Comment Re:Librarians (Score 1) 912
This may have been mentioned, but librarians are not often in total control of their collections.
At the College where my wife, a librarian, works, the acquistions budget is divided between departments; the portion that each department receives be being based on the number of books (regardless of subject matter) checked out by students of that major. In addition the acquistions librarian is charged with processing requests for new books by professors to be added to the collection before they purchase books for the general collection.
The Fine Arts and Film deparments are the largest on campus, with the most students; so we have an excellent film and art catalog library and about 5 shelves on American history total, since there are only two history professors to teach required courses. There are a fair number of books in the Economics/Political Science section, but thats decreasing because enrollment in the department has fallen off and books aren't being replaced as they are discarded.
The filtering that Librarians do doesn't occur in a social or political vaccuum, and they are often not the most powerful idealogical faction on a campus. Or in a given community, as the many recorded instances of factional pressures on librarians to ban certain books can demonstrate.
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedb ooksweek.htm
At the College where my wife, a librarian, works, the acquistions budget is divided between departments; the portion that each department receives be being based on the number of books (regardless of subject matter) checked out by students of that major. In addition the acquistions librarian is charged with processing requests for new books by professors to be added to the collection before they purchase books for the general collection.
The Fine Arts and Film deparments are the largest on campus, with the most students; so we have an excellent film and art catalog library and about 5 shelves on American history total, since there are only two history professors to teach required courses. There are a fair number of books in the Economics/Political Science section, but thats decreasing because enrollment in the department has fallen off and books aren't being replaced as they are discarded.
The filtering that Librarians do doesn't occur in a social or political vaccuum, and they are often not the most powerful idealogical faction on a campus. Or in a given community, as the many recorded instances of factional pressures on librarians to ban certain books can demonstrate.
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/banned
