Limen: Thoughts from a threshold

This seems to be my month for it - last Wednesday, I was at a wonderful lecture by Dr. Eboo Patel, one of the founders of the Interfaith Youth Core, a group that seeks to “1) build widespread public support for interfaith youth work; 2) equip youth-focused institutions to positively engage their religious diversity; and 3) cultivate long-term impact by emerging leaders in this movement.” He’s an extremely engaging speaker, and if you’re at all interested in interfaith community building or youth leadership in any area of your life, and get a chance to hear him, take it.

What he said definitely made me think. Not only about how this plays into general life - but where and how the Pagan communities fit into it. (Note the plural, there.)

My background:
I have, in many senses, always been a religious pluralist, because to be anything else ends up denying some part of my background. My mother is the child of a highly assimilated Ashkenazi Jew (Hungary and Vienna, in specific) who married a Catholic woman in 1935. My mother was born in 1936, became a refugee in 1938, just after the Anschluss, when the family ended up in Northern Ireland - a place of tremendous religious conflict.

My father grew up Church of England, became Catholic to marry my mother, they became Episcopalian a few years later (this was pre-Vatican II - if it hadn’t been, they probably would have stayed.) They returned to the Catholic church when I was 11 (some 20+ years later), and I went through the formal conversion process then too.

I was an active and devout Catholic until sometime late in college, when I began closely evaluating my own religious life, and ended up in the tradition I now practice (a Wiccan-based, initiatory, mystery, and priesthood focused practice.) My siblings have had similar changes in their lives, though none quite as varied as mine (theirs have been between different varieties of Christianity).

Point remains: pluralism is an obvious choice here. Given that life history, how can I think that any single faith tradition holds the only truth. I do believe that different traditions call to different people for different reasons - and that that’s a good thing. But back to Dr. Patel.

Diversity, pluralism, and three things an interfaith leader can do:
He talked about diversity and pluralism. He considers diversity a fact - something obvious when you look at the world around you. (And especially obvious last night: we had every range of skin color, a variety of religious dress choices, and a vast range of ages.) Pluralism, on the other hand, is an action and an achievment.

He also laid out three things that an interfaith leader can do.

1) Leaders define reality.

Leaders take a major role in defining a paradigm - something that Obama did powerfully in his campaign, to pick an obvious example. We’re all responsible for how we define, view, interact with the world around us.

Patel suggests there are two major paradigms when it comes to pluralism. The vast majority of people are religious pluralists at some level - they believe in treating others with equal dignity, mutual loyalty, cooperation for shared interest as a recognition of our shared connections. This is a shared ethic, no matter what their specific teaching or practices might be.

On the other side are religious totalitarians - those who believe that only their group should dominate, that others should be subject to their decisions. Patel argues that ‘totalitarian’ is the overall group - within this, there are Christian totalitarians, Muslim totalitarians, Jewish totalitarians, and yes, Pagan totalitarians. (Ok, he didn’t say that last one - but most of us have come across at least one or two.)

To define reality, we have to know who we are, he says. And boy, does that ring true with a lot of my magical and religious training. Know thyself, says the carving at Delphi, and many philosophers.

2) Leaders expand their own knowledge base:

Here, Patel asked two questions. First, how does my own faith tradition speak to pluralism. And second, how does our nation, our community, speak to pluralism?

I don’t know about you, but my own training, my own tradition spoke very little about pluralism outside the Pagan communities (in other words, we talked a lot more about interacting within the broad Pagan community rather than outside it.) This is understandable in a lot of ways - we had a lot of other things that were also important to discuss, and interfaith work beyond the Pagan community was not a major focus of my teachers.

But I’m a high priestess now. How do I move this forward into those conversations I’ll have with my own group members? My covenmate and I have already been talking about some of this - how do we start having those conversations, in coven, about the parts of our lives that many shy away from.

I want to have conversations - regular, deep, meaningful conversations - about the kinds of diversity presentations I did last week. About going to church with my brother and his family last Christmas. About how I can respect my mother’s deep faith (and support it) even though it’s not my own. (I also want space in which we can talk about relationships, and family, and how we make financial decisions, and all sorts of other issues, and how our faith and practice informs all of these choices.)

This doesn’t mean I want to dictate choices to anyone else - all of us come from different places, with different current needs, concerns, obligations, and everything else. The right choice for me might not be the right choice for someone else. But I want to have the conversations, and to hear other opinions, and to explore more deeply the basis for my own choices.

Patel also talks about shared values. By this, he doesn’t mean the things like what we think a family is, or where life begins, or any number of other issues. But he does mean things like hospitality, mercy, integrity, sacrifice. Different people, different communities, different religions make varied choices about how we do these things. But we do share a lot of them.

I don’t know about you, but I can see resonance in that list. While many Pagan paths - mine included - do not focus on mercy - we do talk a lot about sacrifice. About sharing food and drink with one another. About how we create loving, caring, healthy communities. We talk about the power of words, and about acting in accordance with our magical workings. I might disagree with someone on what those values lead me to choose - but we can still talk about the core ideas together, and gather new ideas and experiences.

3) Leaders have the skill set to make it real

Patel suggests that America’s great philosophical invention might be pragmatism. We are a country that needs to see it to make it real. Thoughts and ideas are nice - but it’s not until we see them in action that we begin to truly believe and act accordingly.

Leaders need to, then, have the skills to make things real. The Interfaith Youth Core is based around shared service projects that bring together people of different faiths, while working on something of service to the community. Sometimes that’s providing food. Sometimes it’s building houses. Sometimes it’s some other kind of service - but they all have a physical result you can see, touch, take pictures of.

Leaders also need to have the skills to evoke discussions - about what we share, what we differ on, on how individuals are inspired by pluralism.

Where does this leave me?

I was left thinking about a number of things.

Within the Pagan community, we see certain ongoing tensions - between people who practice initiatory, mystery, priesthood traditions, and those who use the term Wicca far more broadly. Nearly every conversation about this raises hackles somewhere. I find myself thinking about better, clearer, ways to have that conversation.

One way is for specific communities to clearly define their terms (”On this list, we define Wicca as…” is clear. People may not agree, but you can’t say they weren’t told.) I’ve had good luck with the argument that using clearer terms makes it *easier* for people to find the path that they’re really looking for, and to focus on the resources and communities that do that. (Where if we use Wiccan or Pagan for everything, it’s much harder to sort out.)

More than that, how can I make that conversation go even better? And, in thinking it over, I came up with several ideas. I welcome yours - and I think it’d be lovely if people out there picked one or two of these or similar ideas to spread in your own personal network of people and groups.

1) To directly acknowledge someone’s sincere desire for community.

Sometimes, it seems like we can jump a little too quickly to the definitional arguments. I’m not saying we shouldn’t go there -but I want to take a step back, say “You’re looking for community, here’s some different terms/names you might want to learn more about” rather than leaping directly into the argument about terms. The “Maybe what you’re looking for is better labelled as X, and here’s why.” conversation.

Not only is it a little kinder, but it’s probably more practical - people are less likely to be defensive when it’s put that way.

And I want to do more to encourage finding community - when that’s possible - that’s open to different perspectives. And to say “Even if you aren’t X, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post to this list/have this conversation/hang out in these spaces/whatever - it just means you might want to be clear about where you’re coming from somewhere. Sometimes, these things get tangled.

2) To talk more about what things we do share

Realistically - I’m not talking the fluffy amorphous “we are all children of the goddess, the universe is a kindly place, and we dance with the unicorns and rainbows” thing. But we can talk about things like different approaches to hospitality, to interconnection, to building community, to how we live our daily lives and what we value.

I can - and do - do this with my friends and with my covenmate, and in some other settings. But I want to start doing it a little more often at work, and in other places where the conversation might come up. I want to start occasional threads on the Pagan forums I’m on talking about basic values like this.

Starting conversations and keeping them going about topics like this is not something I’m hugely good at. (I’m not horrible, mind you, but I’m not great.) One of the things that obviously needs to be on my list is learning more skills to do that better. (I have some ideas, mind you.)

3) To help create spaces where deeper conversations about differences and similarities can happen.

Pagan Pride is one of those for me. So are the conversations I’ve been having this year at my workplace. Pagan Pride’s a big event - but there are lots of ways to contribute that don’t take as much time. There are things like our local Coffee Cauldron, and other events and forums in the community.

My behavior is also a part of it - how can I help support spaces that encourage deeper conversation? How do my own actions come across? What happens if I change my phrasing, or post a few more shorter comments than I would by natural tendency. None of this means giving up reasonable boundaries or things I care about - it just means it’s worth looking at which ones are doing what I want and seeing if there are alternatives. Sometimes there might not be - but sometimes there will.

I’ll try these out and see where they take me. I plan to come back to this and talk about this in a few months, with things I’ve done and how they’ve gone. Feel free to share your own ideas in the comments!

As mentioned earlier this week, I spent an hour and a half on Friday talking to the Diversity Club at the school I work at. (Both lunches, so it was different sets of kids, except for a couple who have a free period over lunch.) We had 23 students by the diversity director’s count (plus him, plus the other diversity director, who is not normally based on that campus.) Two boys, the rest girls, and mostly upperclassmen rather than freshmen.

I’d prepared a handout (densely, on both sides of the page). I also brought down a bunch of books the library owns on related topics (including Gus di Zerega’s Pagans and Christians - incidentally, I decided to order *none* of those books - they were all on lists from my boss, mostly before he knew my path. I’m very amused - obviously, we tend toward the comparative religion and academic side.)

I did the handout because I was pretty sure we were going to end up going off on endless side questions (plus having kids coming in and out regularly) and I wasn’t going to cover everything. I was right on with this, so it turned out to be a very good choice. (Also, it’s a good way to make sure they have the spelling of words to Google if they wish.)

I did end up outing myself - as I’d promised myself I would if someone asked directly. That said, I was both delighted and amused by how careful everyone was to avoid offense. (I work with some really amazing kids.) They’d start asking something, realise it was going somewhere that I might find offensive, and then ask carefully.

As I’d expected, we had quite a few questions about movies - how was what we do similar to The Craft or Practical Magic. (Nope, and here’s why. I did not mention the number of witches I know who approve highly of the marguerita scene, because, hey, minors.) Did I think Harry Potter is offensive, and is what they’re doing in there like what modern witches do? (Nope, and nope.)

But far more than that, I had questions about celebrations, what was it like to be in ritual. There were questions about what it’s like to work in a group (and a very interesting one about whether we’d actually turned someone away.) I talked about why traditional Wicca is a priesthood path, designed for adults only, and about how all initiates are considered their own priests or priestesses and able to handle their own personal ritual needs. We went through Sabbats, and a little of how they fit together. (I got a laugh on my comment that around here - Minnesota - Imbolc is sometimes referred to as “Maybe it will stop being winter eventually”)

I got asked about whether there’s black magic, and about how Satanism fits into the whole thing. (Another one of the topics I wasn’t going to bring up unless someone asked) - and explained that there’s people who have destructive beliefs, but that Satanists are actually a different way of seeing their relation to the universe, and focus on developing the self and the will. But by and large, everyone seemed very aware that witches were not scary things, and that it’s a functional religious path. They were also fascinated by the idea that we’ve got an unusually large and active Pagan community for our size.

All in all, a very good experience - it remains to be seen if there’s any other fall-out from it, but I have volunteered to go and talk to our comparative religions class right before Thanksgiving. (That one’s going to be a more structured conversation, probably about 45 minutes.) And afterward, I went back to doing other good things at work, and then came home, went food shopping, and did all of my cooking for our Year’s End ritual tonight. (For which I’m about to go pack and head out to L’s home.)

It’s going to be an interesting evening - Samhain in the group we trained in is the one ritual that rarely changes, and for practical reasons, we’ve had to change some things this year. (There are a couple of things that make *no* sense with two people.) But we’ve kept the core pieces, and we’re looking forward to it. I’m planning to spend the night there afterwards, and if we’re up to it, we’ll be spending tomorrow having a lovely time together. (And if not, I’ll come home after breakfast and fall over and nap and lounge about and recover. It’s all good.)

On Friday, I’m going to be talking to the Diversity Club at the school I work at - about Wicca, and historical witchcraft. I’ve only got 40 minutes or so, so it’s going to be interesting.

This came about in an interesting way - we’ve got a new Diversity Director this year, and he’s been picking a particular topic to talk about twice a week. At the end of September, he sent out a list of topics, through Oct 31st (which is both a regular meeting and Hallowe’en), with October 31st listed as a time to talk about the Witchcraft hunts, Hallowe’en and Wicca.

I looked at my work email, and wandered down the hallway to volunteer. (I’ve been quietly out at work to people I’m closer to, but haven’t been public about it, and he didn’t know my own religious affiliation.) We had a lovely chat - he has Pagan friends, but was delighted not to have to try and field questions directly.

We’re not sure whether I’ll out myself or not (I have been cautious of this with students, because my relationship with them is different than a teacher’s is: I see them far less consistently, and it’s important that all students feel comfortable asking me questions.) But at the same time, the school has a decent history of supporting different religious beliefs and (fact-based) discussion of them by faculty.

Having this conversation:

I’ve spent some time thinking about how I want to do this. I plan to be in there with an easel (my theory is that any conversation that includes the word Samhain, you probably want to have something write it on) and handouts (so that I can focus on taking their questions and discussing, rather than worrying about getting to everything.)

There are some things I know I want to touch on - for example, I’ve been told that a couple of them have made comments that Wicca isn’t a real religion, so I want to talk briefly about what makes a religion, and about how the US does and doesn’t recognise religions. (i.e. there’s no official process, but various Pagan groups and paths have the same kinds of recognition as other religious traditions - IRS non-profit religious status, recognition in the military, ability to grant ministerial credentials, and so on.)

I’ve also made a deliberate decision to avoid getting bogged down in details but to stay accurate (if simplified). For example, I say: “Traditional Wicca is a priesthood path - equivalent to a religious order with specific commitments. Many others adapt Wiccan practices and use the term Wiccan but may vary from what’s described below.” which gets the idea across (I hope!) that there are different ways people use the term.

Likewise, when I talk about ethics, I’ve said: “Ethics are based on personal responsibility for choices and their effects in the world. Free will is a particularly strong value. There is no concept of salvation by deity, but also no idea of original sin.” rather than getting into a discussion of the Rede and the Threefold Law.

I’m also focusing on witchcraft and religious witchcraft rather than the grand scope of Paganism, because that’s how it’s been advertised - but I do mention that it’s one of a larger grouping of Pagan religions, and made sure to include books that mention this.

And there are some things that are not in the handout at all - the “Are you Satanists?” thing, or the “What about sacrifices?” These are answered in a couple of the books I’ve referenced (and that our library owns: I’ll be leaving a few down there for a week or so), but I made a deliberate decision to avoid these questions in the handout, because why give people ideas if they don’t ask about it.

I’ve done my best to treat practices fairly and as if this is a totally normal and reasonable way for religions to work - straightforward, with a sense of depth and more going on for those who are interested.

Don’t worry, I’ll post something (probably Friday) on how it went. I’m talking to both lunch blocks, so it’ll be two different groups of kids. I suspect the hardest thing about it may be avoiding saying “We” and “I” in terms of Pagan practice.

(I’m also trying to figure out what I’m going to wear, since it’s also Hallowe’en. I think I’m going to make it the first wearing of a really gorgeous dress a friend found for me in a consignment store - it’s a pale green, with Celtic stenciling on the bottom) and a fun hat - a gift from the same friend, a Renaissance-faire style velvet snood style cap. And some of my amber jewelry, because I’ll be amused if anyone figures it out - none of it’s obviously Pagan, but anyone who knows a little about Wicca may make the connection.)

A post on one of the Pagan forums I spend time on caught my attention this week. This person was very unhappy with a post in a thread, and was upset that he couldn’t go and respond there. In other words, he didn’t really get the community culture.

All communities have an internal culture - at least if they’ve been going for more than a month or two. Some of this culture may be obvious - but some of it often isn’t. There are many nuances, and it’s often assumed that people will pick up the details as they go along. This isn’t hard - but a lot of people don’t seem to do it, or don’t seem conscious of how to. The list below - my list of “Stuff I pay attention to” isn’t new and bizarre. It’s stuff that works in your work life. If you move to a new area. And it works if you’re looking for a face to face group, whether that’s knitting or a coven.

Why care?

These days, online,  many people create an account, and immediately start posting - and then wonder why they’re having problems in their conversations. This is uncomfortable and unpleasant - but it’s also a direct result of some of their choices. The thing that’s always gotten me is that many of these issues are easily avoided: a little time, attention, and patience go a long way in making an entry to a new group fairly comfortable. You don’t need any special tools beyond what you’d already be using - just a little time, patience, and self-control.

Step 1) Do your homework.

Don’t sign up for every group you can find on a topic all at once. It’s easy to get confused between different forums, and it can be harder to learn a particular list or forum’s style and approach. (It’s also easy to get overwhelmed and have a hard time keeping up with new posts, and that’s not much fun.)

Focus on a couple of groups that seem like the best fit for what you’re looking for. Read their rules and guidelines - often these will tell you whether or not it might be a good fit for you. The guidelines often will mention their expectations, sensitive topics, and other things you will want to know to avoid a rough entry.

Larger groups often have rules about everything from signature size to where or how advertisements can be posted, to how they handle people asking for research participants. These rules are there because the situation’s come up, and needed to be addressed - even if the reason isn’t obvious to you, there’s probably a good reason for it. You can ask about it - later - if you still have questions, but for right now, just follow their rules.

2) Listen more than you talk for a while:

New posters online used to be advised to ‘lurk’ (read without posting) for 2 weeks or so when entering a new group. You’ll get a good sense of frequent posters, common topics, and issues that keep coming up. (My take on this is “I prefer to learn from other people’s mistakes - less painful!”)

You also begin to get a sense of the more frequent posters - who do you find thoughtful? And a sense of  people you might want to ignore or at least pay less attention to - people who constantly turn the discussion to their pet topic, who troll looking for emotional responses, or who are needlessly cruel or snippy. And you’d get a good sense of the way specific terms are used on the group, both terms in the area of interest - and some group in-jokes.

Restrain yourself from jumping in to correct someone who is obviously mistaken - chances are, in a larger forum, that someone else will post and correct factual errors - and people will tend to prefer their own opinions, preferences, or experiences to that of a total stranger. Give people time to get to know you, and you’ll be more persuasive. If you still really want to comment on something, let it sit overnight before posting: you’ll probably find ways to make your post a little calmer when you review it.

3) Learn the forum’s culture:

Some forums are fine with long, detailed posts. Some have many shorter posts, and people who apologise if they go over two paragraphs. It’s probably clear which of the two I tend to do better in! (Brevity and conciseness are not my virtues without a lot of editing work.) Some forums like examples and informal references - others rely heavily on personal experience and see references as distancing or elitist.

And in the Pagan community, there’s one particularly strong distinction: some forums are focused on fellowship and support, while others are focused on debate, discussion, or critical thinking and evaluation. People who want one and end up in the other tend to be uncomfortable - but fortunately, many forums make it clear which way they lean.

4) Take it slowly:

Once you’ve read for a bit, you’ll have an idea which topics may be sensitive, prone to producing lengthy discussion, or that may get a bit heated. If you’d like a more comfortable introduction to the forum, avoid those. Start with something else. As you continue to get a feel for the forum, you can branch out into more complex discussions more easily.

Plus, as regulars on the forum get a feel for you, they’re more likely to give you a little bit of leeway if you say something a bit odd. If you have consistently come across as friendly but very new to this and you say something that’s potentially insulting, you’ll get different responses than someone who’s come across as antagonistic from their first post.

5) Consider how you want to present yourself:

As in face-to-face settings, people will form opinions of you based on how you behave - this is especially true in your early interactions on a forum (the first 25-50 or so, depending on how often you post, and what about.) It’s worth paying some extra attention to how you come across - take a moment to check what you’ve written for clarity, and whether there’s anything that might be misread.

Don’t make your first posts to a new forum at a time when you’re really rushed, emotional, or unable to think clearly unless you really do need urgent help with something. (And if that’s the case, ask your questions, calm down, and *then* come back and post more.) Just like meeting a group of new people in a face to face setting, why not put your best foot forward?

6) If you have questions, be polite:

Assume that a rule is there for a reason. Don’t single people out. Be thoughtful and polite. (Please and thank you never hurt.) For example, the person who got me thinking about this would have gotten a different response if he’d said “Hey, what’s the reasoning behind the full membership thing? I saw something in a folder I can’t post in that frustrates me, but I can’t respond.” than he did by posting something more antagonistic (and quoting the specific post.) Sometimes, it’s all in the style.

(By polite, I don’t mean obsequious - I just mean that you should avoid insults, dismissals of others, and other things like that.)

And here’s the thing:

These things? If you treat them like habits, will make it easier for you, if and when you do go looking for a group in person. Or you move, and want to break into a new social community. Or you start a new job. They’re not an obsolete set of random rules, they’re things that are common to human communities.  But that only works if you make them a habit - and apply them in different areas of your life, so they become second nature.

(I do intend to get back to the rest of the Banned Books week postings sometime this week. My brain got eaten last week by other needful things.)

One of those things has been putting together the website for the shiny new coven. You can see the website here, and our Witchvox listing here. So, now seems like a good time to talk about what I think makes a good group website.

(We’ll pause here and note that I started doing basic webdesign back in something like the fall of 95, and did some educational design for my college for a year after graduation. Which is to say, I am opinionated. I don’t think I’m fabulous at this stuff, but I do aim for competent.)

Design:

I don’t think that design is the only thing that matters - but it is a big part of first impression. Design also plays a big role in navigation and site organisation, so it’s worth looking at before you do anything else.

I think there are lots of ways to go about looking at design. When I redesigned my former group’s website a few years ago, I wanted to keep a hint of the Egyptian focus that the group had started with (and that the former website reflected) - but I also wanted to include the sense of transformation, movement, and potential for change that’s part of a teaching group.

And so, there, you see that the background is a very faded out parchment image - just a hint of texture and shading. The header image is from a photo of the sun through a stained glass phoenix image made by a former student and now initiate (it’s a *stunning* piece: this photo just shows a strip of it.)

For Phoenix Song, I wanted to reflect our emphasis on intentional simplicity and on .. well, okay, giving people a lot of information so they can evaluate it. We do intend to have a nice header graphic at some point (L’s working on some designs) but we expect to keep the dark green color as the dominant color on the site with a white background and gray/black text. (That said, I didn’t want to wait for the art to get the site up: it’s been nagging at me more and more the last few weeks, which is why I pushed to finish it this past week.)

You will notice that neither site has spinning pentacles, blinky text, or other such things. (I consider them bad design, even if they’re sometimes sorta fun to poke at.)

CotP’s site is done in straight HTML with a simple CSS overlay (and a chunk of it was hand-coded for various reasons.) I recently offered to shift them to WordPress (to make it easier for others to edit: they’re currently hosted on my website account and I do the changes as needed since they require the master account password), but no word on that yet.

Phoenix Song’s is set up in WordPress as pages (for easy editing), currently using a slightly edited (color choices) version of the Skimmed Milk theme. (I may well change the theme slightly when we get the graphic, though, as I’m not entirely crazy about some of the spacing.)

Content:

There are different ways to approach content. Some groups put the bare minimum up online, and encourage people to talk to them if they’re interested in the next step. Some groups put a good bit more information up there.

The first thing about content is “Why are you putting this up there?” The second thing is about making it easy(ish) to read and move around in.

Phoenix Song’s site, if you look at it carefully, falls into 3 categories.

1) The “About our group” stuff.

This is designed to start general, and get more specific (ideally, you start at the main page, if you like what you read you get the “More details” which has some other useful practical specifics. If you’re still interested, you get to the membership stuff (which is three pages to make it slightly less painful to fiddle with - one general, one “Here’s how the process works, so there’s no surprises” and one with the letter of introduction.

The last 2 pages could have been handled in email, but I chose not to do that for two reasons.

- I think it’s often useful for people to see how other groups handle things - having it online may be useful to someone else.

- It gives us a good read on whether someone’s willing to read 6 pages into the site and follow some specific directions. If they send us a generic “I’m interested in your group, tell me more.” they probably aren’t a good fit for us. (In practice, I’d probably do a “Our website has all the basic info you need: we’re glad to answer specific questions not answered there” and see what happens.)

2) General information and resources:

Mostly, this is outreach stuff. We’re a small group, we don’t do public ritual, etc - but we can choose to point to other local resources. Doing so, I think, makes it a little easier to say “Not for us, bye!” Having it online (rather than in email) means I can say “Oh, we don’t seem to be a good fit - but here, go look at this page, it has links to a bunch of local options” in a way that’s easy for me to keep updated or edit on the fly.

Likewise, the music resources page is because as soon as we say Phoenix Song’s got a focus on music in ritual, people go “Oh, really, what kind of music?” And doing the listing once (with edits as needed) is a lot easier than trying to remember what’s on the iTunes at home.

The “Visiting us” page falls into both this category and the “About us” one. It’s obviously useful for people visiting us, but it’s also useful for people wondering what kinds of things they might want to be aware of with other groups.

3) Member info:

For actual members, there are some other useful bits of information - links to stuff for class discussions/resources, plus password protected page of other info. I’m thinking basic meeting dates plus some general training sequence stuff - stuff that would not be the end of the world if the password protection failed, but which we’d rather not make broadly available.

Stuff to be added:

• Photos (of things, not people, probably)
• L is going to work on a bio and some music notes (she’s already agreed with everything else on there.)
• The members-only stuff

Other choices:

Now, one set of choices here is about how much text to have up. As you can see, for Phoenix Song, I erred on the side of “More information is good”. This is my natural inclination, but I did think about it a great deal (and about each segment), and in the end, decided it needed to be there.

I wanted to provide enough information that someone could make a reasonable choice about whether it was worth their time (and ours) to explore this further - that means that a lot of practical details (location, scheduling, etc.) are in some ways a lot more immediately relevant. At the same time, I wanted to give enough of an idea of what we do in ritual that people could say “Yes, that sounds interesting” without giving out too many personal/intimate details on the web.

It’s also informative to note which things we don’t talk about in detail - you’ll notice, for example, that there’s nothing about which deities we work with on there, because that’s a conversation we’d rather have in person. At the moment, it takes a bit of explanation. (That said, we do mention polytheistic practice, etc. etc. so people should be aware of what they’re looking at.)

The choice of amount of text is also deliberate in some ways: the way we’re planning on training involves a fair bit of reading (there are some alternatives if that’s an issue for someone, but it’s our base assumption.) If that’s an issue for someone, better we figure that out early, before taking everyone’s time.

What frustrates me in Pagan group page design:

There are - okay, more than afew things - that frustrate me as I’ve looked at sites over the years.

1) Playing music at me.

No. Just no. Bands get to do that, and even then, please make it easy for me to turn off (I’ve got my own music playing, thank you!). Everyone else? No. Really no. I love sites that *include* sound files - but please give me the chance to decide what to play, when.

2) Graphics that take away from the actual information about the group.

I deeply appreciate good web art - but I also believe that good art in an information source should support the information, not make it hard to find or read. I’m in the design camp that says that attention to good basic design (readability, structure, color choices, etc.) goes a great deal to support the art, as well.

If you do choose to use eye-catching graphics, a few go a long way. Or set up a page to play with the pretty shinies, and let people click into it only if they want to.

3) Navigation issues:

If your goal is information, people need to be able to find it. Sequential pages are one thing (like how our membership pages work so that you must read the initial pages first) - but it should generally be easy to get back to the index or general info and find your way around. (This is one of the reasons that doing this in WordPress makes my life easier: set the links up once, and they continue to work.)

Broken links? Not good.

4) Currency

I always wonder when I look at a site where it says “Brand new for 2006!” (and it’s 2008). It doesn’t imply regular editing, certainly. Makes you wonder what else has changed that they haven’t mentioned.

There’s two ways to handle this - avoid time-based stuff entirely (which is what most of our site does), or limit it to a small number of pages that can be easily updated. (which is what we do in the exceptions: I know where the dated stuff is.)

5) Sites that give you little idea about the feel of the group

I’m not talking about ‘put everything out there’. But I do wonder about groups that have very minimal text info, very little design coherency, and very little.. well anything. How is an interested reader supposed to distinguish you from any other group out there?

Sites don’t need to be fancy, but most witches are aware of at least basic color theory (since we use the same stuff in ritual and spellwork!) and it’s nice to see it applied or handled accordingly. If your site is all reds and orange, but you’re talking about calm reflection, I’m going to raise an eyebrow.

(Likewise, I expect some people will go “Phoenix? Why the green?” with ours. Which is okay: there’s a specific reason for it, and once we get some graphic work up, I think it’ll be better. And otherwise, I think we give a good sense of the overall feel.)

So. My opinions and thoughts. If you do have comments on the site, or think I’ve left something out, I’m open to suggestions. (Don’t promise I’ll follow them, just that I believe in listening to reasonable suggestions.)

It’s Monday. I spent all weekend helping run this year’s Twin Cities Pagan Pride event. This is my third year on the board (Programming, plus picking up some other stuff - most of the work on the website is mine, for example, after getting info/data from the appropriate chairs.)

I’m really pleased with this year’s event. We had 24 programming items for adults, a kids track, a teens track, many talented and amazing entertainment performances, and a sizeable dealer’s room. We had a few minor glitches, but nothing major (for example, someone turning off the sodium lights in the gym/vendor space - they take a few minutes to come back on because they have to heat up.)

We also had some great conversations. Over this year, it became clear that one of the things we really wanted to talk about was community - and what the next step looks like for us.

Instead of a keynote speaker, we instead had a keynote panel, where we asked representatives from groups who are working to build community beyond individual paths and public rituals (both of which are fine and wonderful things, but we’ve talked about those in the past, and there’s also quite a few of them, which would make a more challenging discussion).

We had representatives from Twin Cities Pagan Pride, Earth House (looking to build sustainable community space), the Upper Midwest Pagan Alliance (activism and education), Harmony Tribe (a 9 day festival in southern Minnesota) and the couple who are trying to get a teen/youth group going. The conversation spent quite a lot of time on the generational issues, but also talked a lot about acceptance in the broader community (with some really great stories) and about different kinds of service and community projects that are getting underway.

After the lunch break, we had our traditional “Meet the Pagans” panel, where anyone who shows up gets a couple of minutes to speak about their group if they wish. (Upcoming events and announcements, etc.) It’s a lovely way to see all that’s going on in our area.

After that, it was into other panels. I didn’t get a chance to see much, except for a bit of the chant panel late in the afternoon (and of course, the class I taught on Sunday morning.) but by and large everyone seemed to have a good time. I know of only one panel that cancelled itself due to lack of attendees - otherwise, discussions ranged between two (mine!) and about 25, with most in the 8-13 person range.

But overall - I think people had a really good time. I saw a lot of people smiling, talking, having conversations with random people they wandered by. I know I had a couple of great conversations in between other things. That’s a great goodness in such an event, and it was totally a success from that point of view.

Next year:

One thing I continue to struggle with is how many programming items. We did actually cut down a bit this year (from about 32 to 24) but we still had 3 programming rooms going full blast. That means we have smaller attendance at each item - this year, one panel had 0 (my apologies for that!) to about 25 in one room, with most items in the 5-15 range.

I actually don’t think that’s a huge problem in some ways (smaller groups help people make more focused connections and networking) but I know it can also be frustrating for teachers. One of the things I want to look at for next year is what the optimum balance looks like. (There will be surveys! Up later today, probably, for folks who are local.)

I also wish we’d had a better balance of witchcraft-related items (Wicca and other forms of religious witchcraft) versus other strands of Paganism. This is something I’ve really tried to do in my time here, but it seems like we go in waves. Last year had many items from Heathen, Druid, and reconstructionist groups, and few that were specifically witchcraft focused. This year was the opposite (due to some scheduling and internal group demands from various groups.) I’d like to have a more event balance - and maybe try to get a panel together talking about different strands of Paganism.

All of this said: people learned things. They had meaningful conversations. Teachers got to try some new things out. We went away thinking. Those are all fabulous things, even if we have some new ideas for the next time round.

Speaking of which: it’s a tradition that the opening ritual is done by the Twin Cities Pagan Pride board. I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t time to end this tradition. Several of our board members strongly prefer not to participate in public ritual or do not wish to take roles in leading it. (Naturally, of course, we are choosing people for board positions based on their ability to do a particular task - not for their ritual skills!) Those of who don’t mind the idea in general are stressed, harried, and trying to juggle eight other things already - definitely not the best way to do meaningful ritual. Maybe we should stop trying to make this work.

One other option we’ve talked about is having a TCPP chaplain, so to speak - who would be responsible for making sure that each board member got appropriate support (not so much in a religious sense, but someone to check in with if they needed to vent confidentially, or who could help mediate with specific issues.) And who would also have specific responsibility for planning our opening ritual and making it work. Board members could participate if they wanted, but they wouldn’t be trying to juggle the planning and set-up in the same way.

Incidentally, I’m beating up on myself here: absent another option, opening ritual is a programming duty, and thus firmly in my sphere. The opening ritual I put together this year is not the worst I’ve ever done, but I found it quite unsatisfying and nervewracking in a couple of ways, and … I’d like to not do that again. I don’t think it does anyone any good. (Plus, I hate doing less than really good work in that kind of public setting.)

Closing ritual, which I planned in a more personal role with a friend and former TCPPD member, was a lot more successful for me, in part because I had a chance to breathe and focus beforehand in a way that it’s impossible to do at the beginning of the event and also because we’d had a specific concept we’d wanted to work with.

But either way, most of my ritual design work is done in a very different context (small group, well-known participants, specific expectations, and using a standard structure.) The further I get away from that, the more work it is - and the less I can just rely on my trained instincts and experience. They’re different sets of skills - small, known group vs. large public event, and I’m not nearly as good at the latter as I’d like to be, at least with these kind of planning demands and other pressures.

Finally:

I am feeling very tired (and I called in sick to work last night when it was getting painful to walk.) Sleeping over 10 hours (from about 10 last night to 8:30 this morning) seems to have helped a lot, but I still have a headache and other minor signs that my body definitely needs rest.

I was joking this weekend about the Pagan Pride exercise program - do laps around the programming space upstairs checking on people for walking, climb stairs for cardio, lift and move tables for strength training, bend to put down colored tape on the floors. (The last because the building we’ve been using is a community center and former city school. It’s a little confusing to find things. We use colored tape on the floors for directions.)

But I’m now off to make all sorts of updates on the TCPPD website to reflect the fact the event is over. And to put up surveys. And email all my lovely programming presenters with thanks and a link to a survey.

Wow! I notice that Chris Crutcher has linked here with glowing compliments. Thanks! (And for folks not familiar with him, check out some of his letters to people about censorship issues here.)

For folks who might be new over here, I go by Jenett online. I’m a librarian in Minnesota, and I think knowledge is power. This blog is mostly about my religious life and group work, but every year during Banned Books Week, I’ve made a point of posting a series of posts about freedom of information access issues. (And I always do a special focus on religion and freedom of information access issues.)

Please feel free to ask any questions. Just be aware I may be a little slow to get back to you, as I’m on the board for a sizable public community event this weekend, and will be away from my computer much more than usual between now and Sunday night (and tired and worn out when I’m home!)

I’m anticipating 2-3 more posts on this topic this year after this one - but because of my other commitments, they’ll probably finish sometime next week.

Banned Books posts to date:

• Introduction to this year (includes links to posts from past years)
• A particular look at how politics can play into this.
• A discussion of how context matters.

These posts are also mirrored to my LiveJournal (most of my entries there are non-public, but the Banned Books week posts are public, and have some extended discussion in the comments.)

The question of controlled access:

There are three different things I want to talk about in this post: rating systems, ‘behind the counter shelving’ and the question of people stumbling across things they don’t want to see (or their parents don’t want them to see.) All three of these are somewhat focused on parents being able to better control what their kids see - but they also have implications for adults (some good, some bad.) And, like everything else I’ve talked about this week, they’re not simple issues.

Behind the counter:

This is in some ways the easiest. In this model, certain books are kept behind the counter - a library staffer has to fetch them for you. People who’ve used rare book collections or genealogy resources or historical archives are probably quite familiar with this: in that case, it’s done to preserve the materials and protect them.

When it’s done with general books, however, it’s a little trickier.

Certain books have a history (statistically demonstrated) of being more likely to go missing - these are usually the books about sex, the books about magic and modern Paganism, plus sometimes a few others. Some libraries have chosen to place these books behind the counter to help stop repeated losses (and the need for replacement.)

In other cases, libraries have been pressured to have a restricted shelf because parents or other residents are concerned about the effect these books will have. (I’m going to come back to ‘Someone might be offended’ in a different post in the next few days.)

So, what’s the problem? On the surface, the books are still available, right? The problem is that many people will not ask for books on these topics if they have to talk to a librarian who might be disapproving. Many people I know have had poor experiences with someone putting down their interests in the past (and especially on these two topics) - and they’d much rather give up on the information, or look at (sometimes far less informative or useful) resources online.

The other problem is that it places an additional barrier. I’ll be up front here: I’m Pagan. [see the bottom of my about me page for more info] While I’m heterosexual, most of my social circle identifies as something that falls into the GLBTQ grouping. I believe sex is a normal healthy wonderful thing in the right circumstances (not just in marriage) - but that people need accurate and reliable information to help them make healthy choices. (Not just about specific sexual issues, but about relationship questions as well.)

So, when these kinds of books go behind the counter, that’s telling me - an adult, who pays taxes, who contributes to my community, who works to help provide education and information in a wide range of ways - that some of the things I’m interested in, I need to go through a gatekeeper for. You’re telling me that my choices (which are legal, mature, and responsible) are less worthy than other people’s.

It also ignores all sorts of other things. Do we add an additional step to checking out books on home canning, because doing it wrong can cause botulism? Car repair manuals because a mistake might lead to a major accident? Books on getting online, because someone who isn’t careful can have nasty things happen? No.

So while I get that people have reasons to treat religion and health and sexuality a little differently, I can’t say I agree - or that it’s a sustainable choice for libraries or communities.

Rating systems:

Another suggestion people have is the idea of rating systems - of somehow flagging books based on content (roughly similar to movie ratings.) Librarians have been against this since the idea first got brought up in the 1950s.

There are physical issues: maintaining labels like this is time consuming and complex, because it takes additional thought, not just standardised practices. (Plus, many libraries now outsource their processing to the wholesale sellers: we get about 90% of our new additions already labelled and with protective covers: all we do is property stamp them, add a quick note about price and date added, and shelve them.)

But there are practical issues. Let’s pick out a few based on challenges that actually happened:

• Is a mention of menstruation inappropriate in a book for 10-14 year olds? Bear in mind that many young women either have or know someone who has their period at the age of 11.
• Is discussion of bad things happening to children, teens, or adults deserving of a rating label? In what circumstances? How graphic does the language need to be? How does someone determine that without reading the entire book carefully start to finish?
• Sex and religion are often hot topics in challenges - but people also have disagreements about medical ethics (think Jodi Piccoult’s My Sister’s Keeper), politics, language (and writing style), and appropriate ways to spend time. Do we flag all of those separately?
• Different things will offend different people: some people are offended and upset by mentions of non-Christian religions or of choices that are not the ones they’d make. Equally, I’m frustrated by books that imply Christianity is the only possible true religion (and by some other kinds of choices.) The library has to serve both needs.

And that’s just for a start.

What’s a better alternative?

Parents can choose to limit their children’s reading. Many parents I know read books ahead of their children, so they can either talk carefully about any issues of concern. And adults can make use of a wide range of resources to help them find books that suit their tastes - online reviews, booklists, suggestions from people with similar tastes, etc.

Many librarians are also very good at helping parents find the best options for their situation - as long as parents are willing and able to be clear about what they feel is appropriate for their family, or the specific kinds of books they’re looking for. (Librarians are not mindreaders!)

A little patience helps, too - a librarian can do a lot more for you if you give them a little time to check other resources and don’t just demand a list in the next 5 minutes. Many online resources exist these days to help you find books that suit your values and needs. But it’s your job - not the library’s - to do much of that work, because only you know what you want and need for yourself and for your children.

I’m going to leave ‘randomly stumbling on something’ for another day, because I’m short on time, and on sleep, and I’d like to be more coherent for that post.

Part of my continuing series of posts on Banned Books Week, which calls attention to information access, censorship, and other related issues.

Today, I want to talk about context - in two different ways. One is about what the resource is used for, and the other is what the resource is about.

Use:

I’ve been seeing a trend in recent challenges - a number of recent ones are challenges to a book as a required reading (class assignment), reading list selection (where students pick a book off a list and read it) or a suggest reading list (like over the summer.)

In the first choice, students don’t have much option in the assigned title. In the other two, they do - but you’ve got a few other challenges.

But, at the same time, when you’re teaching it in a class situation, you;ve got a lot of potential opportunities for conversation about the book - including any disturbing parts of the book - and a chance to put them into appropriate context.

To highlight a recent challenge: a recent one to Huckleberry Finn in a Twin Cities suburb kept the book, but they’re carefully revamping some of the surrounding teaching material to give better understanding to the issues of racism and to better support students who find it distressing. I think that’s a very reasonable response (though I do tend to think there should be ways to start that discussion without formally challenging the book!)

Personally, I think the point of choosing from a list is to provide choice - as long as there are options there that avoid the likely reasons that someone might be particularly uncomfortable (graphic sex, violence, etc.) and as long as the other choices are appropriate to the reason you’re doing this in class.

The other kind of context:

One really common reason for challenge is that bad and undesireable things happen in the book. However, the protagonist(s) or other major approaches in the book make it clear that these things are not desireable.

There are many examples. Lois Lowry’s The Giver, which is dystopian, has a number of scenes that are very uncomfortable - euthanasia shots given to the elderly and to infants who fail to thrive in accordance with the society’s guidelines being just one of them.

But here’s the thing. The main character is also disturbed by these things. (And increasingly so, as the book goes on, and he becomes more and more aware of what they mean.) The entire book is, so to speak, about how that’s not a good way to run a society.

Another example is books about bullying - The Chocolate War, Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk, and many others. Bullying is a horrible thing. But how do you get the emotional impact across, how do you portray it in a reasonable way, if you leave out all the nasty words and insults? Obviously, this depends somewhat on the writer’s style and structure of the story - but chances are, you’re going to need to have some uncomfortable stuff in there. And yet, you need that stuff to have a story that talks about coming out on the other side of bullying as a whole person.

The last major category is historical - a number of books are challenged because they portray historical events… well, accurately. While this is disturbing, isn’t it even more disturbing to avoid talking about things that actually happened to people because they might be upsetting.

(And if you look at the stats, a sizeable percentage of these challenges relate to African American experiences, which is a whole added issue. The fact that Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is challenged for including descriptions of sexual abuse, racism, and other horrible things appalls me. If someone has to live through it, shouldn’t they get to decide how to tell that story?)

Why was this thing challenged?

There are books in the library I’m sitting in right now (about 12,000 items - and about 1,500 of those are videos and DVDs, and 1,000 or so are fiction) that talk about genocide. About rape. About incest. About brutality. About sexuality - both postive and negative experiences. About racism. About violence. And about pretty much every other horrible thing that human beings have done and continue to do.

We also have books about love. About tenderness. About healthy communities. About making the world a better place. About learning. About creating change. About art and music and dance and pottery. About dreams.

Some of the books in the first list are also in the second list.

I knew, as soon as I started seeing media reports about this, that I wanted to spend at least a little time this year talking about the Sarah Palin censorship related issues - and some other stuff that’s related.

The myth:

As many of you may have seen, there’s been emails flying around about how Sarah Palin tried to challenge a whole big long list of books when she was mayor of Wasila. Except there’s an immediate problem: many of the books on that list weren’t published at the time she was mayor.

I figured this out as soon as I looked at the list: it’s one of the “Top 100 books banned” compilation lists put out by the ALA as part of Banned Books week, and I’ve seen a number of them go by over the years. But Snopes has a nice summary (including relevant quotes), but I was reading about it as things came out on librarian.net (here has a nice summary of her issues and links to the relevant posts) and there’s a bunch of other links from Library Journal here.)

Short version? She did ask (apparently 3 times) about challenging books - she says she was asking about process, the record is a little less firm about that. The librarian was fired for ‘lack of support’ but reinstated fairly quickly after public complaint.

But, frankly, I find this far less interesting than broader issues.

What role do personal beliefs play in government choices?

Politicians bringing personal bias/choices into challenges is not unheard of - there was a challenge in 2006 in Illinois where a school board member who was elected “amid promises to bring her Christian beliefs into all board decision-making” challenged the inclusion of 8 books on class reading lists based on excerpts from the books she’d found on the Internet.

The books were retained, but included “Kate Chopin’s The Awakening; the Vietnam War books Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers, and The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien; Stephen Chbosky’s teen angst tale The Perks of Being a Wallflower; the best-seller Freakonomics; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five; How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez; and The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World .” (quote taken from the full story here)

Now, obviously, this also plays into the issue of context (having a book generally available in a library versus on a suggested reading list versus as a required assignment are three different ones) but it does raise the question of how an individual’s beliefs, preferences, or priorities affect their political decisions.

Me, I think that one part of being an ethical person with authority of some kind (as politicians are, and as school principals are, and so on) is that you need to start by assuming that professionals are, in fact, following professional standards. You might be wrong - and it’s always good to have a method of cross-checking. But as a starting assumption, it seems like the place to start.

What does it mean to be a professional?

Now, I generally believe that each person should be able to make decisions for themselves about what they want and don’t want to read. (And that parents should generally be able to make those decisions for their children - though as the kids hit their teenage years, I think sensible parents should start backing off.)

But I also believe it’s important to recognise that we train people as professional [whatevers] for a reason.

This doesn’t mean we can’t ask about the reasoning behind a choice - after all, people do get stuck in what they’ve done, or they may make a bad call in a particular situation. But again, starting from the reasoning that they’re making choices for a particular reason well-informed by common professional practices is a good place to begin.

A digression about professional education:

The library profession is a little trickier than others: for a long time, the MLS or MLIS degree (Master’s of Library Science or Library and Information Science) degree was the entry level degree for the profession - it’s the degree that lets you do more of the professional decision making, and less of the day to day grunt work of shelving, processing, etc. You’d need it to do more than simple reference questions, too.

These days, due to budget cuts and other considerations, many libraries are using more non-MLIS holders for some of these functions, but overall collection development (”How do we decide which books we’re buying” is generally still overseen by a MLIS degreed person.)

What does the MLIS cover? Depends on the program, but my coursework included

• Introduction to Library Science (overview of the profession and different options - required class)
• Intro to Cataloging (how we put together standard info about books so people can find them - required)
• Intro to Reference (answering people’s questions with useful information - required)
• Reference for the Humanities (one of my areas of background.)
• History of the Book (One of my undergrad majors was in Medieval and Renaissance studies, and I was trying to decide if I wanted to angle for rare books/archival work.)
• Public Library History and Theory (a *fascinating* class in all the ways the public library has changed over time, and how that reflects political and cultural shifts.)
• Library User Instruction (how to teach people how to do things in a library - also a lot of survey design and project planning stuff, so we’d know how to present a complete program proposal.)
• Academic library administration (an administration course was a requirement)
• Collection Development (how do we decide what books/items to buy, and what are the issues)
• Information Policy (how do we develop information policies and where do they come from?)
• Communication for Leadership (highly recommended by my school, as library work often involves working closely with a team of others)
• Information Seeking Behavior (how people look for information)

I’ve also done another class in Reader’s Advisory, or how you answer the question “I like X book - can you help me find some more like it?” or “What should I read next if I like A and B and C?” through professional development funding.

My program was fairly varied as I wasn’t sure (and still am not) exactly which type of library I really wanted to work in. These days, I usually define my professional interests as being about helping people find information that matters to them, and about issue of information policy and education around technology, especially Web 2.0 type resources. But I also love talking about reader’s advisory and collection development (which explains why I’m currently quite happy with my current job - a college-bound high school gives me lots of chances to do all these things.)

So what does this mean for libraries?

Librarians generally order books for one of three reasons.

1) It got good reviews in a professional review resource.

There are a number of these - Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, School Library Journal, to name just a few. (There’s also all sorts of specialised resources for particular topics or types of focus.) Reviews focus on their utility for libraries, so the Booklist reviews often have a last sentence that suggests who the book might particularly interest, or notes on Young Adult potential crossover.

Here, we go through the Booklists every few months, and order things that look of interest to our collection, plus #2 and 3 below. We also look at a few other resources regularly - there’s a publication of University Press books of potential interest to school and public libraries that we order a fair number of things from each year.

2) Someone requests it.

Sometimes this is a specific request (”Can you get This Specific Title?”) and sometimes it’s a request for general books on a particular topic. Here, where a lot of our selection is assignment driven, we look at trends.

For example, we usually have at least one person interested in doing their US history research project on the Salem Witchcraft Trials - so we have a bunch of books about that, and pick up major new works when they come out. Or we got several books about the Armenian genocide after people chose it as a topic for two years.

3) Librarians see a particular gap in the collection.

This is the one where the most professional judgment is often involved, because you’re both judging what a gap looks like and what you’re going to use to fill it. That said, librarians will use their knowledge of the entire community they’re serving, the existing collection, their budget demands, resources at comparable library systems, and professional review resources and other tools to help figure that out.

Library wholesalers produce lists for collection development. For example, you say the size of library you have, and they send you a list of “A good collection in US History for this size library might really want to think about [this list].” where that list hits major titles in the field that are suitable for the collection (so a high school will get different titles than a public library - different age ranges, different needs). Who puts together these lists? At most of the wholesalers, this usually involves someone with library experience and background, and generally their MLIS.

4) There are a few other options.

We’ve started subscribing to a paperback subscription service: we send them money, they send us 18 paperbacks each month. We’re doing it as a quick and easy way to get a range of fun pleasure reading - most of the books are light romances, thrillers, mysteries, SF and fantasy, etc. with the occaisional media tie-in novel. Think airport books. We don’t pick the titles in advance, but we’ve been fairly happy with the selection - and, of course, if we ever had serious concerns about a specific title, we could just not add it to our collection.

Back to our politician:

Your average local politician may be a very good person, and very interested in many things. But what they usually *aren’t* is someone who is fully aware of all of the different issues, demands, and resources in either a school system or a library. This is only reasonable: even people who work in those school systems or libraries often aren’t aware of all of those things: they’re most aware of the bits they work with regularly.

And of course, an outside perspective can sometimes help people see something that could be done more effectively. And it can help someone to ask questions about things that help everyone see new potential resources, opportunities, and approaches.

But at the same time, I think it’s important to respect the professional training and background - not to mention daily experience - that goes into decisions in schools and libraries. And that means a few things:

• Learn what the policies are. How do classroom assignment titles get chosen? What selection criteria does the library use? It’s good to have clear policies (that are flexible enough to adapt to changing community needs.)
• How do these fit into other libraries, other schools? Obviously, other institutions might be messing up on something too - but if a bunch of other schools are including a book, there’s probably something of merit in it.
• Learn about the entire community that’s being served. And if you’re representing the entire community, don’t just cater to the bits you like or agree with. More on this in a second.
• Treat the teachers, librarians, and administrators like reasonable professionals, and be aware of power issues.

From the other side:

Likewise, librarians and teachers can do the same things.

• Have policies. No, really. Now. Look at common issues that have come up over the last few years, and adjust. Make sure your policies cover actual practice - whether that means changing the practice or changing the policy. Have the policies somewhere you can hand them over.
• Know why you’re making particular choices. Can you explain why you want to use a particular book in class in a couple of sentences? Doing that is not only going to help you explain if someone has questions or concerns - but it’ll help you better explain that choice to students.
• Behave like a professional. No one’s able to read every professional journal in their field - but keep up on the high points. I find that reading a couple of email lists, skimming several more, and keeping my eye on about 10 library blogs doesn’t take too long - and it means I’m really likely to hear about major issues pretty quickly, which means I can look at what I’m doing.

Know your community:

Back to knowing your community. Public libraries and public schools are supposed to serve their entire community - not just the folks who agree with them or look like them, or who want the same things. (Private schools have more leeway in a lot of ways, because they’re dealing with a much more closely defined community.)

This means that as well as serving people who believe that sex should be confined to marriage, you need to make sure there are resources so that those who make other choices know more about their options. You need information so that those who are being abused (emotionally, verbally, physically, sexually) know that they’re not alone - even if those descriptions are uncomfortable to read.

It means knowing that there isn’t just one religious group or one ethnicity or one point of view - but that you need to represent those in your community and beyond. (This is part of the Library Bill of Rights.) And it means not just buying to your preferences, but to the needs of the community to ensure a balanced collection.

Ok, going to stop here for today, since this is plenty long.

Every year the American Library Association (hereafter the ALA) and many public, school, and other libraries, call attention to issues of censorship and freedom of information issues with Banned Books Week. And every year since 2005, I have made a series of posts during this week talking about some of these issues in my LiveJournal. This year is no exception (though because I’m extremely busy this week with Pagan Pride preparation, these posts might stretch into next week.)

For folks who don’t know me in this capacity: I’m a librarian who’s worked at a private high school library since the fall of 2000. I started as a paraprofessional, but finished my Master’s in Library/Information Science degree in the summer of 2007, and have since negotiated some greater job responsibilities. I’m fascinated by the issues of access to information.

I’m also a witch and priestess in a small religious witchcraft tradition (Wicca is a close enough approximation until we get into some specific details). Both professionally and personally, I’m particularly interested in how religion plays into challenges to material and access.

What you’ll get:

Today: An overview of issues, plus links to past posts.

Forthcoming (unless someone suggests something that seems even more interesting and useful that I feel I can do something good with.)

• a discussion of the Sarah Palin book challenge reports (because there’s a bunch of misinformation floating around about this one, and it definitely seems topical) and a general discussion of how political choices seem to be mixing in with this issue.
• the issue of “might possibly harm someone”
• context issues (having something available vs. a recommended reading list, vs. assigned reading) plus internal context issues (some books being challenged for depictions in the book of painful things - for example, it’s hard to write a story about someone being bullied without depicting the bullying.)
• issues with rating system proposals and parental permission.
• a discussion of issues around challenges based on religion, as well as challenges to material related on occult, esoteric, or other related topics.

General information:

Technically, a better name for it is something like “A week to raise awareness of challenges to material in various kinds of libraries, schools, and other resources.” That’s not nearly so catchy, though.

More usefully, the ALA says “the annual event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.” They have an extensive set of links, stats, and other resources available. They also have some interesting statistics (up through 2005) of challenges sorted by type, initiator, and type of institution.

They also publish a volume every few years of specifics of each challenge. Many of these are also discussed in the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, put out by a member group of the ALA.

Some stats:

• According to the ALA, there were over 400 reported challenges in 2007.
• Estimates suggest that as many as 85% of challenges are not reported to the ALA - and don’t receive much (or any) media coverage, since many are dealt with on an individual school or library level.
• These numbers are for books only - they don’t include any other forms of media.

Types of challenges:

These are based on stats from 2000 to 2005 (the most recent update with specific sorting). Anything in quote marks comes directly from the Banned Books: Treasure Your Freedom to Read compilation edited by Robert P. Doyle (this is the 2007 edition of ALA’s Banned Books week flagship publication which lists recent challenges plus some notable historical ones.) I’ve included a couple of examples for each book.

Offensive language is the most common reason for a challenge, with 811 challenges. These challenges include the obvious swearing - but they also include challenges to books about bullying, and to books about historical time periods where particular terms were in common use.

• Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk has been challenged “because the book uses racial slurs and profanity” - but the book is about bullying, and includes scenes where people are bullied using these terms. (i.e. the book doesn’t show them as being appropriate.)
• Walter Dean Myer’s Fallen Angels is about soldiers in the Vietnam War. The award winning book has been challenged for offensive language and profanity (things that would seem to be realistic in that setting!)

Sexually explicit books include descriptive or explicit text about sexuality. Sometimes these books are challenged because they frankly discuss teen sexuality (Judy Blume and many others). Sometimes they’re challenged for providing accurate and medically appropriate information about puberty, sexual health, or birth control. This category has 714 challenges.

• It’s Perfectly Normal: A Book about Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health by Robie Harris is an acclaimed book about teenage sexuality issues. It’s also #9 on the 2007 list of most challenged books. A library patron in Maine refused to return it to her library in 2007 because she was “sufficiently horrified by the illustrations and sexually graphic, amoral, abnormal contents”. While she included a check in her letter to pay for the book, the library is pursuing legal action. (Initial story here - there are also updates in January and March 2008.)

Unsuited to age group is a category used for “I don’t want my child to learn about this yet” challenges. Many times, these challenges overlap with the sexually explicit category, or with discussions of homosexuality (and various other things people do) as a normal thing. There were 504 challenges in this category from 2000-2005.

• And Tango Makes Three (by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell) is based on a true story about two male penguins who adopt an abandoned egg. It was also the #1 challenged book in 2007. A challenge in Missouri claimed it had “homosexual undertones” and a committee of teachers and parents at an Illinois elementary school wanted to have it moved to a shelf requiring parental permission.
• King and King by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijlandhas been challenged because the prince in the fairy tale story rejects a horde of princesses to marry another prince. Some of the challenges have been because “let them be kids… and not worry about homosexuality, race, religion. Just let them live freely as kids.” Which is a nice sentiment, but seems to be missing something.
• One other good example of this kind of challenge are those challenges to books that talk about menstruation and are aimed at pre-teens. Since many of those 10-11 year olds (and older) have either already gotten their period, or know someone who has, how is the topic age-inappropriate?

Other dominant categories include other (at 583 challenges in the five year period) and violence (405), but I want to take a moment to discuss one more.

Religion and occult: 229 challenges were made in those 5 years because people felt a book encouraged children to explore the occult in some way. (Books in this category include Harry Potter, Wizardology, and The Bartimeus Trilogy. None of which, mind you, are actually accurate depicitions.

Historically, a few books about modern Paganism have also been challenged (this is a topic near and dear my heart, but should probably be a separate post.)

Archives of previous years:

Posts of potential interest that aren’t just retreading stuff I intend to say this year. Please note that how I phrase things or focus things shifts over time (I’m human, I learn, that happens), but I welcome comment on previous entries as long as folks are aware I may not quite go at it from that point of view anymore.

2005:

• Some of the sillier reasons for challenges out there.
• What book challenges are often about. Some background and overview.
  
• What are book challenges really about? (This is a post I’m particularly fond of - it talks about some of the underlying motivations for challenges.)
• What happens in a challenge - a look at some common approaches and library tools to deal with this kind of issue.
• Religion and sex - a look at two common types of challenge in greater detail
• Who chooses what you read - a look at where some of these choices come from and how libraries should aim for ‘and’, not ‘or’.

2006: (where I was focusing on some issues of the profession and how they relate to freedom of information access in part because I was finishing my MLIS degree that year.)

• Some of the challenges of selection and how things can fall through cracks (this post is more what-if and philosophical than many of my posts on this topic.)
• Professional ethics and other comments on access (following on from previous post in this list)
• Cataloging issues or barriers to finding books in catalogs.
• A discussion of how my commitment to freedom of information access more or less manages to live inside the same head as being part of a religious mystery-focused oathbound tradition (where information is not automatically available just by wanting it.) I should do a revamp of this one sometime.

2007:

• Discussion of Chris Crutcher’s work, and some comments on the difficulties of talking about the difficult stuff in life without describing it.
• (The rest of my posts from this year duplicate other things, and are probably not as worthwhile.)