Journal Entry
Library madness
February 28th 2007 at 11:35 pm
This letter to Neil Gaiman by a librarian was just amazing:
I walked out of our main branch one day to find
several van loads of people carrying picket signs and
descending on our building. There were many children
with the group and some of them were given picket
signs and sent out to rally cars driving by to “Honk
if you hate Library Porn” and “Unsafe for Kids”. The
other picketing parents sent their kids into our
children’s department for us to baby-sit for the next
several hours - while they tried to rally community
support against us. (The irony was not lost on us.)Caught flat footed, our library system began to
scramble to try to deal with the situation. (The net
was very new to us and many of us were not as well
versed in it as we should have been.) We formed an
internal Internet Safety Task Force (belatedly, yes)
to figure out just what we, as a system, SHOULD be
doing.One man in the group called in the local television
stations and showed up at our main branch and began
to ask children in the library about all the porn
that they were finding on our computers and asking
them to show him how to find it. When staff told him
that he could not ask the kids to do this, he
began to troll for porn himself in front of the
cameras (and kids) - going to a list of website
addresses that, as luck would have it, he had
memorized. The group was asked to leave as they were
creating a disruption.
I am so impressed with the US library system and the people who work for it. I never had access to anything like it as a kid, and most Americans do not realize what an incredible resource and treasure they have in almost every community backyard.
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1. Ryan on Mar 1st, 2007 at 6:45 am
As kids, both my (future) wife and I loved libraries. We both worked as pages in our huge, fantastic local library when we were teenagers. I even worked as “the computer guy” there for the summer before I went to college, managing their entire network, fixing broken hardware, and completely rebuilding their website. That was a fun job!
My wife apparently loved it more than I did, and went on to earn her master’s degree in library and information science. Now she works as the school librarian for a rural K-8 school here in New Hampshire, and every day we both learn a little more of the joys and terrors of working in public education. Luckily, the good stuff far outweighs the bad, and she hasn’t faced any public outcries over books in the collection yet.
Being married to a librarian, and watching the entire, difficult process of becoming one, has certainly given me a newfound respect for what they know and do. A lot of people don’t understand the full scope of a librarian’s job, and that’s a shame, because it’s truly amazing, and I think they would get a lot more respect if people knew.
Plus, when I need to research something for my writing, she’s always ready to help me out, and that’s awesome.
2. Steve Buchheit on Mar 1st, 2007 at 7:37 am
Well, libraries endorse those liberal ideals that there is actual thought out there, some where. And for that, some people in the population feel they must be stopped.
3. Simon Owens on Mar 1st, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Wow, that letter was amazing.
4. Tobias Buckell on Mar 2nd, 2007 at 11:14 am
Ryan: that’s a nice perk!
Steve: literacy, an evil liberal concept!
5. Laurie Mann on Mar 3rd, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Good lord, we can’t have children know what the word scrotum means…