Thus far, Robert and I have chosen our book, chosen our local case and begun to connect nation-wide instances of challenges and bans. Our book is absolutely The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and we are looking into the instance of a Tulsa teacher leaving the district in 1960. Robert has emailed a … Continue reading Progress Report #2 : Furthering Research
Tag: library
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.
The photo is taken from the Centennial Image Collection in UMW’s Digital Archives.
Karina and I met with UMW’s Simpson Library‘s Archivist this past Wednesday to see what tools she thought we might be able to use for our research. Carolyn Parsons is a former professor of mine (she taught my Archives and Society Class last semester), so she and I already know each other. She is the head of Special Collections and works together with the Digital Resource Librarian, Angie White. They help students find information within the collection, work to preserve the materials, and keep the depository organized. Professor Parsons was showing me how they had a leak in the ceiling of one of depository rooms, so they are also in the middle of getting that fixed and drying out materials that became damaged. Luckily for the most part, they only had a couple things severely damaged and for the most part are able to restore the other items.
We made the appointment with the intention of asking specifics regarding the book Maurice, but unfortunately because we do not have a local case with that particular book we had to rethink right before our meeting. From the local research Karina and I have done, we have found the To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been banned fairly recently in Accomack, Virginia, so we asked Professor Parsons where we may start in order to find primary resources.
She showed us a few other newspaper resources we could use besides the couple we were shown on class this past Monday. The ones she shared with us were a little more our area and Virginia specific so I think that will be a big help. We also had a long discussion about what other types of resources might be used for such a recent case. Her suggestions were that we look at the school administration pages and find the meeting minutes for the school board meeting that discussed the removal of the books from the school and we look at legal cases. Professor Parsons showed us how to filter through those and find specific types of cases on Nexus Lexius. I think after we have narrowed our research more we can ask her questions again. We might even try to talk to a subject specific research librarian here too and record some of that conversation.
After the meeting, Karina and I began to so some more digging and found an audio recording of the meeting where the books were discussed for this nearby case in Accomack County. I also found that the Hanover County Schools banned To Kill a Mockingbird in the late 1960s while Harper Lee was still alive. When the author heard about the removal of her book and their reasoning was the book was “immoral” she remarked, “Recently I have received echos down this way of the Hanover County School Board’s activities, and what I’ve heard makes me wonder if any of it’s members can read.” I found that story in this article first and I want to do some more specific research of this incident and why the county believed the book was “immoral.”
From here, we are looking into the specific of the Accomack County Public School Case and seeing their reasoning for challenging the book. I am hoping we can get into contact with the school and ask for any information regarding the complaint and so on. Looking forward to seeing where our research will bring us.