Last Wednesday, Sophia and I did an informal interview with the University of Mary Washington’s research librarian, Elizabeth Heitsch. We asked her about how we should go about getting information from Accomack County public schools in relation to the case in late 2016.

First, we asked about her experience with censorship and wanted to see whether or not she had personally dealt with a challenge. She said that because she works at a college level academic library, she has never had to deal with a challenge. Getting complaints at college libraries is not a common occurrence because parents aren’t paying attention to what their adult children are reading. Most books are challenged in grade schools because parents are more concerned about what their kids are reading.

We then asked her how to approach talking to the school because we were fearful that they weren’t going to provide information. I don’t know if they would want this case to be revisited due to the controversy surrounding how they failed to go through the proper book challenging procedure.  We wanted to get any tips that would heighten our chances of getting a positive response. She suggested that we should email rather than call because it would allow us to revise what we want to say and would help us to get our point across. I’m happy she suggested this because I really didn’t want to call them because I get uncomfortable talking on the phone.

Using Sophia’s email, we sent a message to the tech librarian of the entire school system because we could not find any school specific librarian. The case was for the whole school system so hopefully we messaged the right person. We made sure that we came across as non threatening and made it clear that we weren’t going to trash everyone involved in the case. We gave a link to the COPLAC page so they could see what our goals are in getting this information. For now, we haven’t gotten a reply, but hopefully in the next week we get some sort of response.

We are trying to find more information about what actually went on in the case because, as I said before, they did not follow the proper protocol in dealing with a book challenge. We have the basic understanding that the book that was challenged, To Kill a Mockingbird, should have been left on the shelves while the board voted on whether or not it would be banned. Instead, after the patron complaint had been filed, the books were immediately taken off the shelves. We would like to figure out why this happened and if there were any other mistakes that were made. The case was voted on by the board and the book was reinstated. I would like to try to figure out if the protocol errors had something to do with the end result.

For the next week we are going to try to contact more people and hopefully get an interview with someone involved. We found the name of the woman who challenged the book but we only heard her name and don’t know how it is spelled. Ideally, we would interview her to get her perspective on what happened. We will continue to work on our site and plan our where we are going to put all of our information.

Accomack County. Taken from Wikimedia Commons