a library's still about books. and questions.

Instead of bathing in the Bahamas (I like to pretend I could afford a week-long vacation), I'm logging student teaching hours with the little ones. My project here, at present, in between reading to and sitting with the wee ones, is to address the Native American / American Indian collection. It is still about the books. And there are still many questions that weeding brings about, as far as collection development goes.



It's refreshing to recognize that not EVERYTHING is about the newest technologies.



I found this, here, and I find it to be a refreshingly concise stance:

"Timmy wrote on October 3, 2006 8:05 am:
" Although I'm sympathetic to the spirit of this, this is not the proper solution. What qualifications do these media specialists bring to the table as arbiters of cultural correctness? Further, what literature does "accurately" portray culture? As a working class kid I seldom saw my "culture" depicted in books I read in school, and when I did it was usually in clumsy stereotypes. Given the infinite complexity of culture it's difficult to imagine any work that could withstand full scrutiny, no matter what culture it happens to be written about. Beyond that, even ethnographic histories themselves are forever shifting and changing. How are these media specialists to jump into the midst of the cultural maelstrom and determine "proper" and "improper"? I love Beverly Slapin's point that these books need to be maintained because they are a chroncile of our misguided notions of the past that should humble us into recongnizing that we still live with misguided cultural notions today. I admire the solution of leaving the books on the shlves, with reviews attached that challenge some of the information in the book so that the reader is allowed to think for him/herself, and truly grasp that books today likely contain similar inaccuracies based on contemporary understandings that will one day be similarly challenged. There is a real education in these old books that view cultural issues so differently than we do today. ""