Dealing With Controversial Material

Preer, J. L. (2014). Prepare to Be Challenged. Library Trends, 62(4), 759–770. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2014.0018  11 pages

McKenna, Charmagne

Preer wrote this article about a controversy that happened at West Bend Memorial Library over homosexual content in the young adult section. It eventually went as far as a public hearing in which the library required support from the Deputy Director from the ALA office for Intellectual Freedom. The Library Bill of Rights and Freedom to Read Act was referred to in terms of the necessity of presenting all points of view from different members of the community. In response the complainant stated they felt their values were being put on trial. In the end the board ruled to keep the work in question, but revised their challenge policy and procedure. This situation demonstrates how important it is to have a reasoned collection development plan, and a challenge policy and procedure that is complex enough to handle controversial situations, is expeditious, fair, and focused on the offending work, not the offended patron. The language of the challenge form even sets the stage- using the term complainant instead of concerned patron, for example, is adversarial in nature and can change how things are perceived. This article gives further examples of collection development plans, challenge forms, policies and procedures from other Wisconsin public libraries, gained through an online survey. Patrons were also surveyed about intellectual freedom and most seem to be in support of the concept but didn’t understand how that translated to concerns with library materials and procedures in place to address those concerns. 

This article gives a great deal of good information about how to handle controversial book content in the collection and ensuring a library has the policies and procedures in place to deal with any challenges. There are examples of appropriate and useful formats and wording for book challenge policies and procedures as well as good advice on how to maintain and support freedom to read with diverse material from all walks of life.

"Prizing" books as an unintended consequence of censorship

  Kidd, K. (2009). “Not censorship but selection”: Censorship and/as prizing. Children’s Literature in Education, 40(3), 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-008-9078-4

Kidd’s theoretical and critical essay offers a brief history of censorship, book banning practices, and anticensorship in the USA. Most censorship efforts are tied to obscenity, be it pornographic, racist, violent, etc., and bans on children’s books are mostly motivated by the idea of contaminating the youth. Kidd examines the history of literary prizes in connection to book challenges. Kidd claims that book challenges can spark anticensorship efforts that lead to “prizing” of a book, whether the title merits the attention or not. He concludes that the worst thing that could happen to a book is non-attention which results in a book just fading away into the stacks. This article reveals the central role that libraries, librarians, and their selection policies have on anticensorship practices that have become especially important in the past 30 years. Another interesting point of the article is the analysis of censors and anticensors, which Kidd explains as two extremes always “othering” one another, both of which increase attention on a given title. I completely agree that a book disappearing into the stacks is the ultimate "death" of the book. It's interesting to think about how censorship efforts actually bring more attention to books, and I am curious if efforts by adults to censor books leads to the intended audience having more interest in reading the book in question.