The Ban Hammer

First off, I'd like to say how disappointed I am with the comments on those youtube videos. I have come to expect a certain lack of coherent thought when it comes to internet commenting, and I don't think I saw one person that I could legitimately call a troll. That epic beard man looking dude was ripe for it. The terminals.

In regards to banning books I guess I'm on board with most everyone else in taking a general stance against banning books. I keep thinking about how it seems many people are of the opinion that if a library possessing a piece of material it also means they agree/approve of said piece of material. I don't know where this mindset came from, but it seems fairly clear to me that a library collection operates differently from a personal collection. If people aren't interested in the subject matter of something, it's really easy never to check that book out or even go find it in the library. The argument often is that the children don't know any better and will go read it and be ruined. While I do think the library can be an influence on a child's growth and development, unless something's going wrong at home it's not going to overshadow some parenting.

Onto to Nazi stuff, I don't think there's really that much of a dilemma. In a perfect world a library would collect everything and rejoice in their complete knowledge of the infinite. However, in reality public libraries aren't swimming in Scrooge McDuck piles of gold coins, so they've got to spend acquisition money on materials that will be useful for their public. If there's a huge demand for holocaust denial literature, collect away. Most likely there's not, and the money is better spent elsewhere.

However, I recognize that my viewpoint probably won't work as policy. Thus it's very important to get a solid policy in place on how materials are collected to combat people complaining about this or that being or not being in the library.