From an information literacy standpoint, could academic institutions prevent some of these situations if they worked more to include a librarian in the researching process, particularly in cases like the ESL student and what the writer of the article calls the “hopeless deficient” student (though I strongly dislike that term)? I’m thinking about more of a one-on-one scheduled session with a librarian to help students who might require more attention than a professor at a large institution can give. Or is that kind of thing already being done? Is it even necessary? Is cheating even as much of a rampant problem as the writer of the article seems to imply it is?

My concern with this topic, and what struck a chord with me when I read this article, is the idea that students might resort to cheating when they a) don’t understand/haven’t processed the material presented to them by the instructor, b) don’t have the information literacy (or language) skills to seek out information on their own, c) they have collected information but don’t understand or have enough confidence to compile the information into a presentation by themselves.

Do librarians have a responsibility to bridge some of those gaps between students and educators?

From the article:

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let’s be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn’t get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them. Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven’t mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences. My service provides a particularly quick way to “master” English. And those who are hopelessly deficient—a euphemism, I admit—struggle with communication in general.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/

Basically, what this means for a work environment is that while most people have the same expectations and hopes for their careers, there can be conflicts around how this plays out at work. Though not all individuals should be categorized by their generation, it can be a useful tool to help understand some divides/conflicts occurring at work.

What I took away from the article, and what I could use my current job situation as an Access Services Supervisor is that there should be consistency in how I approach the students I supervise, even if there are different expectations that have been programmed into them. I should be firm and strong about the library’s ground rules and make sure to set them up from the beginning. When they do good work, I should reinforce this positive behavior and build an atmosphere of encouragement and motivation. When there is conflict, I should deal with it openly, objectively, stick to the facts, and begin and end on a positive note if possible. Of course, some of the expectations are out of my hands. I have no impact on job benefits, for example. However, when questions about these things emerge, I can always answer honestly and listen to employees frustrations with sympathy.

From an employee perspective, I also found some value in analyzing myself in the schema of expectations and the generational divide. I’m a Gen Yer, and I think it’s fair to say I see a lot of the behaviors described in the article among my peers and even myself. I appreciated that the article criticizes the over-generalization of popular generation theories, but again I see a lot of truth in some of these stereotypes. It’s helpful to keep these traits in mind and to recognize the underlying factors if I want to avert conflicts in my work situation.

I was about four when I made an imaginary friend. I called her Greenwitch. Everybody in the family knew about her. She lived in a castle in the clouds and knit rainbows with her sisters (all with different color names).  When they finished knitting a rainbow, they tossed one end out of the window of the castle. The rainbow came down from the clouds for everybody to see.

I think, for the most part, people thought my invention of Greenwitch was cute and creative. But one day, my mother and I got into an argument (probably something silly, like what clothes I should wear!). I told her I would run away with Greenwitch. She would become my new mommy. I said it to hurt my mom, and I’m fairly certain it did.

That evening, my aunt came for a visit. My mother left her with us kids and went out “to get groceries.” About half-an-hour after she’d left, I heard a knock on the door. My aunt asked me to go and answer it (not usual) and when I did a woman stood there with a green bedsheet over her. She told me in a deep, gravelly voice that she was Greenwitch and she’d come to take me to the castle in the sky where I could knit rainbows with her.

Needless to say, I was scared out of my wits. I told her “no thanks,” slammed the door, and ran back inside the house. About another half-hour later, my mother returned, groceries in hand, very smiley. It took me years to figure out that she’d tricked me, but I’ve never since threatened to leave her for another “mother.”

What I learned from sharing this story with two of my peers was that at times I tended to talk too quickly. At other times, I had trouble finding the exact words I wanted, so I fumbled or explained too much. Also, I struggled with awkward pauses in my storytelling. I told the story in narrative form–I didn’t try using dialogue this time around, although I could definitely see that enhancing the story. I think I could overcome many of those things with more practice and a higher level of comfort and familiarity with storytelling.

One of the side issues this article brings up is the concept of school libraries arranging for parents to censor their child’s check-out choices through a digital program which alerts parents to the items their child checks out. The school system also states that parents can have the library restrict their child from reading anything on witchcraft or a particular author. I’m not sure how the system does this, and it is an interesting concept. The mother who is challenging the books makes a valid point, I think, that at the public library she is with her child and can police her child’s check-out material, whereas at the public school she feels she does not have any control over her child’s reading choices. However, I feel that this is where good parenting and trust should enter the equation, and there’s no need to police other children and censor their reading because you feel out of control of your own child’s choices in this situation.

I wonder about the implications of the alert system as well. How does it work? Can a parent specify on a digital form that he/she doesn’t want their child reading certain books? Does that link to the child’s record? And, should the child choose to check-out those books anyway, does the alert system send out a message to the parent? Or does the librarian have to tell the child, “I’m sorry, but your record says you’re not allowed to check out these books”?

It doesn’t sit well with me, but then again, I’m not a parent. I’d love to hear what other librarians, particularly ones with children, think about this issue.

You can find the article here.

My co-worker also shared that when she was in grade school, she used to volunteer in her school’s library. The librarian would ask her, as a young volunteer, to go through certain books and mark out the bad parts with a permanent black marker. Inappropriate language or scenes where blocked out before the book even made its way to the shelf. We both agreed that this was a troubling practice and certainly an IF violation, and the irony didn’t escape us that the librarian had asked a child to censor these things from other children.

While my paper looks into some of the causes for this charge and explains the financial constraints of the library system, I’ve come to believe that public libraries shouldn’t charge any patrons for library cards, or, at the very least, shouldn’t charge in-state patrons for cards. It is an intellectual freedom challenge. As a child, I often visited my grandmother in New York for the entire summer. Since I wasn’t a resident of New York, it was my understanding that I wasn’t allowed to obtain my own card at the local NY library–at least not for free. That meant I always had to check-out books using my grandmother’s card, which meant all my book choices were subject to her approval before I could check out. I had limits to what I could check out (only 1 book per visit). I was NOT allowed to check out DVDs or videos because my grandmother considered them a waste of time. Then there were certain books I was shy about checking out, knowing my grandmother might judge them inappropriate (fantasy books or popular children’s books). That’s not to say that had I been given a free card, I would have been allowed to check out or read or watch all of the things I might have wanted to, as my grandmother always did a good job monitoring our time at her house, but my intellectual freedom was restricted even more for lack of my own library card.

I’m looking forward to further exploring the issue and coming to some kind of understanding about the purpose/need for fees in a public library setting.

In the ALA’s An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights  under the Labeling and Rating Systems section, it states: “Labeling and rating systems present distinct challenges to these intellectual freedom principles…When labeling is an attempt to prejudice attitudes, it is a censor’s tool.  The American Library Association opposes labeling as a means of predisposing people’s attitudes toward library materials.” I agree with this statement. But it’s also important to keep this in mind: There’s a fine line between labeling as a means of predisposing people’s attitudes and labeling as a means of organizing by content.

While I certainly understand and support the legitimate concern about deliberately biasing someone for/against videos based solely on rating, I still don’t think this is a good rational for obscuring this information from the public. The SPL has a blog called “Shelf Talk” which posts reviews and opinions about the various books, movies, and other media. One quote I pulled from the site referring to a book series said “Although this second installment in the series isn’t quite as engrossing as its predecessor, it’s still pretty good.” This certainly sounds like a phrase that could potentially predispose a person’s attitude, doesn’t it?

In fact, couldn’t one make the argument that having a “juvenile fiction” section, a “YA fiction” section, and an “adult fiction” section is akin to advertising where the G, PG, PG-13, and rated R movies are located in the library? Aren’t we inadvertently biasing people for/against material by specifying age qualifiers on our call numbers?

According to the Library Bill of Rights article 3, “Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.” What about our responsibility to inform the public about the MPAA guidelines? Aren’t we essentially censoring this information from the public by not providing it?

I don’t think it is any more wrong for libraries to divide their collections into what the library considers “age-appropriate” groupings than it is for librarians to recommend certain review sites to patrons, or offer personal opinions about material when asked, or even to post a sign next to the videos listing the ratings or enabling a “search by ratings” function to the online search capabilities.

Why, if in a reference interview we can offer review sites and recommendations for a library patron who requests G-rated material, can’t we streamline the process by providing an online search option for movie ratings so he/she can develop his/her own list of movies ?

It doesn’t seem, to me, like incorporating such a search option would bias anybody who isn’t intentionally wanting to search for a particular rating anyway, and I think some patrons would call it a convenience. It’s not preventing access of information anymore than a librarian pointing the way to the juvenile section when a group of eight-year-olds approach the desk to ask where the kids books are located. That JUV sign isn’t saying that if you’re a kid you must read juv books. It’s merely a resource to enable patrons to make their own (informed) decisions more immediately, without having to wade through the whole selection of books to pick out the ones they prefer.

The only disadvantage I see to having a public display of movie ratings next to the movies is the effort it would cost for manual upkeep every time a new item is added to the collection. However, if a patron could search the online library catalog for movies with a “ratings” search, I do not see how this would impede/obscure the purpose of the library at all. We have searches narrowed down by year, by childrens, by teens, by adult (see the SPL website for an example under the audience section). These are labels we ourselves have imposed on our patronage, justifying it by claiming it a matter of convenience for the patron’s personal preference. Why can’t the same be done for movie ratings, no more no less?

We librarians, as champions of First Amendment Rights, owe it to our patronage to be honest, fair, and as transparent as possible about the materials we collect, even if it means the patron not choosing the items we would hope (such as a patron choosing a “safe” rated-G video to a “thought-provoking” rated-R one, or choosing from a certain genre only rather than a diverse selection of genres). Anything to prevent information enlightenment (such as obscuring this information so relevant to so many of our patrons) is working contrary to our cause.

One of the other things I looked at on the ALA IF page was a link under the IF Issues and Resources section. It was the Censorship in Schools page. I selected this link because of my thoughts in my last post and wanted to see what the ALA had to say about the issue (although I suspected I knew already, having read the manual).

On the page, I read that “A banning is the removal of those materials” that have been objected to by a person or group. This interpretation of the word “banning” surprised me, as it seems rather limited and uncompromising. If a kindergarten librarian puts “The Lord of the Flies” in their collection thinking that this is the kind of material kindergarteners should read, to me that says more about the librarian’s ignorance about kindergarteners than it does about his or her knowledge of IF rights. A parent or group might raise issue, but it might not be because they find the material objectionable. The book is simply unsuitable for the age group and reading level of most kindergarteners. If the librarian is deliberately choosing materials not suited for his or her patronage, don’t parents have the right to complain? The school librarian is, after all, wasting tax-payer money by selecting something like Truman Capotes “In Cold Blood” over something like “Where the Wild Things Are.” Furthermore, the parents who complain about such choices may not necessarily be wishing to restrict access for all children in kindergarten. If there is a kindergartener who is substantially advanced in reading and exceptionally mature in in his/her reading tastes, there are other ways for this child to get challenging materials. After all, shoudn’t the function of a school library differ from the function of a public library? Shouldn’t the school library be supplementing materials that go hand in hand with what the child is learning? A kindergarten library should have materials relevant to the average kindergartener, both in subject and in reading-level, whereas a public library can have reading materials for all levels and all subjects.

While I am certainly not advocating that all school libraries should ban interesting, provokative, or challenging material, I am simply questioning the assumption the ALA makes when it broadly defines banning as the removal of materials based on objections. Aren’t there many more layers to it than that?

At the same time, I can sort of understand why there would be some conflict in the school board about the age-appropriateness of this book. While I found the book immensely gratifying in college, I have to say I don’t think I would have understood the book so thoroughly if we’d reviewed it in high school. In fact, I might have been horrified by the explicit sexual abuse and language in the story, perhaps too immature to look past those aspects, and I might have found myself distracted by the prejudices that seem so prevalent in the story. In short, I think this book could have affected me in high school, but perhaps not the way it affected me in college as an older and slightly wiser (or at least more educated) person. Then again, this is only my personal speculation. I can’t say for sure that my reaction would have been wholly negative, nor can I assume that other young people would react the way I think I would have reacted. In college, I saw the story as one woman’s journey to become independent and confident in spite of the male influence, and then the great strides she later took in forgiving her oppressors. The sexuality, race, and economic factors were, to me, side issues but not the central theme of the plot. I only wonder if high school students would view it this way, or if they’d be diverted by all the other issues the story addresses?