Libraries

From Electric Lit:

Growing up, the library was not just Amanda Oliver’s favorite place but also her “first beloved destination, first embodied center… it was absolutely sacred.” However, soon after Oliver began her career as a librarian at a Title I school and then in the D.C. public library system, she witnessed how systemic racism, income inequality, the widespread shortage of affordable housing, the opioid crisis and lack of mental health care impacted America’s most vulnerable library patrons, placing the burden on library staff working in high poverty environments to serve as mediators and mental health crisis support personnel.

The constant stress, verbal and sometimes physical abuse took its toll on Oliver’s mental and physical health, causing her to abandon the job she loved and write Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library, a heart-wrenching polemic challenging the romanticized ideal of being a librarian.

Like Oliver, I am a former public school librarian who left my once beloved vocation after a trauma—I lost the use of my arms for nearly two years due to repetitive motion injuries which necessitated surgery after being ordered to pack a school library on my own. Around the time I resigned, I encountered Oliver’s advocacy for librarians in an essay. Her words made me realize we saw the same disparities, that I was not alone. Oliver and I recently met over Zoom, where we immediately connected over the mutual challenges we faced in the library, from retrofitting outdated collections featuring predominately white authors, to serving the needs of our diverse clientele on a limited budget, to being gaslit by administrators when we raised valid criticisms about how systemic racism and structural issues were impacting our ability to meet the needs of our patrons, to recognizing how working with limited resources in high poverty environments impacted our physical and mental health.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: In the opening chapters you discuss the mythology surrounding libraries: “It can be uncomfortable to think of libraries as social institutions that plainly tell the many layered stories of racism, classism, and deep-rooted neglect of marginalized and vulnerable populations in our community and across our nation…but to continue to laud libraries and librarians as ever-present equalizers and providers of some version of magic …prevents them from making meaningful changes and progress.”

Can you elaborate on how romanticizing libraries and ignoring systemic issues prevents libraries from making meaningful changes and progress?

Amanda Oliver: I completely understand the mythology and romanticization of libraries. It is obvious, and deserved, why they are so beloved. But when we idealize an institution to the point where we can’t or don’t or won’t look at its faults, both publicly and socially and also within the infrastructures of the institution, that’s a profound problem. 

What’s particularly perplexing to me is the almost universally held view in America that libraries are somehow separate, or above, or outside of the many systemic issues impacting our entire country, when in fact our libraries embody them. I think more and more folks, especially in seeing the ways that libraries and librarians worked during the pandemic, started to understand the sheer magnitude of how much community support work was and is happening within libraries. And, again, this was held up as another shining example of the importance of libraries in America. But there’s a few missing pieces to that equation: the why this is the case—why libraries and library workers are tasked with so much and how this is indicative of pervasive inequities in this country—and also the weight of that responsibility being carried out by living, breathing people who are often not trained, capable, or sometimes even willing to do that work. 

We so often look at libraries as beloved institutions without fully recognizing that they are not just physical buildings, or symbols of some best version of America…they are run by human beings who are often overworked and burned out from the insurmountable amount, and nature, of work they are being asked to do.

We can’t make progress or change to something if we don’t recognize there is a problem to begin with. And when we do the opposite—when we uplift an institution to the point of calling it things like “the last bastion of democracy” or “the last great equalizer,” as we so often do with libraries—it stops us from looking at them critically. Which, as with anything or anyone we treat this way, stops us from being able to make change or progress. If we don’t see a problem, we certainly can’t begin to see solutions.

DS: You worked as a librarian in DC, which has the largest gap in racial income inequality in this country, at a time when, due to technological shifts from 1980 to 2010, we have seen the demarcation between the social classes grow more extreme. How did working as a librarian in DC help inform your understanding of how class and caste operates in this country, particularly in regard to institutions like the library?

 AO: I moved to D.C. right after graduating from my Master’s in Library Science program in 2011 and started working as a school librarian at a Title I elementary school a little over a mile from the White House. The students at that school were predominantly Black, Hispanic, and Mandarin Chinese and many of them lived in low-income housing right near the school. I learned very quickly that many of them  were living in one or two-bedroom apartments with 10, 12, 14 other people. They’d come to school exhausted and tell me things like they’d been kept up all night by rats crawling on them. So many of my students lived in ways that I could not begin to really understand and then they still had to show up at school to learn and to take the same standardized tests as everyone else in the district. It became wildly clear to me very quickly how profoundly impactful class was within the K-12 school system, despite all of the reform work people like Michelle Rhea had been rolling out. When I eventually transitioned from school libraries to public I can remember thinking that so many of my adult patrons reminded me of my students and it felt like seeing the impacts of class inequality all grown up.

As far as how all of this plays out in libraries, there is a deep history of segregation in libraries by social class.

DS: You explore the history of the Library Company of Philadelphia, America’s earliest library. How did it shape how public libraries operated? 

AO: The earliest free public library in America is generally accepted to be the Library Company of Philadelphia, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. Franklin formed the Junto Club, which was a group of white, middle-class Philadelphia men who met for weekly meetings to improve their lives, their positions in their communities, and the societies they lived in. They regularly needed to look up information during their meetings and so they pooled their personal books into something of a collection, but eventually they wanted their books back in their homes. Franklin proposed a subscription library, 50 of them agreed to it, and the Library Company of Philadelphia—and the earliest version of the public library in America—was officially born. 

All people of color were barred from accessing the Library Company. When Franklin and his peers founded the Library Company, teaching an enslaved person how to read was still illegal and punishable by death. Indigenous Americans were also forbidden access, though many had already been forcibly displaced and relocated from Pennsylvania to Midwestern territories by then. White indentured servitude was also common in colonial Philadelphia, and people in these groups—mostly women who were cultural and racial minorities, as well as the poor—were regarded as inferior to affluent white men and barred from accessing materials from most early libraries. Literacy was also a limiting factor, as education was reserved for middle- and upper-class White people. Even as access to education became more accessible to lower classes, and more of a public matter of concern, many students had to resign from school early to help work to support their parents and siblings in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Essentially, the very first version of a public library was created by and for middle- and upper-class white men, and this has permeated libraries for centuries.

DS: Can you discuss how libraries historically upheld white supremacy and segregation? 

AO: Like I said earlier, our public libraries embody the history of our country, and this of course includes libraries and librarians upholding segregation, white supremacy, and xenophobia. In the early 1900s, when more than fifteen million immigrants were arriving to the United States, libraries and librarians distributed Americanization Registration Cards that required a signature agreeing to things like the use of a common language, the elimination of disorder and unrest, and “the maintenance of an American standard of living through the proper use of American foods, care of children and new world homes.” Librarians and libraries all over the country aided in the eradication of the culture, language, and customs of immigrants. Knowing that Black citizens fared even worse than them, the majority of immigrants chose to embrace whiteness and demonstrate their cultural and biological “fitness” to be white citizens, which further perpetuated and upheld white supremacy and segregation.

There is a deep, deep and lengthy history of discrimination and segregation against Black people in public libraries. It’s worth mentioning some of the brilliant Black librarians like Rev. Thomas Fountain Blue, Clara Stanton Jones, Virginia Lacy Jones, E.J. Josey, and Albert P. Marshall, who fought throughout their careers to desegregate libraries. We so often hear about Andrew Carnegie and Benjamin Franklin when we talk about the early history of libraries in America, but these folks were really leading the way and making change and uplifting libraries as truly public and accessible institutions. 

By the 1950s and ’60s there were often still inferior and limited library services to Black people, but beyond that, Black patrons were often subjected to experiences in libraries that were humiliating. And librarians were often at the helm of this humiliation, refusing to give Black people library cards or to provide help for them at the circulation desk and supporting, or being complicit, when white patrons harassed them. These stories are often missing from the profession’s collective history. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG notes that the OP doesn’t mention specific racism in libraries after “the 1950s and ’60s”. PG further notes that the 1950s and ’60s covered a period time when substantial changes occurred in the United States to remove racial discrimination in all sorts of public places, including schools and libraries.

For more recent time periods, the OP focuses on parents objecting to books they deem to be potentially harmful to their children being shelved in the children’s section of public libraries. To the best of PG’s knowledge, there have been no allegations of racism in connection with the parents’ concern over these books.

The author of the book then says:

I was truly only able to write Overdue because I left library work. There was no way, mentally, emotionally, and, most specifically, legally, that I could have written it while working as a librarian. 

PG was interested about why, “most specifically, legally” the author of the book in question could not have written her book while she was still employed as a librarian. She certainly hadn’t given up her First Amendment rights as a condition of her employment by the library. If it was a publicly-funded school or public library, firing her would constitute a state or government action which is definitely prohibited.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing.

PG notes that 1964 is 59 years ago. He will grant that it took a number of years and lots of lawsuits to force lawbreakers into compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but PG is pretty certain that public libraries stopped discriminating against individuals based upon their race, color, religion, sex or national origin a very long time ago.

Does this mean everything is perfect with respect to racial discrimination in the United States today? No.

Is there much less racial discrimination in the United States than there was 50 years ago? Yes.

Do public libraries withhold library cards from African Americans today? No. Do they prevent African Americans from checking out books? No. Is there still deep, deep discrimination and segregation against Black people in public libraries? No.

People change, attitudes change, institutions change. Yesterday’s mistakes should not be forgotten, but improvements and progress towards greater equality and much less discrimination should not be overlooked or minimized.

End of PG rant. He feels much better now. Everything would be perfect if he could figure out how to get Mrs. PG’s website to stop doing strange things.

From CNN:

In September 2021, protesters ambushed the board meeting of the New Jersey school district where I have worked as a high school librarian since 2005. The protesters railed against “Gender Queer,” a memoir in graphic novel form by Maia Kobabe, and “Lawn Boy,” a coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Evison. They spewed selected sentences from the Evison book, while brandishing isolated images from Kobabe’s.

Next, they attacked Banned Books Week, an annual event celebrating the freedom to read. The protesters characterized it as a nefarious plot to lure kids to degradation.

But the real sucker punch came when one protester branded me a pedophile, pornographer and groomer of children. After a successful career, with retirement on the horizon, to be cast as a villain was heartbreaking.

Even worse was the response from my employer – crickets. The board sat in silence that night, and for the next five months refused to utter a word in my defense.

For months now, news broadcasts and social media have featured scenes of once-sedate board of education meetings now as action-packed as professional wrestling matches. Parents, faces red with wrath, scream in objection to library books. Often their outrage includes trash talk about librarians and board members.

These smackdowns aren’t isolated incidents. In a coordinated campaign, groups with extreme agendas have attacked libraries nationwide. Between January and August of this year, the American Library Association recorded 681 challenges against 1,651 books, setting a pace to shatter last year’s record 729 challenges.

For me, these aren’t just statistics, but the scorecard for the worst year of my working life.

. . . .

Amid the controversy, some colleagues shunned me. Students who were allied with the protesters hid books about gender and sexuality. Hate mail arrived at my school email address, while trolls attacked me on social media. The protesters even attempted to file criminal charges with local law enforcement.

The library that served as a safe space for students now felt unsafe for me. Yet I continued to plug away, teaching information literacy classes, creating programs, and consulting with students until October of last year, when I experienced what I now know was a stress-induced collapse. When I saw my personal physician the next day, she ordered my removal from the workplace, prescribed anxiety medication and referred me to a therapist.

The first few weeks of therapy were difficult. Despair consumed me to the point that when the therapist asked, “Have you had thoughts about killing yourself?” I tearfully admitted that I went to bed nightly wishing that I wouldn’t wake up.

The suffering was not mine alone. Under normal conditions, our library provides a calming oasis for students. Beyond books and research resources, we offer relaxing activities and a soothing atmosphere that satisfies students’ social and emotional needs. While I was under attack, however, the library program languished. No new books, no displays, no craft projects, no research instruction, no librarian for a friendly chat.

Counselors later reported that students expressed fear for my welfare.

Link to the rest at CNN

PG recalls an old, but now seemingly endangered, truism, “You can disagree without being disagreeable.”

He also remembers the many librarians who enriched his life as a boy and is pained to think of kind souls like them being insulted by anyone.

From The Bookseller:

The majority of library services are actively considering taking part in a “warm bank” scheme according to a recent survey carried out by charity Libraries Connected. However, only 4% expect to receive any extra funding. 

A snapshot survey of more than 50 library leaders showed 59% intend to take part in such a scheme – which allow visitors to use the facility to keep warm – while 88% plan to signpost vulnerable users to charities and other council departments and 76% plan to offer advice and information on reducing household bills, saving energy and tackling debt.

The results are presented in the charity’s new briefing note Supporting the Vulnerable This Winter, which also revealed 61% of services plan to provide additional activities such as games and crafts to keep people amused for long periods of time, while 43% plan to serve hot drinks and 39% plan to install extra desks and comfortable chairs for those using libraries to keep warm.

. . . .

“Libraries are warm, free and accessible spaces, located in our town centres, high streets and villages. As such they are ideally placed to help those most affected by the cost-of-living crisis this winter, whether that’s with a cuppa, a good book and a comfy chair or specialist debt advice. 

“A relatively small investment across the library network could have a huge impact, allowing libraries to use their local knowledge and connections to provide targeted support at this critical time.” 

Link to the rest at The Bookseller

PG did a little extra research on warm banks and discovered that some UK art galleries are also expected to participate.

PG is not an expert on how this is likely to evolve in the UK, but in the US, especially in larger cities, warm banks could end up being filled with homeless people who, unfortunately, may bring other problems.

For the record, PG is in favor of programs to keep the homeless warm and fed during cold winter months (and at other times), but some of the libraries’ and galleries’ regular clientele might be a bit concerned, especially if they have children with them.

But PG could be entirely wrong.

From Publishers Weekly:

For those of us who cherish the freedom to read, the current wave of attacks on books in schools and libraries is disheartening. For the teachers and librarians on the front lines, it is far worse. They are being attacked for choosing books that reflect the needs of their students and patrons. They are accused of “grooming” children for sexual abuse, or indoctrinating them with allegedly anti-American ideas about race. In the face of these threats, many are considering leaving the profession they love.

The vitriol is also being directed at the parents, students, and community members courageously standing up and speaking out at public meetings against banning books.

But it would be a mistake to give in to despair. Americans have been successfully fighting for the freedom to read for over a century. In the 1920s, for example, the newly organized American Civil Liberties Union denounced efforts by super-patriots to turn schools into a vehicle for their propaganda. It also challenged a ban on the teaching of evolution in Tennessee with the help of a science teacher named John Scopes.

Publishers, booksellers, and librarians joined the fight against book-banning efforts in 1953, after Sen. Joseph McCarthy led a campaign to purge books by 75 “communist authors” from libraries operated by the U.S. State Department. The American Library Association and the American Book Publishers Council responded by issuing a statement, “The Freedom to Read,” in which they declared such a freedom as “essential to our democracy.” Even President Dwight Eisenhower joined the fight. “Don’t join the book burners,” he said.

The next two decades saw significant advances in protecting free speech, as the Supreme Court struck down laws that Southern states were using to suppress the civil rights movement, while also expanding artistic freedom and broadening protections for protesters. But book banning surged again in the 1980s, when conservative groups sought to silence authors like Judy Blume, who wrote about sex and the other complex issues facing young people. The number of book challenges in schools and libraries shot up to more than 1,300 a year.

Once again, publishers, librarians, and booksellers successfully fought back. The ALA launched Banned Books Week in 1982 to counter claims that libraries were harming children. Libraries and bookstores mounted displays of challenged books to give people a chance to see what the book banners were attacking. The most significant achievement of this period was the adoption by many schools and libraries of a formal process for evaluating challenged books.

Previously, there had been nothing to stop a school official from simply pulling challenged books off shelves. Today, most school districts require a written complaint. When a complaint is filed, the school responds by forming a review committee that usually includes a professional (a librarian or teacher), a parent, and sometimes a student.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG worked in a large university library as one of many jobs to work his way through college.

From that experience and interactions with a great many academic and public librarians over the years, he treated all with courtesy. Some were “professionals” per the OP and others who worked full-time were not particularly intelligent or well-educated. Some even expressed personal opinions with which PG did not agree.

The OP made PG cringe for two reasons:

1. Joe McCarthy died in 1957. However, some individuals can’t resist digging him up, likely because nobody like him has gained high public office since then.
2. The OP mentions “a professional (a librarian or teacher)” implying their employment makes them an authority on what books should and shouldn’t be in a library accessible to children attending public schools. This is an example of a long-recognized logical error, commonly called “appeal to authority.”

From Logically Fallacious:

Appeal to Authority

argumentum ad verecundiam

(also known as: argument from authority, ipse dixit)

Description: Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered. Also see the appeal to false authority .

Logical Form:

According to person 1, who is an expert on the issue of Y, Y is true.

Therefore, Y is true.

Example #1:

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and perhaps the foremost expert in the field, says that evolution is true. Therefore, it’s true.

Explanation: Richard Dawkins certainly knows about evolution, and he can confidently tell us that it is true, but that doesn’t make it true. What makes it true is the preponderance of evidence for the theory.

Example #2:

How do I know the adult film industry is the third largest industry in the United States? Derek Shlongmiester, the adult film star of over 50 years, said it was. That’s how I know.

Explanation: Shlongmiester may be an industry expert, as well as have a huge talent, but a claim such as the one made would require supporting evidence. For the record, the adult film industry may be large, but on a scale from 0 to 12 inches, it’s only about a fraction of an inch.

. . . .

Appeal to Authority: Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered. Also see Appeal to False Authority.

Link to the rest at Logically Fallacious

PG has known some highly-educated and intelligent individuals who held one or more opinions that could not be supported logically or with a preponderance of any reliable evidence.

From The Seattle Times:

As record-breaking temperatures baked Seattle this summer, box fan sales spiked, wading pools grew crowded, health warnings were issued …

And libraries closed.

There were more than 130 full- or partial-day closures due to heat in June, July and August, according to the Seattle Public Library.

Nine of the system’s 27 branches lack air conditioning, and SPL’s current policy is to close them when indoor temperatures hit or are expected to hit 80 degrees for more than an hour.

Such closures have become more common recently, interrupting services at the branches that many Seattle residents rely on for checking out books, internet use and resting in a quiet environment.

SPL staffers don’t like the closures, because they get in the way of processing materials and interacting with patrons, said Jessica Lucas, teen services librarian at the Northeast branch and vice president of AFSCME Local 2083, the union for Seattle library workers. The book drops stay open so returned books pile up. Staffers are usually redeployed to branches with air conditioning, which means extra travel, Lucas added. But the closures are necessary nonetheless, because working in the heat is worse, she said.

“Some patrons really understand and some don’t get it at all,” said Lucas, who sometimes hears patrons complain. “We have to be in here all day long for an eight-hour shift and do physical work during that time.”

SPL’s heat-closure threshold used to be 90 degrees but was lowered to 85 degrees in 2018, based on “health and safety concerns for staff and patrons” and an increase in multiday heat waves, SPL spokesperson Laura Gentry said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the system is using a temporary threshold of 80 degrees because employees are required to wear masks, which can increase discomfort in hot temperatures, Gentry said.

The Green Lake and University branches had the most full-day heat closures this summer, canceling service completely for seven days each. The Northeast branch, currently the system’s busiest for borrowing, had the most partial-day heat closures, with 19 days.

“This is part of a big story about how the Pacific Northwest in general is not equipped” for the consistently scorching summer weather Seattle is now experiencing, said Darth Nielsen, SPL’s assistant director of public services. “We see this as a long-term issue … and we have to respond to that.”

SPL plans to add air conditioning at several branches in the coming years and is seeking funds for the other branches, Nielsen said.

Six of the city’s nine branches without air conditioning, including Green Lake and University, were built more than 100 years ago with grants from New York steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who funded libraries across the country.

Link to the rest at The Seattle Times

From Lapham’s Quarterly:

In late spring 1928 librarians in the rare book collections at the Huntington Library in Southern California noticed that something was feasting on the volumes in their care. Rail and utilities titan Henry E. Huntington had established the library in 1920, spending a small fortune to gobble up a number of the largest and finest rare book collections in a relatively short time, and creating a truly priceless set of artifacts. Though Huntington died in 1927, he intended his collection to live on long after him, but as the librarians discovered, the volumes were literally too full of life. The problem with assembling a massive collection of books is that you necessarily collect the very organisms that feed on books.

Variously known as Anobium paniceum, the bread beetle, or the drugstore beetle, bookworms had been known to eat their way through “druggists’ supplies,” from “insipid gluten wafers to such acrid substances as wormwood,” from cardamom and anise to “the deadly aconite and belladonna,” wrote the librarian Thomas Marion Iiams, who led the preservation effort at the Huntington Library. He noted in an account of his struggles in Library Quarterly that the bookworm displays a “universal disrespect for almost everything, including arsenic and lead.” Iiams was new to the librarian profession and was certain that more experienced overseers of fine collections would have a solution to his bookworm problem. In haste, Iiams wrote letters to much older libraries and repositories—the Huntington itself was only eight years old—to learn precisely how they rid their precious books of the pest. He was alarmed to find that no one, not librarians at the Vatican nor at the oldest libraries in Britain, could offer a definitive prescription for how to protect books against the hardy insect. A number of the librarians he consulted thought bookworms to be a myth, and thus offered no help at all.

The letters, telegrams, and reading recommendations Iiams received mainly offered reasons why you can’t kill bookworms. His colleagues elaborated from afar the bookworm’s astounding resistance to traditional pesticides, its voracious appetite not just for book pages but for leather covers, for even the starchy glue that holds book bindings together. From those that did not doubt the bookworm’s existence or tenacity, Iiams received suggestions that ranged from the highly toxic, such as spraying books with formaldehyde—which is effective for preserving dead humans but a potent carcinogen for living ones—to the comical, such as sprinkling the shelves of the library with “a little fine pepper.” Other correspondents suggested that the latter tactic would have been ineffective since, according to The Principal Household Insects of the United States (1896), bookworms are actually “partial to pepper.” The United States Bureau of Entomology responded to Iiams’ query by admitting it had “never made a thorough study of insects affecting books.” It had, however, fumigated libraries with hydrocyanic acid gas, but mainly to destroy “such external feeding pests as cockroaches and silverfish and such nuisances as bedbugs.”

IlIiams grew up in Pasadena, and if he ever went to the Pasadena Public Library as a young man, he would have regularly used fumigated books. Amazingly, librarians considered the use of toxic fumigants to be consistent with a desire for “purified” air, probably because they were less concerned by air filled with toxins than the spread of contagious disease. As one epidemic after another swept through increasingly densely populated urban areas in the early twentieth century, public health officials newly empowered by a broader acceptance of germ theory sent notices to libraries when outbreaks occurred. These edicts forced libraries to close in some cases, to fumigate books in others, or even to burn books loaned to borrowers infected with yellow fever, spinal meningitis, scarlet fever, or bubonic plague. In 1908 Pasadena librarians took the precaution of fumigating 1,200 of the most circulated books. Several years later, they would begin fumigating all of the library’s books as a matter of course.

From the beginnings of the public library system, the public and open nature of book stacks provoked fear and the desire to purify the library’s aisles and reading rooms, to exclude both disease and social undesirables. In 1883, the same year as Andrew Carnegie’s first library construction grant, Charles Ammi Cutter, librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, opened the proceedings of the nascent American Library Association with an address called “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983.” In his futuristic vision, he first enters the delivery room: “There was nothing remarkable about it save the purity of the air. I remarked this to a friend, and he said that it was so in all parts of the building; ventilation was their hobby; nothing made the librarian come nearer scolding than impurity in the air.” According to Cutter, these futuristic librarians vigilantly monitor the temperature and atmosphere in all the rooms: “Everyone must be admitted into the delivery room, but from the reading rooms the great unwashed are shut out altogether or put in rooms by themselves. Luckily public opinion sustains us thoroughly in their exclusion or seclusion.”

The “great unwashed” were those poor and ill-clad individuals who did not conform to emergent standards of bodily hygiene. But cleanliness and purity and hygiene were terms that had deep biological connotations as well; they referred to a clean surface of the body as well as purity of character inside the body at a time when many people believed vice and crime and immoral propensities to be inherited traits. The social hygiene movement attempted to stem the spread of disease, prostitution, and other social problems, with many of its proponents also being eugenicists. Prior to Carnegie’s funding a network of public libraries throughout the United States, most libraries were private and supported by subscriptions. Cutter’s dream of a purified library of the future, a “public” library characterized by exclusion, or seclusion, reveals a central difficulty of creating a truly democratic public space in an era where social Darwinism and eugenics shaped “public opinion.” Up until the late nineteenth century, most libraries shunned lighting by natural gas because it was a fire hazard, not to mention bringing the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. They “preferred daylight and thus closed their doors by dark” until the arrival of electricity. Light bulbs allowed libraries to stay open later, which brought in more working people, some of whom would have certainly constituted Cutter’s “great unwashed.”

Reading and touching library books brought one into contact with the bodies, germs, and contagions of others. Books, like smallpox blankets, could be infected, and like people with contagious diseases, infected books were fumigated, treated, quarantined, and in some cases destroyed. One researcher experimentally infected books with scarlet fever and found that the dreadful germs could survive for eighteen days even in “lightly infected books.” Public health officials compelled librarians, by law, to literally sterilize books during epidemics by closing libraries and fumigating the stacks with poison gas. The cover of the February 1915 monthly bulletin of the Los Angeles Public Library, Library Books, informed readers of borrowing policies on its front page, concluding with a sentence clearly intended to comfort visitors and allay fears: “The library receives notice of all cases of contagious disease. No book may be drawn or returned by anyone living in a house where there is a contagious disease until the house and the book have been fumigated.” In Portland, Oregon, after a spinal meningitis outbreak in April 1907, the library closed for two days for the fumigation of 7,500 volumes, and any books that had been loaned out were fumigated immediately upon their return by borrowers. At the public library of Toledo, Ohio, books in homes with smallpox, diphtheria, and scarlet fever were not to be returned, and if they were returned, they were destroyed. The Free Library of Saranac Lake, New York, had “traveling libraries” of twenty-five or more books each “loaned to boarding houses for sick people in the vicinity. The books in these collections,” detailed a 1908 article in Library Journal, “are withdrawn permanently from general circulation and are never returned to the shelves of the library. Each time they are sent out they are carefully cleaned and fumigated.” Books and magazines sent through the mail were also suspect. In an 1895 letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal, a public health officer named Charles Porter told of the case of an illustrated newspaper sent from Denver, Colorado, to a family in Stockport, England, which seemed to have infected their four-year-old child with spinal meningitis. Upon reflection, Porter thought that valuable books didn’t have to be destroyed but could be kept for use “in the isolation hospital only,” quarantined along with humans. Less valuable ones could be burned. But neither the fumigation of individual books nor the toxic purification of a library’s air had ever been demonstrated to kill bookworms as effectively as they sterilized books of typhus and other plagues. So even if Iiams were familiar with fumigation techniques in libraries, it wouldn’t have solved his growing bookworm problem. Ultimately for Iiams, preserving his books would require more than just the use of poison gas. He needed a technological solution that would infuse the poison deeply into the books to eradicate even bookworm eggs and larvae.

Link to the rest at Lapham’s Quarteryly

From IPKat:

Moving can be among life’s most trying family events. This is especially so when moving means downsizing. This Kat recently endured this trauma, after 35 years living in the same apartment with Mrs. Kat and the (once small, now grown) family Kittens. IP was not spared. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the move was dealing with his book collection.

While the digital world is threatening the future of the personal library, this Kat would like to believe that the personal library will survive. And, as long as it does, the library owner will face the challenge of dealing with the stark reality that while copyright may protect book contents at the incorporeal level, books only have personal meaning in their three-dimensional, physical context. But books take up space, which may, or may not, be readily available to accommodate the book lover and his collection when the time comes to move. What is one to do?

. . . .

First, why do personal libraries seem to expand even more than one’s middle-age waistline. It is not merely that they are a storage repository for books that have already been read. It is also more than the physical embodiment of one’s reading aspirations. Something deeper is going on. This has been explained by the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (think “The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable“), writing about the Italian novelist, Umberto Eco. Taleb observes:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

In other words, a personal library trends to expand because the ultimate aspiration of the library owner is to assemble an antilibrary. Let us assume that this Kat’s book collection has some (at least a scintilla of) characteristics of the antlibrary (which we still call a “library”, so readers have a more ready linguistic anchor). For Mrs. Kat, Eco’s waxing romantic about books may do wonders for one’s emotional well-being, but it does little to address the question necessitated by the move: what are we going to do with all those books (especially when most of them are in English, and this Kat lives in a non-English speaking country where they read from right to left)? Hence the order—”Downsize!”

There are several aspects to formulating a plan to downsize. First, one must determine when categories of books, if any, can be ruled out in wholesale fashion (where to dispose of them is a separate issue, as we describe below). For all other books, the guiding principle then becomes: the category is relevant, but all members of the category may not be treated equally. I.e., how to cull these books?

First, what about those books that have been read (which means, given this Kat’s reading habits, that there is copious underlining and other markings)? The answer is—”it depends”. Depending on how severe the downsizing will be, it is not sufficient to conclude that this Kat may wish to consult the book again in the future. The future is without end, but shelf space is limited. Tough choices are required.

As for fiction, one is tempted to conclude that it is usually easy to obtain another copy of a work of fiction, should this Kat wish to reread it. But not always. This Kat rereads “The Catcher in the Rye” every 5-10 years. That means his multiple copies, each with its own marking and notations, will remain; so too will all the novels of Jane Austen. When you know that you will for certain reread a book, a copy of that book will remain, even it could be easily acquired later if needed.

What about unread books, those which feature so prominently in Eco’s notion of the antilibrary? Three questions must be answered: First, how much do I want the mere presence of unread books to menace me, Eco-style? Second, how serious am I when I conclude to myself that I plan to read the book in the future (the “whom are you kidding” test)? Third, even if I am not really deceiving myself, are there enough reasonable hours in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead to make it actuarily reasonable that said book will indeed be read?

All of this means that a subset of all the books in this Kat’s library will survive the culling process. But what does one do with the books that have failed to meet the test? This is perhaps the most painful part of the process, because it means that these books must be disposed of. As a young reader, the first commandment of this bibliophile was that “thou shall not throw away any book”. For sure, libraries may do so, but that was part of the carrying out of their public service function (they too had to contend with too many books, too little space). Au contraire, when one’s (modest) private book collection is concerned.

Link to the rest at IPKat and thanks to C. for the tip.

For those who are of a certain age, let your heirs worry about it.

From The Wall Street Journal:

A library in a rural western Michigan town is asking the community there to restore its public financing after voters defunded it following a dispute over books with LGBT content.

Voters in Jamestown Township, Mich., located about 20 miles southwest of Grand Rapids, defeated a funding measure for the Patmos Library earlier this month, stripping 85% of its funding for next year. The library, which has an annual budget of about $250,000, is in danger of closing if it can’t replace those funds, said Larry Walton, president of the library’s board.

The Patmos Library, like many libraries and schools across the U.S., has become a center of debate about free speech and what materials are appropriate for children. Conservative groups and parents in some states have asked libraries to remove books they find objectionable, many of which deal with LGBT themes.

County commissioners in Llano, Texas, ordered a review of children’s books at the local library system last year. Some residents sued the judge, county commissioners and library board members in April after some books were banned.

In Vinton, Iowa, residents criticized their library for having LGBT staff and books with LGBT-related themes. The library temporarily closed in July after staff members quit amid the harassment.

Patmos Library’s last two directors also resigned following harassment at work from people who objected to the books with LGBT themes, according to Mr. Walton. 

The American Library Association Executive Board said it was troubled by the increasing number of incidents of intimidation directed at library staff. 

The American Library Association condemns “threats of violence and other acts of intimidation increasingly taking place in America’s libraries, particularly those acts that aim to erase the stories and identities of gay, queer, transgender, Black, Indigenous, persons of color, those with disabilities and religious minorities,” the group said in a statement. 

The dispute over books in Jamestown began last November when a patron asked the library to remove the graphic novel “Gender Queer: A Memoir,” Mr. Walton said. Residents began asking for other books with LGBT themes to be pulled, including the graphic novels “Spinning” and “Kiss Number 8.” 

. . . .

Groups of parents unhappy with the materials began coming to the library board’s monthly meetings, demanding the removal of the books, Mr. Walton said. The library declined to remove any books from circulation. 

A group called Jamestown Conservatives that disagreed with the library’s decision to keep the books, organized a campaign to defund the library. The group passed out fliers stating the library has many books with LGBT content and “pornographic sexually graphic material,” according to a copy of the flier included in a packet for a library board meeting in June and viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The fliers also said the books were aimed at “very young and impressionable kids.”

. . . .

On Aug. 2, Jamestown voters struck down the funding measure for the library. The measure would have used property taxes to fund the library for 10 years.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal and thanks to T. for the tip.

In the United States, public libraries, especially those located in small towns, are right up there with Mom, apple pie and the American flag in terms of long-standing traditions of making books available to anyone in the community without charge.

This tradition was born and continues to be sustained by the local populace through a variety of public funding methods which, in PG’s experience, always include modest taxes paid by local citizens other than the most impoverished.

These libraries are managed by local librarians (who are often underpaid), but paid for by the populace through mechanisms created by democratically elected officials. Traditionally, virtually all local librarians paid close attention to local tastes in books and magazines because the people who had those tastes were contributing to the costs of acquiring and maintaining them.

While PG believes he has a bit more than a casual understanding of adults and children who are LGBT, he also has quite a lot of understanding of those who believe that children shouldn’t be exposed to such literature.

PG has also knows more than one friend who felt he/she, etc., would be described by one or more of those categories at one time in their lives, but who later came to regard themselves as falling into one of the traditional female/male categories and acted accordingly.

While he understands that reasonable people may disagree (and knows some who do), PG tends to come down on the side of local democracy having the ultimate say in what books should or should not be purchased with a portion of their tax money and placed in local public libraries located in communities where they live.

From The Hill:

A librarian in Louisiana filed a lawsuit against two men and a conservative organization alleging they defamed her when they attacked her for supporting the teaching of books involving the LGBTQ community.

Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian and the president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, alleged in the lawsuit that a “public campaign” against her started after she spoke out against removing certain books from the Livingston Parish Library system at a board meeting.

The lawsuit states that Citizens for a New Louisiana posted on its Facebook on July 20, the day after the meeting, criticizing “anti-censorship folks” who opposed moving “sexually explicit and erotic materials targeting eight to ten-year-olds” to the adult section of libraries.

A second post from July 22 specifically referred to Jones, asking why she was “fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials” in the children’s section. The lawsuit notes that a photo of Jones in the post is surrounded by a red circle with a white border, arguing it appears similar to a target.

Michael Lunsford, who leads the group, commented on the post that Jones was on the “public payroll” and was “’advocating’ for having erotica in the kids section.”

Link to the rest at The Hill and thanks to T. for the tip.

From National Public Radio:

When the Kentucky Legislature started mulling a bill that would tighten control over public libraries earlier this year, librarians across the state called their lawmakers pushing for its defeat.

In the past, legislators would at least have heard them out, says Jean Ruark, chair of the advocacy committee of the Kentucky Library Association. Not this time.

“It seemed as though our efforts fell on deaf ears. There was a big outcry about the passage of that and they did it anyway,” Ruark says.

At a time when public school libraries have increasingly become targets in the culture wars, some red states are going further, proposing legislation aimed at libraries serving the community as a whole. A few of the bills would open librarians up to legal liability over decisions they make.

While some of these bills have quietly died in committee, others have been signed into law, and librarians worry that the increasingly partisan climate is making them vulnerable to political pressure.

“We’re seeing more indirect efforts to control what’s available to the community or to put in laws that would direct how the library staff collects books,” says Deborah Caldwell Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

“A lot of this legislation is really concerning, largely because of the breadth and scope of it, but also because it removes local control from communities,” says Patrick Sweeney, executive director at EveryLibrary, an advocacy group that tracks the legislation.

The bill passed in Kentucky allows local library boards to be appointed by county officials. Sponsors argued that the move makes libraries, which are funded by local property taxes, more accountable to taxpayers.

But opponents say the legislation will undermine the independence of local librarians, which are supposed to serve the public as a whole.

“It’s giving all of this power to partisan elected officials in counties, and if their constituents start telling them they want to ban books, this would allow them to do it. This is incredibly dangerous,” says Kentucky state Rep. Patti Minter, a Democrat who opposed the bill.

Other states have reached further. In Iowa, a bill was proposed allowing city councils to overturn librarians’ decisions about what books to buy and where they’re displayed.

In Oklahoma, a bill was signed into law requiring public libraries to install filters on digital databases to prevent children from seeing obscene material. Anyone who deliberately flouts the law would face legal liability.

Most libraries already have filters in place, and Oklahoma state Rep. Todd Russ, a Republican, says he expects the bill to rarely if ever result in legal action.

“We’re trying to be good partners here, he says. “We’re not trying to create all these class action lawsuits. We want to work with them to help create good protection, common sense stuff.”

But other states, including Iowa and Idaho, have proposed similar bills, stripping away the legal immunity that librarians have traditionally enjoyed for the decisions they make.

Moreover, legal actions against librarians are not unheard of.

Link to the rest at National Public Radio

The bill passed in Kentucky allows local library boards to be appointed by county officials. Sponsors argued that the move makes libraries, which are funded by local property taxes, more accountable to taxpayers.

But opponents say the legislation will undermine the independence of local librarians, which are supposed to serve the public as a whole.

PG says if county officials are elected by the people in the county, are they not also tasked with serving the people in the county? And if the people of the county disagree with those county officials about libraries, decisions of local library boards the county or city elected officials appoint or anything else, presumably, they can replace those officials at the next election or, perhaps, if state law permits, even start a petition drive to recall the county or city officials they’re unhappy with and replace them with others the people choose.

Are local librarians elected by the people who use the libraries and/or pay taxes for staffing libraries and acquiring books “for the public as a whole?”

In PG’s perhaps biased observations, there are a lot of news items that talk about schools and other institutions that directly interact with children to be “safe spaces.”

While the definition of “safe spaces” is certainly up for dispute and may differ from place to place, but shouldn’t elected county or city officials ultimately carry the responsibilities for determining what the local community wants “safe spaces” to be and what should be in or not in “safe spaces”?

From The Texas Tribune:

Librarian Suzette Baker said she faced a hard choice last year when her boss asked her to hide a book on critical race theory behind the counter.

“OK, I’ll look into it,” Baker recalled telling her boss at the time.

But eventually, Baker — a librarian at the Llano County Public Library’s Kingsland Branch — decided to ignore the request. And she continued to vocally protest other decisions, like the ban on ordering new books. She spoke up, telling her supervisors that the library was facing a censorship attack.

By February, the pressure to keep new or donated books from the shelves increased, she said. After waiting weeks for a local library board to approve the books Baker wanted to add to her library, Baker’s boss would tell her that even donated books could not reach the shelves.

On March 9, Baker was fired for insubordination, creating a disturbance and failure to follow instructions.

“This change is inevitable and you are allowing your personal biases, opinions and preferences to unduly influence your actions and judgment,” her dismissal documents stated.

Baker’s experience represents one of many new conflicts facing Texas librarians as book challenges continue to multiply. Many feel left out of decisions on banning books while also facing increased scrutiny from politicians, parents, and county and school district staff. Some have already quit, and others are considering it.

For those librarians working at schools and at public libraries, the pressure to keep some challenged books off the shelves is growing. And some Texas librarians say the insults and threats through social media and the added pressure from supervisors to remove books are taking a toll on the profession.

“It’s the job I’ve always wanted my entire life,” Baker said. “But then it started getting to be a place where it was hostile.”

. . . .

The Texas Tribune spoke to librarians in two independent school districts that have been at the center of book challenges and bans: Keller, northeast of Fort Worth, and Katy, west of Houston. One from each district spoke to the Tribune, but both asked that their names not be published because they feared harassment.

In Keller, local Facebook group pages and Twitter accounts have included pointed comments about librarians being “heretical” and portrayed them as pedophile “groomers” who order pornographic books. After a particular book challenge failed, one commenter included the phrase “pass the millstones,” a biblical reference to execution by drowning.

“It was heartbreaking for me to see comments from a community that I’ve loved and served for 19 years, directed towards me as a person,” the Keller ISD librarian said.

Several successful Keller ISD board candidates ran this month on campaign promises that they would increase parent involvement in education, including looking harder at school library books.

“I don’t think there’s been a day or an hour in the last 12 months that I haven’t been frightened and immobilized by what the future could look like,” the Keller ISD librarian said.

The Keller ISD librarian said she wants to talk with more parents about the books they want to ban, but so far, only one parent has reached out to her.

“This has been our experience in reality, and we still want to work together,” she said. “Communities have to come together. We can’t keep doing this back and forth.”

Parents and community members have challenged more than 30 books in Keller ISD since October, including the Bible and Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer.” The district has so far removed at least 10 from circulation, and librarians have not been able to order new books since that time, the Keller ISD librarian said.

A librarian In Katy ISD said the wave of book bans has left her less confident about what new books to order for her school library.

She considered ordering a collection of short stories called “Growing Up Trans: In Our Own Words” but worried the book may be targeted for removal.

“Should I play it safe?” she said. “Or should I push the envelope and get a couple and see what happens?”

She worries that librarians will soon be able to fill shelves with only books included on pre-approved lists.

“Are we going to get there?” she said. “Are you just gonna take everything away that I came into this job wanting to do?”

Link to the rest at The Texas Tribune

From Publishers Weekly:

I had a bit of a situation recently after I featured my newest nonfiction picture book in a presentation to a Texas audience of engrossed fourth graders and their unnerved teachers. By “a bit of a situation,” I mean it was a Very 2022 Mess that threatened to spill over into my scheduled visits to several other elementary schools in the same district.

The book in question was Moving Forward: From Space-Age Rides to Civil Rights Sit-ins with Airman Alton Yates, illustrated by Steffi Walthall and published by Simon & Schuster’s Beach Lane Books. At the heart of things was a request—soon followed by multiple requests—that I instead present a different, not-civil-rights-related book to other local students. And behind that initial request? Fear.

The details are convoluted and not terribly important. But there are two takeaways:

1) Through a lot of private dialogue with the librarians hosting me in the district, we worked things out, and my presentations at the other schools I visited did indeed focus on Moving Forward—a story of courage, sacrifice, teamwork, progress, and public service—in its entirety.

2) You and I can help prevent situations like this from occurring in the first place.

I assume it’ll come as no surprise to you to hear that there’s an anti-democratic mob attacking this country’s schools, libraries, educators, and librarians—unless you yourself are part of the anti-democratic mob, in which case that might not be how you’d characterize yourself. (You’d be wrong.)

This mob is deliberately whipping up a climate of politicized fear as it strives to cast books, public education, diversity, and the freedom to read as threats to be repelled by them rather than as resources and gifts to be treasured by us all. I don’t believe that this noisy, unruly element represents the majority of us. What this element lacks in numbers, however, it makes up for in commitment to making itself heard and getting its way. But for those of us in the majority—those of us who, among other things, oppose using intimidation to suppress ideas we don’t like—what we boast in sheer numbers, we seem to lack in commitment to putting our strengths and values to work.

Specifically, I see far too little demonstrated support for the people who keep our schools and libraries going. I don’t mean support only when a particular institution is under assault; I’m talking about routine, proactive, never-taking-them-for-granted support. And if teachers, librarians, and the people who work with them—including administrators and public officials—don’t get a sense of that support from the broader population, what exactly is going to reinforce their resolve to do the democracy-minded thing when they’re under pressure from the aggressive and all-too-visible reactionary fringe?

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG notes that it’s a natural human reaction to disagreements about values for each side of the disagreement to defend their own personal values.

Unfortunately, there’s also a natural human reaction during such disagreements to denigrate people who disagree with your opinions. Such reactions, at least these days in the United States, quickly move to reliance on Ad Hoc arguments, sometimes called Ad Hoc fallacies.

Here’s a definition:

Ad hoc fallacy is a fallacious rhetorical strategy in which a person presents a new explanation – that is unjustified or simply unreasonable – of why their original belief or hypothesis is correct after evidence that contradicts the previous explanation has emerged.

As such, it’s an attempt to protect one’s claim from any potential refutations and thus preserve their existing beliefs. Furthermore, the explanation is specifically constructed to be used in a particular case and is created hastily at the moment rather than being the result of deliberate, fact-based reasoning.

Link to more at Fallacy In Logic

A second element PG has seen in disputes like that described in the OP is the fallacy of Appeal to Authority.

Here’s a definition:

Appeal to authority is a common type of fallacy, or an argument based on unsound logic.

When writers or speakers use appeal to authority, they are claiming that something must be true because it is believed by someone who said to be an “authority” on the subject. Whether the person is actually an authority or not, the logic is unsound. Instead of presenting actual evidence, the argument just relies on the credibility of the “authority.”

Link to more at SoftSchools

From CNN:

Seven residents in Llano County, Texas, are suing county officials, claiming their First and 14th Amendment rights were violated when books deemed inappropriate by some people in the community and Republican lawmakers were removed from public libraries or access was restricted.

This county of 21,000 people in the Texas Hill Country is now part of the growing number of communities in the United States where conservative groups and individuals have pushed to control what titles people have access to and singled out books that deal with race, gender or sexuality.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in US District Court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonio, claims county officials removed books from the shelves of the three-branch public library system “because they disagree with the ideas within them” and terminated access to thousands of digital books because they could not ban two specific titles.

“Public libraries are not places of government indoctrination. They are not places where the people in power can dictate what their citizens are permitted to read about and learn. When government actors target public library books because they disagree with and intend to suppress the ideas contained within them, it jeopardizes the freedoms of everyone,” the lawsuit states.

. . . .

In the lawsuit, Leila Green Little, a mother who lives in Llano County, and the other six plaintiffs argue that county officials removed several children’s books last August in response to complaints from a group of community members who described them as inappropriate. Those titles include “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak and “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health” by Robie H. Harris.

Months later, Texas Rep. Matt Krause launched an inquiry into whether 850 books on the subjects of race or sex that might “make students feel discomfort” were in public school libraries and classrooms. The lawsuit says Wallace eventually sent a spreadsheet with the books from that list that were available in Llano County library’s collection.

. . . .

Shirley Robinson, executive director of the Texas Library Association, said she hopes the lawsuit inspires people in other communities to speak up.

“It is a shame that this unnecessary culture war has led to this, but we applaud the efforts of these individuals to utilize the justice system to speak up and say with a clear voice ‘enough is enough,'” Robinson said. “We didn’t ask for this fight, but we’re certainly not going to lay down and let subjective opinion and politics restrict the freedom to read.”

In a recent analysis, PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization, found that 1,145 books were banned in communities across the United States from July 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022. The majority of those bans involved departures from best practices established by National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the American Library Association regarding how books and instructional materials should be challenged in schools and libraries, the group said.

For Jonathan Friedman, director of PEN America’s Free Expression and Education program, the lawsuit in Llano County could have a significant impact on the current climate and serve as a reminder of the constitutional protections that people around the country have.

Friedman told CNN there has been “a kind of abrogation of duty” to uphold the First Amendment and there has been “very little resistance” from officials when there are demands to remove materials from school or public libraries.

“Whether that’s in the school board or whether that’s in a library, somebody wants something gone and it appears to be going. At their meetings, there’s no resistance, there’s no friction, there’s no one in some of these rooms saying ‘well, hold on a minute, let’s make sure we exercise due diligence, due process, consider the kind of diversity of opinions as people who our institution serves,'” Friedman said.

Link to the rest at CNN

PG suggests that, regardless of one’s personal opinions about the library battles involving public school and community libraries in various parts of the United States, such strident disagreements are not good for the welfare of such libraries moving forward.

Schools and public libraries have budgets, generally set by one or more groups of elected officials. Budgets for public libraries can be cut to the point that such libraries become unable to serve their patrons or would-be patrons either completely or in any meaningful way.

If librarians decide to choose other ways of earning their living or move to other locations where turmoil is not a feature of their working lives, there is not a guarantee that replacements will be found.

A large organization that drives the training of U.S. librarians and their use of public funds has chosen a self-described “Marxist lesbian” as its next president amid growing concern about libraries actively connecting children to sexually explicit activities and materials.

Emily Drabinski was elected president of the American Library Association last week by the organization’s members. She will take office in July 2023.

ALA’s approximately 54,000 members include librarians, libraries, library graduate schools, members of library boards and associations, and library students. The vast majority of its membership fees, therefore, are provided by taxpayer funds.

Drabinski won with 5,410 votes from such an electorate, compared to her opponent’s 4,622 votes, according to an ALA press release. The election was conducted online.

The interim chief librarian of The Graduate Center at City University of New York (CUNY), where she was previously the “critical pedagogy librarian,” Drabinski posts openly on her Twitter feed in support of sexually exposing children, union-led political strife, socialist politicians, and libraries pushing explicit and far-left material on unwilling taxpayers.

. . . .

“I so value Emily’s work in intentionally bringing a class, labor, and queer consciousness to her efforts as an anti-racist ally,” wrote fellow ALA member April M. Hathcock in a public endorsement of Drabinski.

Link to the rest at The Federalist and thanks to E. for the tip.

PG noted in the OP that the new union president received the support of 10% of the members of the ALA and the number of members who effectively boycotted the election by not voting for anyone was over 80% of the total ALA membership.

PG did a little research on the ALA website and discovered that there are about 166,000 paid librarians in the United States plus an additional 200,000 “paid staff”, so 5,410 voters for Ms. Drabinski as ALA president is not necessarily an indication that she speaks for anything close to most librarians.

PG will also note that nobody is a Marxist any more and labor unions are representing a declining number and percentage of workers in the US – 10.3% currently per PG’s research at the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the US Department of Labor. In 1983, about 20% of the US workforce were members of labor unions.

Effectively none of the employees of the giant tech companies in the US that are responsible for most of the economic growth over the last 25-35 years are members of labor unions.

PG further suggests that neither leader of Russia or China are Marxists/Communists that Lenin would have recognized as such, just old-fashioned thugs/dictators who are so distanced from the proletariat as to be totally out of touch with the lower-income 80% of the population of their nations.

(PG understands that he is using traditional gendered pronouns in his description of Drabinski which the Prez may not like. While he means no personal offense, he can’t be bothered with following trends in personal pronouns or labor unions.)

From Electric Lit:

It seems like every day there’s a new slate of bad news for the queer community in the United States. From anti-trans legislation in Texas to the Florida governor signing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill to books being pulled off shelves—nationwide—for no reason other than who their writers are: queer authors, authors of color, and queer authors of color. It’s an unending slew of depressing headlines.

I feel helpless. When I hear the governor of Florida claim that discussion of sexual identity in school is “indoctrination,” I am filled with endless rage and sorrow. Telling kids about people like themselves is nowhere near as close to “indoctrination” as removing all other viewpoints and identities, or teaching them only one way to be good, and right, and acceptable. That’s the childhood I had, and its effects still linger.

Having lived through actual indoctrination, and knowing first hand what it’s like not having access to books that could have helped me see myself, and the larger world, in a better light, I am passionate about making sure future generations get to see their experiences; see those unlike them; and choose to live their lives to the fullest of their own identities. This is partly why I started writing queer stories myself—books helped me see my own identity more clearly. They helped me come out to myself as bisexual, and I want my writing to give that gift to others, especially teens who are trying to figure life out. As demoralizing as it is for me—a queer aspiring kidlit author—to read these headlines, they have a different impact on me than they do on the authors whose books are currently, and routinely, in danger of being pulled off shelves. 

I spoke with two kidlit authors, Mark Oshiro and Kyle Lukoff, about what it’s like to have a book challenged and/or banned. Both of these authors are award-winning and beloved, and I’ve seen them speak out on social media against book bans, as well as the distressing effects of having their books challenged. 

During our conversation, Oshiro referenced an interview Amanpour & Company did with Jason Reynolds, another author whose books have frequently been challenged and banned. Reynolds said having his books questioned in this manner, “ … offends me, and quite honestly, it hurts my feelings.” Oshiro added that seeing their books on lists challenging and banning them, “sucks a lot.” They said it reminds them of their own childhood, when sex education was so frowned on in their school district that there were literal portions of pages cut out of textbooks, which teachers could not acknowledge. “It’s triggering, it’s upsetting,” Oshiro said. “I worry about the kids who are in these emotionally precarious positions looking at the adults around them who … want to treat them like they don’t exist.”

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG posted this because it relates to books that public schools (or their boards or superintendents or principals or teachers or parents) don’t want to buy their books for students of the school to read.

As PG mentioned before, if an author publishes a book, does PG have to purchase it? Does PG have to purchase it in order to make it available for school-age children in the neighborhood around Casa PG?

Publishing a book doesn’t mean that anyone has the obligation, express or implied, to buy that book.

PG has no doubt that LGBQT authors are upset when people don’t want to by their books because of their identity. PG has no doubt that Baptist authors or Russian authors or African-American authors are upset when people don’t want to buy their books because of their religion or nationality or race.

Operating a library other than the Library of Congress involves choices – choosing one book and not choosing another. If you were a librarian working for a government entity whose salary is paid by the people in the local community, would you feel that the wishes of the people in the community regarding books you purchased or didn’t purchase should be considered? Honored? Respected?

If you want to buy books with no consideration of whether people who you think might want to read them or will want to borrow them for themselves or others, start a private library. Use your own money to buy the books. Collect voluntary donations from like-minded individuals for the purposed of acquiring books for your library.

For a public library in the US, ultimately, there is a group of someones somewhere who are elected by the majority of those who vote and those elected officials quite often want to please the people who elected them, thinking that the elected official would run the governmental entity for which she/he/they are responsible in a manner that the voters think is useful and wise.

From Electric Lit:

The day of the incident it had been only me and Ms. Roberts at the circulation desk. I was one month into the job and used to calling these kinds of things “incidents” by then. The yelling was coming from the Adult Fiction section, an area with four tables that made up the far-right corner of the larger square that was the library. Walls of tall bookcases made it into its own square, and it was impossible to see into it unless you were standing right within it. Only one chair, tucked in between the emergency exit and a single bookcase—the Fiction A’s—could be seen from the circulation desk. A few weeks earlier, a patron had overdosed while sitting in it, his skin already blue by the time someone at the desk noticed and called 911.

I knew it was Christian who was yelling before I reached him. He was a regular patron who kept his cell phone in a holster on his hip and a Bluetooth piece in his ear, loudly taking frequent phone calls until an employee would tell him to hang up or take it outside. The other two people sitting at the table with him kept their eyes fixed down as he yelled up at an older woman who was standing near him. I recognized her by the long flowing dress and colorful silk headscarf she always wore, but I did not know her name. The woman often annoyed other patrons by asking to borrow items from them—a cell phone, a tissue, a bit of their food—and would hover until she got a yes. Whatever she had asked him for that day annoyed him to a point where he had been saying “fuck you” for a while, obviously angry, but I don’t know that anyone expected what happened next.

Christian stood and used both of his hands to shove the woman backward as hard as he could. Her thin body flew into the wooden bench behind her and her head audibly cracked on contact before she rolled to the floor.

I instantly started to yell. “Out! Out! Get out!”

The other patrons finally looked up, most of them staring at me. I was the woman with pink hair, the newest hire who was usually the most patient and friendly at the circulation desk, yet here I was now, angry and yelling.

Christian turned toward me, shouting how he’d done nothing and I didn’t know shit. Spit was flying from his mouth. Two patrons I didn’t know were cradling the woman’s head as she lay sprawled out on the floor next to the bench. I tried to check for blood while simultaneously watching Christian.

. . . .

Libraries are often referred to in warm language: safe place, sanctuary, freedom granting, for all. There is the famous Jorge Luis Borges quote: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” And similar sentiments from Albert Einstein: “The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” From Ray Bradbury: “Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.” From Judy Blume: “I think of libraries as safe havens for intellectual freedom. I think of how many times I’ve been told about a librarian who saved a life by offering the right book at the right time.” And Margaret Atwood: “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library.”

Warm understandings of libraries have long permeated our media as well: the Breakfast Club members find comradery in their school library, Hermione and Harry and Ron discover life-saving solutions and spells at the Hogwarts Library, Belle finds sanctuary and a sense of Beast’s humanity in his private library, Mrs. Phelps offers Matilda the beginning of her exit from an abusive home, the cast of The Magicians frequent the library for answers and deep conversations, and so on. 

. . . .

There is nothing incorrect about any of these beautiful assertions or imagined scenarios. But there remains a somewhat perplexing overarching social assumption that libraries are social equalizers and asylums from the rest of the world in ways that no other American institutions quite are—that libraries are good, as opposed to the bad people sometimes ascribe to museums and other shared spaces that have been criticized for being elitist and otherwise exclusionary or fraught.

When I tell someone for the first time that I was a librarian for seven years, their face usually lights up. Sometimes they want to tell me about their childhood library, or the last time they went to their local branch, or ask if I’ve read a particular book. Sometimes they just want to know what the work was really like. Was it quiet all the time? Did I read books all day? Did I have to go to school for that? Do I have glasses? Did I shhh?

They often tell me, last, about how much they love libraries. I tell them I do too.

And I do.

. . . .

In my own social circles, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like libraries, even if they haven’t patronized one in decades. According to the American Library Association’s (ALA) State of America’s Libraries Report  2019, there are more public libraries—16,568—in the United States than Starbucks cafés—14,606. 100 percent of those public libraries provide Wi-Fi and nearly 100 percent offer no-fee access to computers. The ALA’s 2020 report notes that “the popularity of libraries is surging” and cites a 2019 Gallup survey poll that visiting the library is the most common cultural activity Americans engage in “by far,” with US adults taking an average of 10.5 trips to the library, “a frequency that exceeded their participation in eight other common leisure activities. Americans attended live music or theatrical events and visited national or historic parks roughly four times a year on average and visited museums and  gambling casinos 2.5 times annually.”

The State of America’s Libraries reports are released during National Library Week every April as annual summaries of library trends, and they include statistics and issues affecting all types of libraries, including public ones. The State of America’s Libraries Report 2019 notably states that public libraries “are a microcosm of the larger society. They play an important and unique role in the communities that they serve and provide an inclusive environment where all are treated with respect and dignity. No longer just places for books, our public libraries serve as a lifeline for some of our nation’s most vulnerable communities.” The report goes on to note that “homelessness and addiction are two of the most difficult issues facing communities today. They often go hand in hand.”

The ALA notes on its website that “[unhoused people] face a wide range of challenges including lack of affordable housing, employment opportunities, healthcare, and other needed services. As many public  librarians know, with no safety net to speak of, homeless citizens often turn to the library for help.” It is common for libraries to be patronized by marginalized and vulnerable groups, whether they are in rural,  suburban, or city settings, for a wide variety of reasons including free access to a temperature-controlled environment, clean drinking water,  and Wi-Fi, and computers—because, of course, all public libraries are shared spaces. They do not exclude anyone, including people suffering from addiction, trauma, mental health struggles, and other internal, and often externalized, battles. 

That unhoused people regularly patronize libraries has become more commonly known in recent years and is a fact that impacts some library users’ desire to visit certain branches in their local library systems. Although there is no statistic on this, my own experience working within the DC Public Library system showed me time and again that the majority of middle- and upper-class library patrons who wanted to sit and work at a library preferred to visit branches in certain neighborhoods around the District over others, even if it was not their closest neighborhood branch. These same people would comfortably pick up holds from their local branch because it did not require them to linger in the space, but they opted for other libraries if they wanted to stay for longer than a few minutes. I have close friends in New York City, Portland, Seattle, Bethlehem, Buffalo, and DC who have similar practices and preferences. Some of them take their children to library story times as well, but again, there are branches in their local library systems where they would choose not to take their children and where they would prefer not to pick up books or try to work, whether that is something they can comfortably admit or not. It is obvious through data that libraries are still regularly used all over the country by people from all races and socioeconomic statuses, but the reasons they use libraries differ greatly. While library usage remains statistically prevalent and on the rise, I continue to be interested in the question of by whom, where, and for what reasons.

. . . .

Two weeks before Christian assaulted the woman, I had been in the Adult Fiction area reshelving books. The collection was often disorganized—a  side effect not so much of being understaffed, but of staff never agreeing whose job it was to reshelve—and the disarray often doubled how long it took to find the correct place for books on the shelf. Generally, I didn’t  mind reshelving, but I tried to never linger in the area. Male coworkers had warned me early on not to—female employees were particularly vulnerable back there. If something was going to go wrong, it was going to go wrong in the Adult Fiction area. 

I was on my tiptoes that day, impatiently searching spines for the letters PAT when I heard him from behind me. 

“There’s my White girl with a booty.” 

I went momentarily stiff and then shrank the only way I could shrink  in the moment—back down to flat feet, arms crossed protectively over my  chest, book pinned against my sternum with my pointer finger hooked  slightly on the plastic of the spine label, pressing my flesh into it. I had spent most of my adult life trying to avoid this exact situation: feeling cornered and vulnerable, especially around men. There was laughter—three, four, five male echoes of it—and I moved my body sideways instead of turning around to look. I tossed the James Patterson paperback on an otherwise emptied cart and beelined to our small back work office. 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG’s reaction to the OP was that, if he had experienced anything remotely like what is described in the OP in ancient times when he worked in a large university library, he would have immediately quit and found a job waiting tables at a restaurant or something similar.

He understands that not everyone can make such a choice instantly, but it’s hard for him to believe that someone qualified to be a librarian couldn’t find alternate employment in most cities.

Thanks to F. for the tip.

From School Library Journal:

​It seems to have started during Banned Books Week, ironically: Throughout the fall and winter, a steady drumbeat of book complaints and challenges, mostly in schools but a few in public libraries, has spread across the country.

This fall, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe was the most challenged graphic novel—and perhaps the most challenged book—nationwide during increased calls to remove “offensive” materials from libraries. But Kobabe’s memoir is far from the only graphic novel people demand be removed from the shelves.

Whether in officially filed challenges or during speeches at school board meetings, parents and organizations nationwide have brought objections to Jerry Craft’s New Kid, Jarrett Krosoczka’s Hey, Kiddo, Cathy Johnson’s The Breakaways, and the graphic adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Often, news of one book’s challenge spurs a new one somewhere else.

Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at the writers’ organization PEN America, says graphic novels are more vulnerable to challenges, in part because they are still a relatively new and evolving medium, and older people simply are less comfortable with them. Parents also may be more uncomfortable with something depicted visually than with words alone, he says.

“There’s no question that groups have formed on social media, that they are sharing excerpts from books—often under the heading that they’re concerned about material and books—and they want other parents to know,” says Friedman. “Sometimes that mingles with a much more insidious, skeptical, and critical point concerning schools and libraries in schools and their purpose. So it’s difficult to draw the line in some cases between groups that are just concerned parents and groups that are active on other political causes.”

Some of the people challenging books have also protested mask policies in the schools, for instance, while others want changes in the curriculum. No Left Turn, for example, includes “promote fact-based learning” and “promote classical education in the liberal arts and sciences” among its goals. The organization also specifically targets books and curricula that include “critical race theory” (which is not taught in elementary and secondary schools), “anti-police” attitudes, and sex education.

“The challenges pretty consistently are concerned with books that deal with LGBTQ identities, with sexual activity, or sexual assaults, or themes of racism, immigration, diversity,” Friedman says. “And in particular, anti-racism.”

In some cases, community members have also sought criminal charges against libraries or librarians for having particular books on their shelves.

In East Bremerton, Washington, a parent tried to file charges against the school staff who purchased Gender Queer for the Olympic High School library. Kitsap County prosecutor Chad Enright reviewed the Washington obscenity statute, which includes a clause stating that it does not apply to libraries under state supervision. While the statute doesn’t specifically mention school libraries, Enright told SLJ that in his opinion it did apply to them.

The statute requires that the book be reviewed as a whole and that in order for the images to be deemed obscene, they must have been designed for the sole purpose of sexual stimulation. “I don’t think that the intent of any of these images is for sexual stimulation,” Enright says, “but more importantly, the book as a whole, I don’t see that it is written with the intent of sexual stimulation. This book tells a story that, I think, has very some very good redeeming qualities for the reader that is far different from sexual stimulation.”

Enright declined to prosecute. Nonetheless, according to local news reports, the school removed the sole copy of the book from its library, because of its “sexually explicit images”; a spokesperson said the graphic novel “was not thoroughly reviewed before placement in the library.”

. . . .

In Gillette, WY, a resident tried to press charges against the Campbell County Public Library because of five sex education books, including Cory Silverberg’s graphic novel Sex Is a Funny Word. The county attorney’s office sought assistance from an attorney in a neighboring county to review the case, and he determined it was not prosecutable.

Terri Lesley, the executive director of the Campbell County Library System, says that while she found the episode “discouraging,” at least it couldn’t happen again. “We went through a process and now there’s an opinion on it that says that’s not prosecutable,” she says. “There is an exemption for public libraries and schools. They went through the different statutes methodically, so it’s a pretty strong document.”

Campbell County residents also filed 57 challenges, targeting 29 books, two of which are graphic novels—Gender Queer and A Quick & Easy Guide to Sex and Disability, by A. Andrews (Oni Press, 2020). The library has a well-established challenge system, which Lesley said was not used much in previous years. “It sure has been used a lot in the last six months,” she said.

Instead of going through the library’s process, Lesley says, the patrons went directly to the county commissioners, who aren’t involved with the process of challenging a book. But once people understood the process, Lesley said, “we started to receive a lot more” challenges. The library has elected to retain all the challenged books so far, although the two graphic novels were moved to the adult graphic novel section.

“That’s what a good Request for Reconsideration policy is all about,” Lesley says. “The manager reviewed the books and determined that that would have been adult content … so the manager made a decision to move the books to the adult graphic novel collection. And that happened at the meeting between the patron and the manager.”

James Lucas Jones, the publisher of Oni Press, says Gender Queer has always been marketed as an adult graphic novel. However, he points out, age ratings are a marketing tool. “The book won the ALA Alex Award and was an Israel Fishman nonfiction honoree, which would suggest that it had appeal beyond just being considered an ‘adult’ title,” he says.

“Gender Queer is an important story that will resonate with anyone that reads it,” he says. “Maia’s experience is thoughtfully crafted, heartfelt, and relatable. Eir narrative is the kind of story that teens having similar feelings and concerns need to see out there, so they know they’re not alone. That’s such an important thing—to feel like your pain and heartache isn’t this singular, isolated thing, that others have felt that way and that there’s a path through it. Seeing the joy and relief in that journey is such a big deal, too.”

Link to the rest at School Library Journal

While PG acknowledges that censorship has a bad history and earned reputation, a public library is supported by public funds extracted in one way or the other from people living in one or more government subdivisions, typically community or county, often with a dollop of state funds included.

The public is the source of the funds and, PG believes, should have a voice in how those funds are spent, even down to the book level. Librarians are public employees, also paid with funds extracted from individuals whether those individuals want to pay them or not.

Invariably, charges of censorship are directed toward the general public in disputes similar to those described in the OP.

However, in the United States, other than the Library of Congress, librarians also make choices concerning what books the library will acquire and what books the library will not offer to the public. Should one or more librarians determine that a book is not appropriate for the library to acquire, they are engaged in a species of censorship themselves, denying members of the public who support the library from having ready and free access to that book.

Assume, for discussions’ sake that the library acquired a book that flatly stated that people of some races are inferior to people of some different races. Would the editors of The School Library Journal criticize those citizens who protested the racist books and demand they be removed?

From School Library Journal:

Almost a decade ago, my colleagues and I wrote an article for SLJ entitled “Are Dewey’s Days Numbered?” in which we made the argument that the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system had lost its relevance. We took a bold stance, and the backlash was swift. Fellow librarians would wait outside the rooms I was speaking in at conferences, backing me into corners to demand that I stop talking about alternative systems.

At the time, we focused on creating better, more fluent access for children and modernizing a system that was created in the 19th century. It seems appropriate that today, an era when the status quo has been turned upside down by COVID and the racial justice movement, I find myself once again looking at the Dewey system. In this time that has highlighted the vast inequalities and injustices in our country, are we going to continue to use a cataloging system that is steeped in the values and worldview of a racist, misogynistic anti-Semite?

In 2019, ALA approved a resolution to take Melvil Dewey’s name off of one of the organization’s top awards for librarians, because of his known history as a racist, anti-Semite, and sexual predator. The reason: “the behavior demonstrated for decades by Dewey does not represent the stated fundamental values of ALA in equity, diversity, and inclusion.”

It is impossible to ignore that these ideas are ingrained in the system. Just look at a few examples: African American culture and history is located in groups of people (305), not American culture and history (973). In fact, any activist from suffragettes to environmentalists are classified in social sciences, history.

It is impossible to ignore that these ideas are ingrained in the system. Just look at a few examples: African American culture and history is located in groups of people (305), not American culture and history (973). In fact, any activist from suffragettes to environmentalists are classified in social sciences, history.

What message does that send our students? Are we suggesting that these groups of people can only be studied in relation to others, that their own history is not enough to stand on its own? Christians make up approximately 30 percent of the world’s religious population, yet they make up 90 percent of the 200s (religion.) The Dewey Decimal System is a perfect example of systemic racism, and we as librarians are perpetuating this harmful worldview in our libraries.

In a recent article in SLJ, many librarians commented about how weeding their collections allowed them to focus on issues of diversity and inclusion. Collection development is the natural focus of many librarians when thinking about how to make our libraries more diverse. But how inclusive can we be if the system itself is exclusionary? Most of us put a lot of effort into collecting diverse, informative books that provide windows and mirrors. When we put those books on the shelf in an outdated system, it negates those very principles. Students searching for the 16 official languages of India find out that they are shoved into 495.9 (miscellaneous languages of southeast Asia.) There are twice as many people living in India as in all of Europe, but the message we send is crystal clear to our children that white, European people and their culture are the most important. Kids looking for LGBTQ+ nonfiction books find out that they are shelved next to prostitution and pornography. The understanding that their thoughts, their very identity, is wrong and immoral comes through loud and clear no matter what we might say to the contrary.

It’s striking to me that librarians aren’t applying our rigorous weeding criteria to the system itself. Dewey is outdated and obsolete, it is difficult to use, and it doesn’t resonate with our patrons, our values, or the world around us. The system codifies and upholds a white, male, Eurocentric, Christian, heteronormative, abled perspective.

Link to the rest at School Library Journal