[LM_NET] Mature collection

[Jean Townes <townesj@PEAK.ORG>]

This is the message that I had earlier sent to Lindy that had bounced so
it wasn't in her HIT.

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I have a variation of this problem as I work with a 7-12th grade school.
What is OK for 12th grade is not at all the same as what is generally (but
not always) OK for 7th grade.

I really don't think you want to go to trying to label books! All sorts of
problems will come up.  How do you decide what is good for one student
when it may not be good for another?  If you start labeling what is "safe"
for one population then you are going to be held responsible for making a
decision that really needs to rest with the student and parents.

What I did was to put a statement in the student handbook about how the
library needed to serve the needs of all students,students have different
interests, some students are more mature than others, different families
have different expectations and that students and parents need to select
books on the basis of what works for them, and if a student ever checks
out a book that they or their parents are uncomfortable with to bring it
back to the library and we'll help them find a different book.

And yes it has affected a bit my selections.  Books that sound VERY edgey
and are rated for 10th grade up I tend to think twice about. Sometimes I
go ahead and order them and sometimes I don't. But I am also dealing with
a rural very conservative school district that until two years ago when I
started working with it had a fiction collection that consisted largely of
1970's or earlier copyrights.  With a tremendous amount of those
historical romances.




Jean Townes, ESD Library Consultant
Central Linn School District
townesj@peak.org
541-745-5210

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