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ALSC Intellectual Freedom Commitee members are looking forward to a third year of contributing to the ALSC Blog. Our blog posts are usually scheduled for the third Saturday of the month and we have a whole pile of interesting topic ideas to work through.

The ALSC Intellectual Freedom Committee serves as a liaison between ALSC and the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee and all other groups within ALA concerned with intellectual freedom; we advise the division on matters before the Office of Intellectual Freedom and their implication for library service to children; we make recommendations to the ALA IF Committee for changes to policies regarding library service to children; and we promote in-service and continuing education.

This year we are planning to follow our blog posts with an intellectual freedom themed discussion on ALSC-L and we are looking at some options for intellectual freedom trainings for youth services librarians. We have a busy year ahead of us!

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns for the ALSC IF Committee. We would love to hear from you!

Heather Acerro, ALSC Intellectual Freedom Committee Chair

Dear Diary:

I keep you locked and hidden in my favorite secret hidey-hole to keep snoopy people OUT OF MY BUSINESS! THIS MEANS YOU [_______________________________________________]!!!

Fill in name of older, or younger, or every sibling above in ALL CAPS

Did you keep one of those when you were a kid? Or did you grow up as one of the digital natives and managed to get a Facebook or Myspace account, maybe even before you were technically of age to get one? Did you think about everyone who might read it? Were there some people you really did not want to read what you wrote? There may have been a few of them. And now there are many more that young authors on the Internet don’t even think about.

Bruce Farrar, Intellectual Freedom Committee

It’s not just the National Security Agency. When a former contractor for the intelligence agency let the cat out of the bag last year, visions of large posters reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” began to float through our heads. But it is not just governments who are interested in your personal thoughts, opinions, friends and behaviors. Right next to Big Brother, and looking over his shoulder, is Big Data who may be even more interested in taking a peek at your personal life and business, and most especially what you are buying and how much you spend for it.

Last month’s Choose Privacy Week raised consciousness about all this. In case you missed it, ALA started off the Week with the posting of the newly revised Privacy Tool Kit, containing a wealth of information on Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and how the right of privacy affects School Libraries and Public and Academic Library Services to Minors. It’s all important stuff, so it’s time to click on those links and start studying up, if you haven’t had a chance to do it yet.

But what does it mean to your customers? You know them: those smiling faces looking up at you in Story Time, the eager readers who look to you for the coolest new book to read, or the gamers crowding around your computers, blissfully ignoring the scowling grown-up waiting to type up her résumé. How aware are they of how much of their PII they are posting for all the online world to see and what the consequences might be?

Unlike us, they don’t think in acronyms like PII, ALA IFC, COPPA, or IFRT; and although children can be effective advocates with parents and caregivers, they aren’t mobilized for advocacy on a policy and legislation level yet. So how do we reach them at their developmental level? Planning a lecture on Your Privacy Rights filled with PowerPoint slides crammed full of text won’t pump up your program statistics and win you accolades from library administration. I know you’ve already thought of the attractive display of children’s books about Internet safety. But what else might work?

• Could it be something incorporated into Story Time? Perhaps an updated folktale: Little Red Riding Hood learns not to chat with strangers who want to know information that they don’t need to know, or the story of the Three Little Pigs, including the tragic fate of the first two who shared their PII online. The first one received a package in the mail from Wolf.com and then there was nothing left of the first little pig. All that remained was a large charge on his parents’ credit card for the package. The second overcame his shyness and shared all his bad feelings and fears about wolves at school, and then was mercilessly bullied by them and came to a bad end. But the third little pig outwits the wolf by following safe and sound online practices.

• Could it be online after school gaming? There’s an online interactive version of the Three Little CyberPigs at Privacy Playground, and several games at the Federal Trade Commission’s Just for You Kids page. Games follow a brief introduction by library staff about online safety and protecting PII.

• Could it be a program parents and kids held in your computer lab that includes safe and fun places to visit, and incorporates safe practices and tells parents about the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and shows them the Protect Kids Online page at the Federal Trade Commission site?

Let’s hear your brainstorming idea—or even better than brainstorming, brag about the program you put on at your library! That’s the kind of brag you could take to your supervisor, and it stands a very good possibility of showing up on your next performance evaluation. Plus we’re all dying to know about finger plays and crafts that can help protect privacy.

Reading Homeland by Cory Doctorow brings up many themes about the NSA, Privacy, and Edward Snowden.

June 5^th marks the anniversary of Snowden disclosing thousands of classified documents, and Fight for the Future is organizing a campaign to educate internet users about security, and encourage the use of free privacy tools.

Sunday the New York Times ran an article about NSA who are creating a database of photos for facial recognition software.

Historically Libraries have been advocates for Intellectual Freedom (check out the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom for more information). We fight for our customer’s rights to have access to information, but as we work with the public, especially teens, we often need to teach them how to protect themselves online rather than just have us do the protection for them.

Now is a great opportunity to have programs on internet safety.

Below are some resources you can use to create an internet safety program for your community.

• Onguard Online has a great resource for parents to talk to their children about internet usage.
• Netsmartz by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• Google Safety
• 4 Net Safety by Sprint

Consider putting print outs or bookmarks about internet safety out with a display of Dystopian Fiction like Cory Doctorow’s books and Web Programming books.

Even if you don’t have time to create a display, consider purchasing the independently produced audio edition of Homeland, exclusively available on Cory Doctorow’s website, and adding it to your Overdrive Downloadable collection.

According to ALA, “intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored”.

We all know that there is a digital divide and that there are fewer books in homes and neighborhoods that are less advantaged. We also know that children in more privileged homes hear many more vocabulary words than those in poorer homes. This is not news. However, libraries are bridging that gap by providing books and computers to people in low-income neighborhoods. Right?

Well, kind of. It’s more complicated than that. It turns out that just providing the materials and computers does not close the gap, especially for young children.

In fact, in their paper “Worlds Apart: One City, Two Libraries, and Ten Years of Watching Inequality Grow,” Susan B. Neuman and Donna C. Celano posit that for both print and digital resource use, it’s all about adult involvement. In their 10-year-long study in Philadelphia, they discovered that while adults in the more economically advantaged neighborhood were continually interacting with their children while the kids used both print and digital media, the kids in the poorer area were mostly left to their own devices. And without adult involvement, kids demonstrate “short bursts of activity, almost frenetic in nature”.

Even with so-called intuitive software, digital play is not as self-sufficient as it seems. “Toddlers and preschoolers, although they appear capable, are not all that intuitive at negotiating the software… Without help, children can revert to random clicking”. Without parent support, educational computers take on a different kind of role: that of a video arcade. Neuman and Celano suggest several action steps in order to close this gap, most notably “targeted human resources,” also known as adult mentors and technology specialists. It turns out that simply providing the materials does not solve the problem. In order for our less-advantaged children to “seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction” they need interaction with supportive adults. Now that you think about it, this is not a surprise, is it?

So what can we do to help bridge this gap?

For further reading, see the following book by Neuman and Celano: Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance: Poverty, Literacy, and the Development of Information Capital.

Amanda Goldson, ALSC Intellectual Freedom Committee

Did you see the news about Hop on Pop? It was challenged at the Toronto Public Library and retained. This was only one of seven challenges that TPL received in the past year.

Book challenges happen all of the time.

Please remember to report your challenges to the Office of Intellectual Freedom. Only 20 to 25% of challenges are reported each year! You can report challenges easily and anonymously through this online challenge reporting form.

If you need help with a challenge, there is a lot of information at the Office for Intellectual Freedom’s website. You can also email the ALSC Intellectual Freedom Committee and we would be happy to support you and help you in any way we can.

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in the airport with library colleagues and we started talking about all of the positives that can come out of a materials challenge. Challenges can be stressful, but they do bring good for libraries, books and reading. Here are four of the ideas we talked about:

• A book challenge starts a valuable community conversation.
• It gets people to read books that might stretch their minds.
• It puts media attention on authors, books, reading and intellectual freedom.
• It highlights the role of the public library and how we work to represent the entire community in our collections, programs and services.

What do you have to add to this list?

Every year around this time all the children’s services staff in our District gather together for one full day of staff development. It’s always a fun day; a chance to see everybody and catch up on news, and the trainings are interesting and relevant. One of the highlights is when our collection development librarian does her annual roundup of patron concerns and challenges, with a timely reminder of District policies and procedures relating to the same. It’s not as dry as it sounds, this particular librarian has a great sense of humor, and there is undoubtedly some humor to be found in a few of those instances (how did that end up in the juvenile collection?). I believe it’s also important to be discussing these things frankly with all staff. This year it was also a timely reminder that I ought to follow up with my newest staff member to see if the training had raised questions, and to ensure that he was aware of the policies and procedures we have in place in the event of any patron concerns.

A week later I got a chance to sit down with him and I was happy to find that the training had piqued his interest and he did indeed have questions. From there the conversation spilled over into patron privacy issues and a discussion of the ALA Library Bill of Rights and Freedom to Read Statement. Being passionate about intellectual freedom I took full advantage of this “teachable moment” to encourage and foster his interest in how the library profession is upholding the first and third amendments and how much of why-we-do-what-we-do-the-way-that-we-do-it is related, and how important it is that we continue to value these core values of our profession, and I probably ran on as much as this sentence does, if not more. (*Breathe now*) But really, advocacy should begin at home, and he was surprised, as many folks new to library work are, at how hard we librarians work towards the rights that library users enjoy.

How do you introduce the subject with your new hires? How do you keep the topic alive within your workplace? Please share!

Claire Davies for the ALSC Intellectual Freedom Committee

Dude, report challenges. It is important.

According to the Office of Intellectual Freedom’s estimations, only 20 to 25 percent of challenges are reported.

Please take the time to report challenges. It is easy. There are several ways to do it (and you can choose to remain anonymous). Here is the simple online challenge reporting form. This page has a form to print out and fax or mail in and the phone number for the OIF if you need assistance with a challenge.

Speaking of needing assistance with challenges, wouldn’t it be nice to see a sample challenge response letter to get an idea of what to say? Dude! It is your lucky day. While we wouldn’t dream of suggesting that a cookie cutter letter would do for every challenge, here is an outline of a letter to give you a place to start:

Dear [insert name here],

This letter is in reply to your recent request for reconsideration of the book [insert title here] by [insert author/illustrator here], published in the [insert country here] by [insert publisher here].

As you know, at [insert library here] we provide a wide range of materials for people of all ages and beliefs. Opinions, values and interests in our community are diverse and the collection at [insert library here] is built to reflect this diversity. We recognize that not all books will be suitable for all children, therefore, we strongly encourage parents to accompany their children to the library to select materials.

[Insert title here] was purchased for [insert library here] because [insert reason here: popularity, reviews, customer purchase request, awards, etc.].

Based on the reviews of [insert title here] (copies enclosed) and [insert any other reason mentioned above], we have decided to retain this title in the collection for which it was purchased.

Please contact me if you have further questions or concerns. If you wish to appeal this decision, please [insert information from your library’s reconsideration policy here]. In addition to the reviews, I am enclosing a copy of the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights statement.

Sincerely,

[insert name here]

The concept of Banned Books has always been a funny one to me.  I grew up and thrived in a household where I was encouraged to dress how I wanted, be who I wanted, think how I wanted, and read what I wanted.  No thoughts, ideas, or beliefs were ever off limits; as I long as I practiced the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), I was free to live my life how I chose

I moved around a lot as child and called many school districts and library branches home.  Some more conservative than others, but I was never told what I could or could not read.

I encountered the concept of Banned Books for the first time in fourth grade, when I came across a book that explained on the cover it was a compilation of writers who all had had books banned at some point in their career. At that time in my life, we lived in Ithaca, New York, and a wonderful children’s librarian named June Gilligan briefly explained the concept to me, but told me that I should never let anyone tell me what I could or could not read.

Now years later, I am in my second year of a three year graduate school program at Indiana University.  I’m grateful to be receiving a dual degree in Library Science and Information Science from an institution that allows me to develop my own focus on multicultural children’s literature, but I am disappointed that there is little to no discussion about banned books in our classrooms.

As future librarians, it is our duty to share knowledge and information, thoughts and beliefs, stories and tales with our patrons, regardless of whether or not they are widely accepted or on the best-seller list.  As librarians we cannot educate children about Banned Books, their history and the important role they play in our culture, if we do not know it ourselves.

Yes, you may know why Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian was challenged, or why Bill Martin Jr.’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?  was banned, but can you tell me what effect this had on our culture, library policies and other authors?

Without this information, we are allowing a teachable moment to pass us by, hurting ourselves and our patrons.   A Mahatma Gandhi quote is often paraphrased to “be the change you wish to see in the world”.   This holds true when it comes to Banned Books education.

The chances of my wish for at the very least a workshop on Banned Books will probably not happen in my Indiana University lifetime, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take the opportunity to educate myself and others; and neither should you.

Take time to learn more about Banned Books- www.bannedbooksweek.org  is a great place to start.   Take this week to incorporate Banned Books into your programming too, maybe read Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen at story time, have kids write a postcard saying why their favorite Banned Books shouldn’t be challenged, or start small, and make your staff pick’s collection all Banned and Challenged Books.

Most importantly, don’t let the education stop here.  While we honor Banned Books with one week in September, it is important to remember that they are challenged 365 days a year.  Therefore, it’s crucial that we continue to educate ourselves, our patrons, and fight for everyone’s right to read throughout the year.

Alyson Feldman-Piltch is a graduate student at Indiana University.  When she isn’t reading or working, she can be found cheering for the Red Sox or at the Bonobo exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo.  You can follow her on twitter at @aly_fp.

 Although she has many favorite Banned Books,  she will be posing with Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson for her “Read Banned Books” poster this year.

Not only do I read banned books, but I buy them as well. Let me start with a story. At the end of August, on my final evening of a lovely trip to Cape Cod, I was checking out Herridge Books in Wellfleet. Herridge Books is a used book store tucked in a corner not far from Mayo Beach and Wellfleet Center. I was looking for Church Mice books, while my daughter wanted ghost stories. You could have

No doubt you ensure that kids have access to books on every topic under the sun. You must celebrate Banned Books Week with a nice display of And Tango Makes Three, In the Night Kitchen and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Of course your library has a nice policy on book challenges and you have the forms ready to hand out to customers. But what happens after you get an official book challenge and your library follows all of the action steps and the issue has been resolved? Do you report the challenge to the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom or do you file the challenge away?

According to the OIF’s estimations, only 20 to 25 percent of challenges are reported. This is crazy! Can you imagine NOT HAVING ACCESS to 75 percent of your programming statistics? How would you determine where to focus your budget, time and attention? The answer: you could guess.

Please take the time to report challenges. It is easy. There are several ways to do it (and you can choose to remain anonymous). Here is the simple online challenge reporting form. This page has a form to print out and fax or mail in and the phone number for the OIF if you need assistance with a challenge.

And spread the word to your colleagues. Here you can find images like the cool banner above that you are free to print out or use online. Spread the word far and wide, the OIF needs you to report each and every challenge.

The Dallas Public Library was definitely the place to be last night. Starting with the reception that preceded his presentation, YA author/rock star John Green was swarmed by loyal readers who were anything but quiet!

In his introduction to John Green, Freedom to Read Foundation, (FTRF) President Kent Oliver shared a general overview of the kinds of cases the organization has been recently involved in; a harmful to minors statute to be applied to the Internet in Ohio, the removal of Vamos a Cuba in Florida, and video game bans in Illinois and Minnesota. FTRF is a legal arm of the American Library Association that John Green thanked several times throughout his presentation for their support to First Amendment Issues.

John shared the controversy at DePew High School in New York when Looking for Alaska was challenged for being inappropriate (well, pornographic were the actual words used) to teach to 11th graders in 2008-2009-even after permission slips were sent home to parents to okay their child reading the book or receiving an alternate one. John created this video, stating, among other things, that he’s not a pornographer. Due to widespread community support the book remained in the curriculum. Probably not a well known fact, John shared that he set out to write Looking for Alaska as Christian fiction.

Some additional points John made throughout his presentation included:

• Librarians and teachers are trained and paid to make decisions on choosing books for their students to read.
• Public education is for the good of the community. What books are being read in the classroom is decided by Librarians and teachers, whom the community put value in, in the first place.
• Teen readers are not going to model their relationships directly after the characters in books.
• Penthouse is not appropriate to teach in schools

Okay, so I did take the last point a bit out of context, but it was a point made during the presentation to show the extreme of content-Looking for Alaska, not even coming close.

John took many questions from the audience, careful not to let too many spoilers said about the Fault in Our Stars, his latest YA book. He urged attendees, particularly teens, to keep reading his books and not be afraid to share why they’re important.

“There’s something in my library to offend everyone.”

So read a favorite t-shirt of Dorothy Broderick, a legend in YA librarianship, a great defender of intellectual freedom, and an unforgettable personality. Dorothy died Saturday, Dec. 17, at 8:45 p.m.

Dorothy  was an active member of ALA, including YALSA. Her work was recognized repeatedly in the library field, from the prestigious Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award in 1987 to the Grolier Award from ALA in 1991 and the Freedom to Read Foundation’s Roll of Honor Award in 1998.

Dorothy’s greatest contribution to YA librarianship, however, is the mentoring and personal guidance she gave to hundreds of librarians throughout her career, as a librarian in the field, a professor at five major library schools, an author, and through her work as editor of VOYA (co-founded with her partner, Mary K. Chelton, in their home in 1978).

YALSA and YA librarianship wouldn’t be what it is today without Dorothy. The YALSA Board of Directors offered a resolution in her honor in 2007, calling her “the glue that that bound many of us together in earlier YALSA years,” and noting her “wicked wit,” which belied a “a heart of gold, a brilliant mind, a love of librarianship, [and] a strong sense of right and wrong.”

In my early days in YALSA, in the 1990s, Dorothy was still attending conferences. It was always a delight to see her, and to hear her asides about whatever was going on at the time. Dorothy was also one of the first editors to publish my writing—articles and reviews and VOYA, so I am personally grateful to her. I’m so glad I had the opportunity to know her and work with her.

She will be missed, but never forgotten.  The Board of Directors, and all of YALSA, are grateful to Dorothy for everything she gave to YA librarianship. Our thoughts are with Mary K. and their family.

Sarah Flowers, YALSA President

A few weeks ago, my husband, a security consultant, met with a city about finding vulnerabilities in their network. When he met with the city’s library director, one of the questions he asked was, “You don’t filter your public computers, do you?” My husband texted me immediately after his meeting to say, “You should be proud of me. I told them to keep their public computers unfiltered.”

There is some irony to this. He is, after all, the same man who used to be responsible for blocking access to Web sites at his former company, but his stance on filtering makes complete sense. His company had an Internet policy for its employees, for one, and he kept constant vigilance to make sure nothing got past the filters that shouldn’t and that innocuous sites were still accessible. His stance is that filters should not be used in a public setting, especially when constant modifications cannot be made, because it infringes on First Amendment rights.

I have an additional reason to add to his. The privacy of our customers, no matter their age, should be paramount. This especially applies to teens, many of whom do not feel comfortable asking an adult they don’t know about a sensitive issue. Filters are always flawed. They either block too much or not enough. Imagine, for example, a transgendered teen coming to your desk because they can’t access a site that will give them helpful resources, or a teenage girl who thinks she might be pregnant but can’t access any sites about abortion, or any teen with any issue that might be blocked by overfiltering.  If the teens at your library feel comfortable enough and trust you enough to come to you for help finding information on the sticky subjects, that’s fantastic, but many teens at many libraries feel too uncomfortable to ask, so they don’t ask at all. We should never put our patrons in that position, and if removing filters from public access computers solves that problem, then I’m all for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying “Yay, pornography in the library!” by any means. A lack of filters does pose challenges, but they are far outweighed by the benefits, in my opinion, because not only are filters inherently flawed, but some are intentionally so due to the bias of their creators. If you want more information about filtering, check out ALA’s very comprehensive page on the subject, http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/ifissues/filtersfiltering.cfm. Does your library use filtering on its public Internet computers? Respond in the comments!

Banned Books Week (September 26 to October 1) is coming up! This is the perfect time to remind your community of your role as an Intellectual Freedom Fighter. To help you get ready there is a bunch of information on the Banned Books Week Website including instructions for participating in the  Virtual Read-Out.

I love reading the reasons the classics were banned and I use the yearly challenged book round up as a reading list. Looks like I have a lot of great books to catch up on.

Speaking of fantastic banned/challenged books,  my current favorite is Maurice Sendak’s In The Night Kitchen. I love to read this aloud to my 2-year-old who thinks that Mickey is the funniest kid in the world. Just think, without librarians like you protecting his right to read, he wouldn’t even know who Mickey is. What is YOUR favorite banned/challenged book?

With all of the talk about the banning of Angry Management by Chris Crutcher and the removal of the ban on The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, it seems like it’s a good time to talk about policies. I hope that everyone has a Policy for the Reconsideration of Library Materials, or some other similarly titled policy. If not, the time to form one is yesterday.

Check out ALA’s resources at http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/index.cfm. There you’ll find a sample form to give to patrons challenging materials, and tips for how to talk to the patron with the challenge. Everyone, not just those who would ultimately handle a challenge, needs to know what to do when a patron wants to ban a book. At my library, circulation staff are instructed to immediately refer the person to a manager or a reference librarian and to not say anything in defense of the material or the library. Because our circulation desk is right by the front door, circulation staff are most likely to have first contact with the patron, and they need to know what to do.

When a patron has a challenge, you should be ready with the form for them to fill out, as well as copies of your materials selection policy and selection procedures. If they still want to proceed, make sure your library has a process for reviewing the material and making a recommendation to administration, and if the patron is still not satisfied with the decision, make sure that the appeal hearing is made public. ALA also has tips for talking to the media during the challenge process.

Depending on your library’s procedures, you may be involved a lot or very little in the challenge process, but considering that YA novels make up most of the top ten of the most frequently challenged books each year, we as YA librarians need to be aware of how to handle these challenges effectively.