zlacker

>>Anon84+(OP)
Yeah but “banning books” isn’t much of a thing. Even the ALA talks about “challenged books.”

And most of the controversy involves school libraries - although there are some exceptions.

This bill just doesn’t do much. I’m not opposed to it. I guess it might do a little good.

But it’s posturing by politicians.

>>pyuser+ab
> And most of the controversy involves school libraries - although there are some exceptions.

This is splitting hairs: removing books from school libraries is a de facto ban on those books. Neither the article nor law implies that "book ban" in this context means anything other than "school book ban."

>>woodru+Xc
> removing books from school libraries is a de facto ban on those books.

No, it isn't. There are millions of books that aren't in school libraries. Are they all de facto banned?

Confidently declaring something doesn't make it true. A library deciding not to carry a book is not a book ban.

>>imgabe+4D
This is the fifth or sixth time someone has started a thread with this “gotcha,” and the answer is still no: curation is a logistical concern, not a doctrinal one. Banning is a consequence of doctrine; curation is a consequence of books being expensive to categorize and store.

>>woodru+BE
Nonsense. Curation is not purely logistical. It requires some judgment to select which books they believe are good and appropriate for their audience. Otherwise you wouldn’t need a librarian at all, just a random number generator to randomly select however many books will fit in the library out of all the books available.

Obviously they pick some books and not others for some reasons. If you like their reasons you call it curation, if you don’t like their reasons you call it banning.

>>imgabe+nG
That reason is called popularity. Librarians discard books that aren’t frequently requested so that they can bring in books that are frequently requested.

Randomly selecting books for rotation would bias by sheer publication volume. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my local library to be 40% Atkins Diet by volume, regardless of how positive I might feel about it.

>>woodru+SG
I'm sure if they filled the school library with pornography and comic books, that would be really popular with 13-17 year olds, but they don't do that. Obviously there are considerations aside from purely what is popular that go into deciding which books to put in the school library.

>>imgabe+CK
School libraries are filled with comic books, and they are popular.

Nobody is talking about pornography; not everything that contains sex or violence is pornographic in nature (much less obscene).