This past week, Karina and I met with a research librarian, Elizabeth Heitsch, at Simpson Library and talked about how to get in touch with people who was a part of the case from late 2016 in Accomack County. She remembers the case when it happened and how it was a big deal, so she already had an idea of what case we were investigating.
We asked her about her experience with censorship and because she works in an academic library she has not had anything challenged. Of course, their are patron complaints, but they never consider taking anything off the shelves. She pointed out that sometimes they have things like soft pornography because it is being used by a professor for academic research, which I found interesting. Usually there are access restrictions on those kinds of items, but the library will still provide and pay for it if being used for an academic purpose. Because it is an academic setting you can get away with a lot more than you could if it were a secondary high school or middle school. She pointed out that most of the time censorship happens because there are children and young adults under the age of eighteen reading the books that come into question.
After our conversation on her experience with censorship we asked how we should contact the school, because I was concerned we were going to be met with some pushback. This case kind of blew up in our area, and I am afraid they will not want to revisit it. Her main
suggestion for us was to send an email to the school librarian because usually they want to help as much as they are allowed. By emailing we could present ourselves as students and get across everything that we want to because usually over the phone it is difficult to convey why we are asking for this information and we tend to forget everything we wanted to talk about. Following our meeting and class on Wednesday, Karina and I composed a message to the contact page we found on the Accomack County Schools page with the template that Max sent us (thank you Max and Robert!). I haven’t received a reply yet, but hopefully I will before the end of Monday. If we don’t hear anything by then we are going to try to find another way to contact the school library.
We are looking into trying to contact the parent who complained about the case and we listened to her complaint in the School Board Meeting we found a recording of on the Accomack County School’s webpage. She makes a strong case for why they shouldn’t include To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the high school curriculum. The really interesting part about this case is we are finding that the school did not follow their own policy on how to handle learning resource complaints. It is a little confusing, but they took the books off the shelves and from the classroom when the complaint was made instead of waiting until they made their final decision. As it was, their final decision was to reinstate the two books and by mid-December they were back on the school’s library shelves. I would love it if we could interview the parent or the student, (with the parent’s permission of course), especially since the school decided against removing the books.
This coming week our focus is contacting more people involved in the case and researching the author a bit more. We started this past Wednesday putting our project site together and we are trying to figure out how exactly we want the layout to be. We are also starting to meet on Wednesdays from 12pm-2pm on campus and working on our project together in person. This way, if we get stuck with any digital technology thing we will have that time to get help and to put our site together. With the in person meetings, I think we can accomplish a lot over the next few weeks.