How does a librarian deal with a patron complaint about a children's book on the subject of same-sex marriage? Well, if he's an unusually thoughtful librarian, he deals with it like this. It's far and away the best such response I've ever seen, and serves as a model for librarians dealing with patron complaints on any topic.
(via The Tin Man)
2 comments:
Well, on one hand, the letter of response is a very nice piece of prose, and makes a nice article (or at least blog post). It's articulate, well reasoned, and well supported both in rhetoric of argumentation and by reference to external authorities.
On the other hand, though, I worry that it basically dignified (by length and elegance of response) a complaint that should now be relegated to the margins, not the mainstream. While the politics of this particular situation may have required this mode of response (i.e., complainers can make trouble for librarians), more generally this seems to me to be an issue on which it may be desirable to take a relatively firm stand, and emphasize that religiously-driven anti-gay bigotry is not a position that deserves the dignity of a reasoned response.
Would that the politics of public librarianship allowed that kind of dismissal, but alas, they don't. One must respond to complainers, no matter how crackpot they may be, as if one has the utmost respect for them.
And sadly, there are still parts of the US where these views are still the mainstream and haven't yet been fully marginalized. The librarian in this case is in Colorado, and probably has less leeway to be blunt on this issue than would a librarian in New York City or Los Angeles.
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