TILT-y Mail #15
A Banned Books Week Everyone Can Get Behind
Banned Books Week is happening and for the first time in a while, I’ve been enjoying it. My feeling in the past has been “Books haven’t been banned in a long time and ALA and others use this as an excuse to try to sell you things.” but I’ve gotten into the spirit of things this year.
My new feeling, and talking point, is “Books used to be challenged because of underwear and bad words and kids being rude to parents, but now the challenges are about social control and we should be concerned.” bolstered by this article in Time Magazine that interviews Jamie LaRue the new director of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (ALAOIF). Specifically recent challenges are concerned with:
- Increasing cultural diversity and pushback against that
- Increasing religious diversity and pushback about that
- Increasing sex and gender diversity and pushback on that
I appreciate the work that ALA does, but this year the Banned Books Week Coalition is really excelling at getting the message out. Their Twitter account is hopping. Here is a quote from one of their blogs about challenges targeting diverse books.
The University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) and publisher Lee & Low have provided statistics from 1994 to 2012 that illustrate that while 37% of the U.S. population are people of color, only 10% of books published focus on multicultural content….. ALAOIF has determined that 52% of the books challenged, or banned, over the past decade are from titles that are considered diverse content.”
This week I participated in a new, to me, event this week: a Twitter chat with Belmont University students about digital divide issues. As you know I always appreciate a platform and I eagerly dove in along with Caitlin Gibson from the Washington Post. Format was sort of free form. A few students asked questions and a few more chimed in and after a few minutes I realized I had lost the thread of the conversation entirely but I did enjoy the interaction and the rapid fire exchange of ideas.
Here’s a great list of ideas for the inevitable “What can WE do?” question. Belmont is a Christian university and so it’s no surprise that there were many service-oriented answers.
After the hour was up, I went back and looked over the event hashtag #closethedigitaldivide to see what I had missed. I also wondered if this was a “millennial” experience where to old-timers like me everything seems to be happening at once, that there’s a time sequence but I couldn’t sense it at the time.
Closing with two short notes
1. I’ll be speaking at Boston University next Thursday afternoon in an event that is open to the public, talking about libraries and advocacy and what this means in a world where a lot of the money is going towards “disruption”
2. This lovely library poem by Ted Hughes (yes that one), and an anecdote about the poem from OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey
Matthew Evans (at the time Chair of Faber and Faber) chaired a UK investigation of technology/networking in Public Libraries in the late 90s. It went under the title of The People’s Network (the focus was similar to some of the Gates work in the US).
Matthew agreed to ask Ted Hughes to write a poem to accompany the report. This is the poem he composed….
It was on my mind as there was some discussion about it among the original members of the task force (of whom I was one) when Matthew Evans sadly died recently.
TILT-Y MAIL is written irregularly by Jessamyn West who also maintains librarian.net. It’s also available in your inbox via TinyLetter. Thanks for reading.
