Librarian as Superhero

I think I’ll write a librarian underground resistance novel

I wonder what librarians will do as the book challenges and book banning conflicts continue. In my fantasy world, I’m thinking some librarians, instead of removing books because of anticipated challenges, will become a part of an underground resistance. I think it’d be great fun to write a novel about these librarians. I’d have them foil the censors. There would be lots of tension and stakes (job loss, angry book banners, prison sentences!). There are aspects of the librarians’ jobs and of their computer cataloging systems that could be used by a secret society of students and teachers to get the right book into the right hands at the right time. This is an overbroad view of a plot point, but just for fun . . .

How the Book Banners Find the Books

Those currently wanting to challenge and remove books from school libraries search library catalogs for trigger terms and then demand that all books with those subject headings (LGBTQIA, etc.) be removed for review. They generally don’t read the books and know very little about them. My fictional librarians would have a few secret subject headings to act as code.

A little background for those who don’t work in libraries:

The language of the library catalog changes as society changes. At times, older terms are discarded because they are considered pejorative language. For replacing old terms with newer ones, the computer/online cataloging program has a ‘batch edit’ feature, which is probably self-explanatory. The cataloguer tells it that a specific term is to be replaced with a new specific term. The program changes the term in every book’s record. 

Here’s an example of changing terminology in the Sears List of Subject Headings (used in small libraries, such as school libraries).

1920s: Negros (with Colored People as a reference term) 

1977: Blacks  

1997: African Americans (Afro-Americansas a reference term) to indicate Black people in the US (A term that does not replace Blacks, but is more specific.) 

(An argument is being made for changing Blacks to Black people. A quick article on accurately describing the African American experience in the library catalog is here. A longer, quite interesting article on changes in the Sears List of Subject Headings is here.)

You can see how handy batch edits are in keeping the catalog relevant. A devious cataloguer could change terms to something unrelated and the underground resistor teens would learn it and be able to look up their books. 

Art Imitates Life

I thought of this because I once worked with a library clerk who frequently messed up our catalog by accident. It got to the point where she was asked never to touch the backend of the catalog because her ‘help’ caused a lot of extra work for others. One day she accidentally added the subject heading “Farm life” to a vast array of books. She didn’t know how she did it, and we couldn’t figure it out. We had to remove the subject heading from the entire catalog. Which was okay because our suburban school library didn’t have many books on farm life. Farm life … it could work.

Some Book Banning, Book Challenges Updates

Scholastic Book Fairs is having a tough time deciding how to deal with books that are on the ‘suspect list.’ They decided to separate them in their book fair offerings so that schools with ‘no read’ lists could avoid having any of these books for purchase. Yeah, that’s weird because if a parent wants to purchase a book for their kid, they should have the option. After lots of blowback, Scholastic rescinded this policy. But then they got themselves in trouble again. Here’s a good article from School Library Journal detailing the issues.

California Dreaming on Book Challenges

People don’t often think ‘California’ when they hear of book challenges, but there are a few cities and school districts in Southern California with challenges. I grabbed this screen shot from the editorial/opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times on Friday.

While one of the letter writers argues that a review of books is not a book ban at all, in my Substack post last week, The Fear of Censorship, I attempted to show how effective these reviews are at keeping books off the shelves.  A few weeks back I wrote about my own book challenge experiences. Preemptively Banning Books is No Way to Curate a Collection.