Thursday, October 2, 2008

Know Your Library

"Know Your Library" is a new web site on the scene. It involves efforts by citizens to move inappropriate materials from the teen to the adult section of a public library in St. Louis, MO, exactly as the St. Louis County Library has already done on its own. It also wants content labels for books. It does not support censorship.

Please visit "Know Your Library" to see what's there. This is the community where the American Library Association [ALA] advised the library director to manipulate the media.

Note the ALA says: "there are times when a book might be moved, for example a young adult novel makes it into a fourth or fifth grade classroom and that's more appropriate for the high school library, and a committee can just say this wasn't an appropriate book to buy for this age group but it works for high schoolers and to move it to that high school library."

Source: "Deborah Caldwell-Stone Discusses Banned Books," by Deborah Caldwell-Stone, American Library Association, 11 July 2008. (She says this at the very end of the linked MP3 file.)

So the library moves books and the ALA says moving books is okay. It is not censorship. Then what's the problem with citizens requesting the thing? Why do the media get it so wrong?

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