How social should libraries be?

Social media has been hotly debated by parents and other adults ever since youngsters started flocking to it and spending (it seems) hours posting silly and sometimes disturbing messages and photos on it. At first some school districts and public libraries assumed that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were time-wasters and students should not be allowed to use them in schools and libraries. But social media crept into our lives and gradually made it difficult to separate personal fooling around from serious learning. Now there is a movement to reverse the trend to ban websites from schools and children’s libraries. The American Association of School Librarians this year inaugurated a Banned Website Awareness Day designed to call attention to the problem. In a report on the growing trend toward freer access for young people to social media and other websites and the New York Times published an article this week describing some of the ways teachers use social media to advance studies. For example, in one Advanced Placement Biology class, lab groups created a Facebook thread to share data and collaborate on projects. Many educators believe that today’s young people will work in environments where shared projects are the norm and they will have to learn to use the tools of collaboration. By exposing young people to social media and to websites that might be considered offensive in schools and libraries, teachers can help students learn how to use the Internet safely and where to draw the line on offensive material. As generations of adults have learned over time it is almost impossible to shield young people from questionable information; it is far better to help them learn how to evaluate it. Librarians have been in the front lines of the fight against book censorship for many years; now is the time for us to extend our concern for books to other materials. As digital material in many formats becomes more and more a part of the life of young people, we should help them to decide how to handle it rather than try to build walls around our libraries. We are all interconnected now, so we might as well get used to it.

More fuss about censorship

The optmistic way to look at attempts to ban particular books from libraries is to realize that if people didn't think books were powerful, they wouldn't bother to ban them. However, it's difficult to hold onto that thought when authors' works are being withdrawn from some schools and libraries and one YA writer has been disinvited from a YA Lit Festival. Ellen Hopkins was dropped from the Texas festival after a librarian and a few parents had expressed doubts about her books which deal with current teen topics such as meth addiction and prostitution. Several other authors also withdrew from the festival after reading the story on Hopkins's blog. It's sad that so many parents and school officials don't believe teens can handle mature subjects when most teens are dealing with them day to day. When are we going to learn to trust young people?

What do we do with films?

Many teachers show films to introduce concepts and topics in science, history and other subject areas, but as many librarians know, visual media present even more problems than print in arousing parental objections. Even a film as clearly educational as An Inconvenient Truth has caused objections in some school districts. Often school districts simply ban the film from classrooms, but students would benefit if they adopted the stance of public libraries and decided that a parent could only prohibit his or her own child from seeing a particular film--not the entire class. The prejudices of a small group should not inhibit most students from learning in as many formats as possible. As more films, both old and new, become available for download, it is easier than ever for young people view them whether adults want them to or not. Raising objections to films may cause more interest and more viewing than would otherwise occur. This was the lesson of book banning and it is likely to be repeated with films. It's probably lucky for educators that so many censorship attempts backfire.

Always controversy

Librarians sometimes feel it's impossible to do everything right. SLJ's report on the recent controversy in Brooklyn, NY, over a Tintin book is a case in point. The 1930s versions of many books were undoubtedly racist. Most of them have disappeared from library shelves, but Tintin is a classic, and Tintin au Congo has been a part of library collections, but has now been moved to a limited-access section of the collection. Showing Africans as childlike and dependent on white people to help them is undoubtedly unrealistic. Most of us do not want our children to see images or read stories that show such dated and unjust portrayals of Africans--or anyone else. But the New York Civil Liberty group objects to removing the book from open shelves because that is censorship. Who is right? When a book is in a restricted collection, it is undoubtedly kept from most children. Should a book like this be available only to adults who can understand the historical context? Many of us would agree that it should be, but that puts us on the side of censors and that's an unpleasant place to have to stand. But we can't have it both ways. Glib anti-censorship statements often don't cover all the situations that arise in real life libraries.