belief (i.e. political or religious), the less likely people are to seek out alternate viewpoints. There are times when people do seek out opposing viewpoints, such as politicians who will have to defend their view, but 67% of the time an average person will stick to his or her point of view.

Now technology is actually making it harder for us to seek out opposing viewpoints. In his TED talk, Eli Pariser explains “filter bubbles” wherein search engines like Google filter out what they think doesn’t interest us. This is great when we are looking up local movie times, but less so when we are researching an issue.

As a librarian I feel it’s my job to help students to understand these filters — both within us and without us — and to teach them how to find information representing a variety of viewpoints (and, for that matter, facts vs. opinions). It’s getting harder and harder to do each day. And, if I am being perfectly honest, I am as guilty as the next person. While I try to see all sides of an issue, I definitely find myself lingering at sites that share my views. Jezebel tops my list of sites visited, but I don’t think I’ve ever visited a site by or for conservative women.

Graphics from ALA

Banned Books Week at ALA is supported by theirOffice for Intellectual Freedom. What is intellectual freedom? Well, according to the ALA it’s, “the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular.”

What does that mean on the ground? Well, it means that what people check out of the library, look at in the library, and access on library computers if private. I won’t willingly tell anyone what books my students have checked out. Maine law says I have to tell parents, but I would really encourage parents to talk to their students rather than to me.

It also means that if a student asks for a book on a subject I find unappealing, I do not tell them so. I happily help them to find it, because they have a right to that information.

It means I try to buy books covering all perspectives of a controversial issue, because, again, my students have a right to information. They have the right to sift through that information to discover bias — and hopefully I am teaching them the skills to do so.

So, instead of just being a week against censorship, lets think about this as a week celebrating our freedom to think for ourselves.

Graphics from ALA

In February of 2009, Debra Lua Whelan published an article in SLJ about self censorship by librarians: “A Dirty Little Secret.” It’s a must read for librarians for sure, but also for anyone in the publishing business. In conjunction, SLJ surveyed it’s “Extra Helpings” readers about self-censorship. The results are shocking. Here are a few of the lowlights:

• 70% said possible reaction from parents kept them from buying a book.
• 87% said sexual content has kept them from buying a book.
• 47% said homosexuality has.

Statistics like this make me reflect upon my own choices. While I pride myself on buying books about hunting and the military when I myself am an aquavorian pacifist, I do have my touch points, namely misogyny in general and violence against women in particular.

Case in point: more than one (male) student has asked if we have Tucker Max’s I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell. We do not. I can hide behind my collection development policy here: the only professional review I could find came from a humor roundup in Booklist which called it “foul and misogynistic.” On the other hand, The Gossip Girl books aren’t exactly burning up with positive reviews and I have those. Picked up secondhand usually, but still they are on my shelves.

So is this self-censorship or collection development? Am I letting what offends me get in the way of my decisions? After all, it seems inconsistent of me to chastise people for wanting to keep what they feel is offensive off the shelves, while I won’t purchase certain books that rile me. Librarians, have you ever kept something off the shelf because you disagree with its content or because you fear a challenge?

Graphics from ALA

So, this week is Banned Books Week, which, according to the ALA’s website:

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.  Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Each year I celebrate BBW in my library. My favorite thing to do is to put paper covers over the books and write why they were banned on them. Inevitably, writing “Sexual content” or “Violence” or “explicit homosexual and heterosexual situations, profanity, underage drinking and smoking, extreme  moral shortcomings, child molesters, graphic pedophile situations and total lack of negative consequences throughout the book” makes teens pick them up. (That last one is for Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors. Here’s the complete annotated list: Books Challenged and/or Banned – 2009-2010 (PDF))

My students often ask, “This was banned here?” and I explain that no, it was not banned in our school or library, but someone attempted to remove it from a school or library elsewhere. When they see books that they love and books that they are asked to read for school banned, it really makes them think.

Two things I probably don’t stress enough is that, although it is called Banned Books Week, in the United States it’s usually more about challenges. As the ALA site points out:

Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections.

However, book bannings do still happen in other countries, as well as the imprisonment of authors whose views don’t match those of their governments. The PEN’s Freedom to Write offers great information about how you can fight the silencing of writers worldwide.

I am officially in my summer vacation! Hooray!

The end of the school year means prepping for the next school year, which, for me, means getting my book order in, well, order. I thought authors and other folks might be interested in how at least one librarian makes those decisions.

Through out the year, I read the professional journals like Booklist and VOYA and keep a running list of titles that sound good to me. I note the price and the review source. If a book is reviewed in more than one place, I try to keep note of that, too. I also consult what might be called the popular press like The New York Times and, um, People.

I am looking for fiction that seems in line with what has been popular, current trends, etc. I work in a high school, and need books at reading levels from about second or third grade up through, well, off the charts. I need books to entice kids who have at some point in their lives decided they hated reading. And I need new and exciting books for kids who have read every book in the library.

For nonfiction I need all of the above plus in support of the curriculum. Actually, I need fiction to go along with the curriculum, too (historical fiction for social studies, sci fi for the science classes, etc.). Since nonfiction is often more popular with boys, I’m also looking for high interest titles for the students to choose for free reads.

I also have to add in extra copies of very popular books and books that seem to walk away. (If Ellen Hopkins could send me her backlist every year, that would be awesome. Also any books by or about Kurt Cobain or Tupac Shakur would be more than welcome.)

So then I get to the end of the year. This year I had about 600 fiction books and 400 nonfiction. This was more than I have money for, of course, so the cutting comes. This is impossibly hard. Luckily, I only had to cut a little from my fiction this year. But still, I have to ask myself, “Do I take a chance on the new author, or go with the bestseller even though the reviews are only so-so?” Of course this question has particular resonance for me, but I only need to look at my shelves to see books that have never gone out, still shiny in their plastic covers.

The nonfiction was really hard because it was coming down to choices between the “fun” stuff and the curricular stuff. We are making a real literacy push so those high-interest books are essential. But so are the books that faculty requested for their classes.

I did get it all done after two straight days of work. I may make some more changes over the summer. Then I put my order in just before school starts. Several hundred books show up a couple of weeks later, shiny and new. Which brings up another point: like most school librarians, I think, I tend to make a HUGE purchase in the fall because I don’t want a budget freeze to steal my budget. Sometimes I can make a couple of small orders later in the year, but the general philosophy seems to be to spend it while you know you have it.

So there you go, a year’s worth of work crammed into a blog post.

I want to steal Janet Trumble’s description of herself from her blog:

YA writer, activist, librarian, and straight human with gay tendencies.

Although, I think I really need to work on the activist part. Maybe I can be “YA writer, mom, librarian, and straight human with gay tendencies.”

Anyway, she has a terrific guest post from fifteen-year old book blogger, Brent, in which he describes a school librarian who tells him that books about LBGTQ teens are inappropriate. Such an arrow through my heart as both an author and librarian.

As many librarians have commented on the post, we are, of course, not all like that. But what matters is that some are. I’ve met them. It sucks. And frankly, I’m afraid, some of these librarians are not going to change their deeply-held beliefs that being gay is wrong and/or controversial and so books that portray homosexuality should be kept out of the library.

So what’s a teen to do if his or her library doesn’t stock these books? Ah, the wonder of ILL — interlibrary loan. Not every library does this, and some may charge, but it does open up a whole new world of books, more than could ever fit in one single library. Many libraries even allow you to do this online, so you don’t have to have a face to face conversation with the librarian. If you are having trouble with this, please let me know, and I will help you to navigate the system in your region/state.

Of course, you don’t know what to request if you don’t know what’s out there. Here’s a list of sites that offer reviews of books with LGBTQ characters of both of the types that Brent describes (“books about gay characters, and books whose characters just happen to be gay.”):

Daisy Porter’s Queer YA

Reading Rants: Closet Club

ALA Rainbow Project

GLSEN Booklink

These are usually where I start when looking for books. Any other suggestions?