How+one+library+dealt+with+this+issue

Library Director Girls Preparatory School Chattanooga, TN ** ** November 10, 2008 ** When I became the director of the GPS library, I examined our collection development policy and found it to be sorely out of date and in need of attention. I queried the AISL listserv asking for help and received many examples, short and long, comprehensive and brief. After reading them all, examining our mission statement and educational strategic plan, I put together a collection development policy that best fit our school. Without a current policy, I had no where to go, no vision and no direction. However, I soon found that just having a vision and being ready to move forward with building a new fiction collection wasn’t enough. I had to begin to buy some new books that our girls were eager to read. I knew that books were getting edgier, more explicit, more like television, but I was still overwhelmed and a little dismayed at what I found. Edgy literature is on the rise and what are we to do?! Facing the question of “good literature” vs. what my students want to read and what’s out there for them, knowing that they are bombarded daily with sex, promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, divorce, parental neglect, and self-abuse from our television and media, I was at a total dilemma as to how to rebuild a fiction collection that was relevant, interesting, engaging, and inviting to today’s young readers. My thinking was that before I stuck my neck out and ordered some of the books my predecessor would not even consider purchasing, I had to be sure that my administration understood the problem and either stood behind me or disagreed with the need to build a new and relevant library collection and that would take our library in some new directions. Katie and I had read a number of new books that were iffy but well reviewed. They were suggestive, blatant, or downright out-of-the question! I had brought up the edgy book issue more than once in my weekly meetings with the associate headmaster and she suggested a meeting that included the librarians, the dean of faculty, the head of the English department, the principal of the middle school and one of our middle school English teachers who is a library advocate. The associate head invited the principles involved to put the right degree of emphasis on the importance of the meeting. We chose to have a lunch time, informal meeting and everyone came. Katie prepared a simple table with the titles of the books, the reviews they received, and examples of iffy quotations from the books themselves. We took the books with us for a visual display, read the excerpts in question and proceeded to make our English department head, the only male at the meeting, blush unmercifully! However, the meeting was a huge success and I came away feeling that the library was fully endorsed and the librarians fully supported. The consensus was that our girls are bombarded by sex on television, advertising, movies, magazines, billboards, and every other form of media known to exist! The committee agreed that our goal was to provide good literature and if the nature of the literature was changing even as our society is changing then we as a school could not and should not attempt to “protect” them from something they are seeing and hearing on a daily basis. . . and experiencing in real life! Since that meeting we are a little more relaxed but still keep our guard up and are ever diligent to what we order and to what we expose our girls. Our collection policy is in place. We continue to check our usual review sources. For authors we are not familiar with, either we preview or we have several 7th and 8th graders who have volunteered to be previewers for us. This is a great help since there is simply no way we can read every book that arrives for processing. We are very selective about whom we ask to preview. They have to be good readers who really like to read; therefore, they have read a lot of books and can make informed decisions. This adventure has been extremely successful and has engaged some new girls in the life of the library. Will we continue to fret? Absolutely! But we will continue to search for those books with the best writing, the best plots, the best character development. Does the book have to have a happy ending? No, but the resolution of the problems presented must be in line with our community’s ethics and moral code.
 * Marty Vaughn