I am now feeling hopelessly ignorant. It strikes me that libraries are always political. What to include, what to exclude, what to emphasize, how to make access easier and more inviting to everyone. Each of these decisions has a liberal answer as well as an authoritarian answer.
I encountered this in a slightly different setting about seventeen or eighteen years ago. Our family has been close to another family, whose daughters consider me a second father, just as our daughters consider the family's husband and wife to be a second set of parents. One day my great friend Jane called me with a complaint about the reading list for her youngest daughter, then about 15. It included a book with a (gasp!) gay character, and another in which a character was murdered. I agreed with her, and suggested the schools return to teaching the classics, such as MacBeth, Oedipus Rex, the writings of Aristotle. She agreed whole-heartedly.
Then I reminded her what the story of Oedipus entailed. She was struck dumb.
Public librarians really got going with the Carnegie donations in the early 1900s. In the early days there were many fights about including fiction. Funny that Sophicles slipped in as you say.
If you look at the book awards librarians give you see some political points of view prevail.
The presidential library movement funding only started with FDR but they have gotten bigger and bigger and now are also museums...or like Obama's--a presidential center with the documents off-site. (not yet broken ground). Obama was the keynote speaker at the American Library Association conf. in June. Mrs. O. was the keynote speaker before that.
Clinton created a presidential center in Harlem in addition to his library in Little Rock.
Donating to the past-president's libraries is like art-washing for museums.
Librarians need to get books people want but are quite free to get the numbers and authors they want as well.
I thought the fact that the recent YouTube about Biden's embassy staff mentioned that there had once been a Roosevelt library gave me a hook to write about its history. U.S. sure backed the wrong horse in China.
Yes, that gave me shivers. The book chapter indicated that we (U.S.) were sort of tepid about this...Truman wasn't too interested. I went through old issues of librarian journals and no one even wrote about it...all I could find was the archives of a committee. I wonder, sometimes, how people in Taiwan remember Chiang Kai-shek?
Corrupt, mostly. The Republic wasn't a good government, but it also wasn't a communist government. Now all the former Chinese supporters of Kai-shek who fled to Taiwan now kind want to hook up with China again, and the always locals don't want to.
I am now feeling hopelessly ignorant. It strikes me that libraries are always political. What to include, what to exclude, what to emphasize, how to make access easier and more inviting to everyone. Each of these decisions has a liberal answer as well as an authoritarian answer.
I encountered this in a slightly different setting about seventeen or eighteen years ago. Our family has been close to another family, whose daughters consider me a second father, just as our daughters consider the family's husband and wife to be a second set of parents. One day my great friend Jane called me with a complaint about the reading list for her youngest daughter, then about 15. It included a book with a (gasp!) gay character, and another in which a character was murdered. I agreed with her, and suggested the schools return to teaching the classics, such as MacBeth, Oedipus Rex, the writings of Aristotle. She agreed whole-heartedly.
Then I reminded her what the story of Oedipus entailed. She was struck dumb.
Public librarians really got going with the Carnegie donations in the early 1900s. In the early days there were many fights about including fiction. Funny that Sophicles slipped in as you say.
If you look at the book awards librarians give you see some political points of view prevail.
The presidential library movement funding only started with FDR but they have gotten bigger and bigger and now are also museums...or like Obama's--a presidential center with the documents off-site. (not yet broken ground). Obama was the keynote speaker at the American Library Association conf. in June. Mrs. O. was the keynote speaker before that.
Clinton created a presidential center in Harlem in addition to his library in Little Rock.
Donating to the past-president's libraries is like art-washing for museums.
Librarians need to get books people want but are quite free to get the numbers and authors they want as well.
I thought the fact that the recent YouTube about Biden's embassy staff mentioned that there had once been a Roosevelt library gave me a hook to write about its history. U.S. sure backed the wrong horse in China.
oops-Sophocles
There are about 150 million Chinese who would disagree about backing the wrong horse, were they still alive.
Yes, that gave me shivers. The book chapter indicated that we (U.S.) were sort of tepid about this...Truman wasn't too interested. I went through old issues of librarian journals and no one even wrote about it...all I could find was the archives of a committee. I wonder, sometimes, how people in Taiwan remember Chiang Kai-shek?
Corrupt, mostly. The Republic wasn't a good government, but it also wasn't a communist government. Now all the former Chinese supporters of Kai-shek who fled to Taiwan now kind want to hook up with China again, and the always locals don't want to.
elm
so it goes