LISNews: Librarian News

Will the Dr. Laura show makeover caused by ratings problems cause the show to appeal more or less to our base instincts? So, Dr. Laura, will the programmers ask you throw more prurient interest into your show? How does that square with your morality quest?

I read this quote from Robert Anton Wilson, in the Illuminatus trilogy recently:

\"Thus in preliterate societies taboos on spoken word are more numerous and more Draconic than at any more complex level of social organisation. With the invention of written speech -- hieroglyphic, ideographic, or alphabetical -- the taboos are shifted to this medium; there is less concern with what people SAY and more concern with what people WRITE. When a more efficient medium arrives, the taboos on television will decrease.\"

-- Read More

Freedomforum.
org has a nice Story on banned books, starting
with the very first banned book. The author, Paul
McMasters, comes down hard on would be censors
throughout the past few centuries.

\"Two
centuries of
enlightenment brought on by the advent of the printing
press have failed
to ease our fear of the new and the different.
We still struggle vainly to resist change. It is
something of a miracle that our children do
learn and grow, despite our best efforts to shut
out the light, to dim and deny it.\"

Someone sent in this Story from Salon on a complaint from a parent that prompted school officials to pull Aldous Huxley\'s novel \"Brave New World\" from library shelves in Alabama. \"Brave New World\" ranks 54th on the ALA\'s list of the top 100 books drawing complaints during the 1990s.

\"Kathleen Stone of Elberta filed the complaint in letters to the school and Gov. Don Siegelman. She said Wednesday the novel\'s references to orgies, self-flogging, suicide and the characters\' contempt for religion, marriage and family do not make it a good choice for high school students.

\"When you\'re a college student, it\'s one thing, but I don\'t think too much of assigning this to high school students,\" Stone said.

Mary Musgrave was the first one to send in The Story from TRNOnline. A federal judge struck down Wichita Falls, TX \"gay books\" library resolution saying the controversial rule was unconstitutional. The case stems from a two-year controversy over \"Heather Has Two Mommies\" and \"Daddy\'s Roommate\". They has set up a petition system to allow library patrons to ask the library to move children\'s books to other sections of the library.
It required the signatures of 300 card holders who were 18 or older and had lived in Wichita Falls for at least six months. No word on how many children turned gay from the books. -- Read More