Most Frequently Challenged Book? It's Perfectly Normal

Library Journal: 2008 August 31
http://tinyurl.com/6eolq3

Robie H. Harris's It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health was the most frequently challenged book last year, reports the American Library Association (ALA) in its annual list of most frequently challenged books. Harris had another book in the top ten as well. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom last year received a total of 405 challenges—a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.

The “10 Most Challenged Books of 2005” include:

• It's Perfectly Normal for homosexuality, nudity, sex education, religious viewpoint, abortion, and being unsuited to age group;
• Forever by Judy Blume for sexual content and offensive language;
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger for sexual content, offensive language, and being unsuited to age group;
• The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier for sexual content and offensive language;
• Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher for racism and offensive language;
• Detour for Emmy by Marilyn Reynolds for sexual content;
• What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones for sexual content and being unsuited to age group;
• Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey for anti-family content, being unsuited to age group, and violence;
• Crazy Lady! by Jane Leslie Conly for offensive language; and
• It's So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families by Robie H. Harris for sex education and sexual content.

Most of the challenges include books aimed at juveniles. ALA pointed out that some books on previous lists, including John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were not on this year’s list.

Tips for the worried librarian relative to Gustav

LISNews - Librarian And Information Science News
Sun, 08/31/2008 - 16:53 — StephenK

As seen in the past, hurricanes are big news. We worry about loved ones and the electronic communications bring us ever closer. As noted in the response to Hurricane Katrina, communications were a major issue. Rumors easily spread out of the Superdome and due to those massive communications nets those rumors whipped up pretty drastic hysteria...

http://lisnews.org/tips_worried_librarian_relative_gustav_0

Canwest Raise-a-Reader Day

Canwest Raise-a-Reader Day is Wednesday, September 24, 2008. If ever you can write a letter to the editor about school libraries and get it published, that will be the week.

Remember to include your name, address, email and phone number (where they can reach you to verify the authenticity of the letter).

Canwest papers:

Vancouver Sun
sunletters@png.canwest.com

Province
provletters@png.canwest.com

Times Colonist
letters@tc.canwest.com

National Post
http://tinyurl.com/5rtkch

Vancouver Island Newspaper Group Inc.
http://www.canada.com/vancouverisland/index.html

Van Net Newspapers
http://www.van.net/

Education by the Numbers

Ministry of Education: 2008 August 22
http://tinyurl.com/5l8zh9

Recent Investments in B.C. Schools

• $20 million in literacy innovation grants to school districts over the last four years.
• $4.25 million to help support local libraries and increased library access through programs like BC OneCard and Ask Away.
• $2.7 million under the ActNow BC strategy for LEAP BC to help increase healthy living and literary skills among preschoolers.

Did you know?

• Since 2001, government has invested more than $137 million in new literacy initiatives, including pre-literacy and early learning programs such as $9.5 million to operate the kindergarten readiness program Ready, Set, Learn and $2.7 million for the ActNow Literacy Education Activity and Play (LEAP BC) program that encourages literacy, physical activity and healthy eating in preschool-aged children.

Tories slashing $44.8-million in arts spending

Canadian Heritage programs hit hardest

Globe & Mail: 2008 August 20

The Tories are committed to cutting $44.8-million in spending on arts and culture by April of 2010, The Globe and Mail has learned.

As criticism of recent cuts continues, most recently from the mayors of Montreal and Toronto in a joint letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, details of several new cutbacks are emerging.

The Conservatives have earmarked 10 programs and parts of another to be eliminated and will reduce spending on two others, after a "strategic review" process that audited all Canadian Heritage programs for efficiency and effectiveness.

All but one cut falls under the Heritage purview, the lone exception being the previously reported $4.7-million PromArt, a grant program for foreign travel administered by Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

The most expensive of five new cuts approved in February was the $11.7-million Canadian Memory Fund, which gives federal agencies money to digitize collections and mount them online. Also chopped were the $3.8-million Culture.ca Web portal; the $560,000 Canadian Cultural Observatory; the $5.64-million research and development component of Canadian Culture Online; and the $2.1-million Northern Distribution Program, which distributes the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network signal to 96 Northern communities.

Funding to the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Magazine Fund will also drop by $1-million and $500,000 respectively.

July brought another round of cuts, a Heritage Department spokesman said, which included the previously reported $300,000 Audio-Visual Trust, the $1.5-million Canadian Independent Film and Video Fund, the $2.5-million National Training Program for the Film and Video Sector and the $7.13-million Trade Routes, in addition to cuts and reductions totalling $3.4-million to the Stabilization Project and Capacity Building elements of the Canadian Arts and Heritage Sustainability Program.

The departments says a rarely advertised $500,000 annual fund - part of the Sustainability program designed to rescue arts organizations on the brink of extinction - has also been axed, after helping rescue four groups on the brink of disaster in the past six years: the Winnipeg Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic and Théâtre du Rideau Vert received $250,000; and the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal received $100,000.

Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay and Toronto Mayor David Miller's joint letter to Mr. Harper, which decried a perceived reversal in a generous Conservative approach to the arts, only added to the exasperation of the Prime Minister's communications director, Kory Teneycke.

"To listen to some in the arts community and the opposition, you would think that there's blood in the streets," he said.

"When we find examples of programs that are clearly not meeting their objectives, without apologies we will cancel them. That is the entire purpose of Strategic Review. We owe that to taxpayers," Mr. Teneycke added, calling PromArt "a boondoggle."

Freepath--a tool a librarian (and a teacher and a presenter and a student) can love

Freepath--a tool a librarian (and a teacher and a presenter and a student) can love: "

Every once in a while a new tool makes me almost want to be a PC user. Take Freepath, launched yesterday in public beta.



Although Free...

ALSC provides “Kids Reading List” for Oprah’s Web site

ALA: 2008 August 12

CHICAGO—The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), has teamed up with “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to provide a Kids Reading List on the show’s Web site.

The list, available at www.oprah.com, is divided into five age groups, from infant to 2 through 12 and up. Each grouping contains an annotated bibliography of librarian- recommended reading. There is also a separate “Classics” section, grouped by age ranges, giving parents the opportunity to share the books they once loved with their own children. The Web site also provides a list of ways to make reading fun for kids and other helpful tips for parents.

“One of our goals as librarians is to provide all children with quality reading materials,” said ALSC President Pat Scales. “By teaming up with Oprah’s Book Club, we’re able to connect with a wide range of people we may not have reached otherwise. Whether children come into our library or are given a book from our recommended reading list, we are helping our youngest and most important patrons.”

The Kids Reading List was complied by the ALSC Quicklists Consulting Committee, which works to promote books and other resources through recommendations, compilations of lists and related services.

ALSC is the world’s largest organization dedicated to the support and enhancement of library service to children. With a network of more than 4,200 children’s and youth librarians, literature experts, publishers and educational faculty, ALSC is committed to creating a better future for children through libraries. To learn more about ALSC, visit its Web site at www.ala.org/alsc.