The Invisible Library

Pam over at Pandagon beat me to the story about the Gerogia Mom who wants to ban Harry Potter books in school here because they indoctinate kids into Wicca, cause school shottings, and acne:

A woman who maintains that the Harry Potter books are an attempt to teach children witchcraft is pushing for the second time to have them banned from school libraries.

Laura Mallory, a mother of four from the Atlanta suburb of Loganville, told a Georgia Board of Education officer that the books by British author J.K. Rowling, sought to indoctrinate children as Wiccans, or practitioners of religious witchcraft.

Referring to the recent rash of deadly assaults at schools, Mallory said books that promote evil - as she claims the Potter ones do - help foster the kind of culture where school shootings happen.

That would not happen if students instead read the Bible, Mallory said.

OK, I made up the bit about the books causing acne, but its just as plausible. This woman wouldn’t know a Wiccan if one walked up to her and said “Merry meet”. She probably head the word somewhere and learned that it was the modern religion of “witchcraft” and flipped out like all these ditzy Georgia soccer moms do. A couple years back the local paper advertised a Harry Potter book burning just across the border at a church in South Carolina. That’s the mentality we’re talking about here. Wicca, Satanism, school shootings, they’re all related in her twitterpated little mind. Harry Potter is just the most recent and convenient icon for religious nuts to attach their ire to. Before Harry Potter it was Marylyn Manson, and before that it was Ozzy, and Kiss and Led Zeppelin, preceded by Elvis Presley, then Swing Music, then Ice cream parlors and the evils of the zipper. And flappers. let’s not forget how flappers (and bobbed haircuts for girls) were supposed to drive us all to Hell in a merry little handbasket.

None of this nonsense addresses the real reason school shootings happen, though. Most of the kids who have gone into their schools and shot people did so because of the stringent enforcement of cultural and social conformity. These kids were outcasts, bullied and made fun of for years until they couldn’t take it anymore.

As for the guy who shot up the school last month and the one who shot up the Amish school last week, they were severely disturbed men with violence issues and a pedophilia streek a mile wide. if they hadn’t have shot up schools after raping girls, they would be running for Rep. Foley’s seat in Congress.

So yeah, there are weirdoes and disturbed individuals with easy access to guns and internet porn out there. They are a real problem. But so far, none of them have had dogeared copies of The Prisoner of Azkaban in their pockets. And they didn’t listen to Kiss records either.

Here’s a list from the ALA of the most challenged and banned books in the country. Bet you can’t guess what the most banned book is. Hint: it’s about a boy with glasses who goes to a special school.

What’s your favorite banned book? Let me know in comments.

This week is Banned Books Week and of course, some people don’t like the word “banned”:

Judy Platt with the Association of American Publishers is a proponent of Banned Books Week. But not even she could come up with a book that has been banned.

“I can’t think of any book that has been banned across the country.”

Phil Burress with Citizens for Community Values says the event is a fraud put on by the American Library Association.

“What people need to understand is that this is the American Library Association’s way of trying to censor those who exercise their free speech rights and say that there are books in the library that should not be available to children.”

These are the same people who often don’t like the word “book” either unless it is preceded by the words “The Good” (a euphemism I’ve never really cared for, as it carries with it the implicite assumption that if this is The One and Only Good Book than whatever subject covered in all those other Books is by definition Bad).

But they’re missing the point. The ALA wouldn’t have to sponsor a Banned Book Week if idiots didn’t keep trying to ban books. That’s the operative word, trying. Because while we no longer ban books on a national level, it wasn’t that long ago that we did. Not that illiterate jackasses would know that, since they weren’t the ones trying find a copy of Ulysses or Lolita back in the sixties when those books were still being seized by customs officials.

Hat tip to Bookslut for reminding me it was one of my favorite weeks of the year.

The Nation:

The day-to-day challenges librarians face are inherent in the job description: defending access to controversial or banned books, staving off budget cuts, and creating and expanding programs to draw more citizens into one of the few remaining genuinely public commons in American life. While the ethic of secrecy often prevails in the gathering and dissemination of corporate and governmental information, the work of a librarian is imbued with just the opposite. Be it in the capacity of archivist, reference librarian or information technology professional, a common thread is the profession’s dogged commitment to safeguarding books, research and information to make knowledge more widespread, not less.

In the past few years this dedication has become more important than ever. With the federal government ever more intent on spying on its own citizens, and on classifying, concealing and manipulating larger swaths of information and intelligence, librarians and library custodians are on the front lines protecting freedom of inquiry and our right to privacy. And where right-wing groups, both local and national, have campaigned for censorship, librarians have also stepped up to the plate to defend minority points of view in their collections. Anecdotes there are aplenty, too many to document here. The following are but a few profiles of courageous individuals in the field who exemplify the democratic values and the independent spirit of the profession.

[…] With the recent passage by the House of Representatives of HR 4437 (the Sensenbrenner bill), which would make it a felony for a librarian to issue a library card to an undocumented immigrant, Garcia-Febo and members of Reforma around the country swung in to high gear. In Queens, Garcia-Febo directed a public relations campaign using bus and newspaper ads, to assure the local community that the library would keep its doors open to everybody. Garcia-Febo also helped develop a Librarian’s Tool-Kit for responding to anti-immigrant sentiment.

“When I came over from Puerto Rico, I realized how important libraries are to immigrant communities here, for everything from literacy classes, job postings, readings or as a place for kids to do their homework,” Garcia-Febo says. “That is why they need to continue to provide full, equal access, regardless of background or legal status.” [Emphesis added]

The whole article is well worth reading but I wanted to highlight this last part as it connects to a much bigger issue, namely, the racist immigration policy currently making it’s way through Congress. Th highlighted statement above really captures the heart of this idiocy: let’s criminalize the poor and needy, so they’ll stay uneducated. The reason is not to scare them away. No one in Congress is dumb enough to think they can actually close off the boarders. They wouldn’t do that even if they could. But by keeping books and the tools available in libraries out of the hands of the immigrant population, it keeps them in a second class status, willing to work for lower wages and no benefits. And that is what this is really about: demonizing the working immigrants and keeping a vast pool of cheep labor pool open for exploitation. Criminalizing library cards for immigrant sis just one aspect of this. But it’s all towards the same end. Just follow the stench of money and see whose hand is in whose pocket.

ALA:

“Throughout history, there always have been a few people who don’t want information to be freely available. And this is still true,” said ALA President Leslie Burger. “The reason more books aren’t banned is because community residents - with librarians, teachers and journalists - stand up and speak out for their freedom to read. Banned Books Week reminds us that we must remain vigilant.”

Bookstores and libraries around the country will celebrate the freedom to read with exhibits, readings and special events during Banned Books Week, September 23-30, 2006. First observed in 1982, Banned Books Week reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted. City Lit Theater in Chicago and ALA will kick off the week with theatrical readings from recently challenged books September 24. The ALA also will participate in a virtual panel discussion with author Chris Crutcher (”Whale Talk”) and 15 high schools on September 25. Participants will hear about Crutcher’s experiences as a frequently challenged author, learn more about the history of book banning in the United States and examine contemporary issues in intellectual freedom and access to information.

There were 405 known attempts to remove books in 2005. Challenges are defined as formal, written complaints filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness. About 70 percent of challenges take place in schools and school libraries. According to Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the number of challenges reflects only incidents reported, and for each reported, four or five remain unreported.

“We are as busy as we’ve ever been in fighting censorship attempts in schools and libraries,” Krug said. “Libraries are no longer simply about books - but also about DVDs, videogames and online information.”

Number one on the list of most-often banned books? That hot-bed of radical thought, Judy Bloom’s Forever.

All through September I’ll be featuring reviews and discussions of some of my Favoite banned books.  As always, suggestions are welcome, in comments.

Something is happening at the Library of Congress and Thomas Mann, Reference Librarian in the Library of Congress Main Reading Room wants to know what. He’s written an essay (PDF) outlining the shape of cataloguing procedures at the LC. And they don’t look very good:

There is substantive evidence, provided by patterns of statements both from LC  management and from the sources it relies on, that the Library of Congress is striving mightily to  get out of the business of providing systematic access to a large collections of printed books  through the provision of LC Subject Headings (in an online catalog that is not merged with  Google) and through the provision of subject-categorized shelving of actual volumes arranged  according to the LC Classification system. It sees the digitization of book collections being  essentially accomplished completely by Google’s Book Search project (and some others), in spite  of copyright restrictions. It also envisions keyword searching of these digitized book texts, with  computer-algorithm “relevance ranking” of the results (and Amazon-type reader-preference  tracking) as being adequate to meet the new goal of research libraries, which is simply to provide  something delivered quickly and remotely to “the user.” Questions regarding the quality of  resources made available on the Internet are all to be answered simply by digitizing everything–in  spite of copyright restrictions and in spite of the fact that Internet search mechanisms cannot find  the quality material, or adequately segregate it from the mountains of chaff, through keyword and  user-tracking softwares.

Now, none of these things is necessarily wrong by themselves. If the LC had decided to incorporate folksonomy and page ranking on top of the services they already offer, that would be one thing. But they aren’t. The powers that be at the LC have decided that the Google Model is good enough for everyone, including other libraries. Regardless of the fact that they’ve been presented studies showing that library researchers want the ability to browse actual books and sort through indexed records, not just Google for surface level info.

While all of this may sound a little technical, it’s part of a larger pattern. The LC higher ups, specifically Deanna Marcum, the Associate Librarian for Library Services, claim that they’re just trying to meet user needs, while staying within the boundaries of shrinking budgets. Fair enough. But why are the budgets shrinking so much that the LC has to cut services? And why, in the face of plenty of information to the contrary, has Deanna Marcum, decided that the Google Model will do just fine?

I know from inside sources that the LC has a hiring freeze on. That means that when librarians retire or move on, they aren’t hiring replacements, just assigning the workflow to the few librarians still there. This means one librarian attempting to do the work of two, sometimes three or more. Programs are being cut and services rigged to be either automated or maintained by bots and IT.

It’s no secret that President Bush is no friend of books. Some may even describe him as a functional illiterate man-child waging a personal war against the English language and any knowledge that wasn’t plucked out of thin air by late bronze age sheep herders. The GOP in general has, for decades, tried to kill federal arts programs and now it would seem that they’ve decided the world’s most advanced society doesn’t really need all them books anyway. And, as usual, they ply the same old tactics: starving programs to death, acting bewildered when they fail and then cutting them entirely. (Does Haliburton have an IT devision? Bet they do.)

This doesn’t mean that Dr. Marcum is another Heckuvajob Brownie. She could just be a useful tool. An enthusiastic supporter of emerging technology put in a position to reshape the Library of Congress in an exciting new way that just happens not to really help matters but may in fact make things worse at an already strained institution.

This question gets asked a lot. We librarians have criteria for evaluating a resource: reliability (Wikipedia is always there), authoritativeness (check out the recent study published a few months back in Nature), depth (1 million plus articles and growing daily) and specificity.

this last one is key. It measures how much a resource know sits audience, and how well the contributers provide that need. It’s a gage of how much passion the contributors have for their subject. So, how specific is Wikipedia?

Today I found this article: Gorillas in Silver Age Comics.

It’s that specific.

A friend at the Library of Congress sent my this e-mail:

Billington, the Librarian of Congress, is considering a deal in which Disney would manage the reading rooms in the Jefferson Building. The idea is to install interactive exhibits in an attempt to lure “visitors” - not researchers by any means. Some of you might remember Disney’s attempt to build a “historical” theme park/real estate development/shopping mall right next to the Manassas Battlefield. I shudder to envision what we’re in for.

Look, you need the money. I get that, Billington by why Disney? All Coke-a-Cola wants is a few adds in the bathrooms and a couple of soda machines in the hallway. But Disney? Why not just start pimping out the Librarians.

Whenever the Mouse fuckers in Disneycorp get their hands on something, they bleed it dry; oversell it and then toss the rotting husk aside. (anyone been to Euro Disney?)

Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a civilised country that actually funds it’s cultural institutions instead of wasting 40 Bajillion dollars on a missile shield that doesn’t work?