since you asked

Lori brought up this kerfuffle, which is over the recent Newbery award winner. The Newbery is the top award for children's literature (the Caldecott is the other top award, but it goes to illustrations, not text). Books like The Giver, Number the Stars, Dear Mr. Henshaw, and A Wrinkle in Time have all won Newbery awards. Anyway, the winner this year apparently contains the word "scrotum" in relation to a snake biting a dog. Some school librarians thought that this word was too offensive to their communities and decided they wouldn't buy the book for their collections.

School librarians operate on a bit of a different track than public librarians because they can't take the "we have books for all kinds of people" defense. Their schools or school boards can very easily force them to remove books from their collections. One of their main jobs is really to support teachers and curriculum, so they don't even necessarily have to buy a book just because it's a Newbery (which pretty much all public librarians would do, at least with recent Newbery winners).

I do, however, think it's pretty ridiculous to self-censor (that would be when you decide to not buy it in the first place, as opposed to removing it from a collection) just because a book contains a word that is just part of male anatomy (and a dog's at that!). I've read some comments from elementary school librarians saying that they thought the book was a little "old" for most of their kids (ie, most of the kids just wouldn't want to read it because it's a little advanced in terms of reading level), which is slightly more justifiable, but I wonder about the kids who do want to read it. They could always get it from the public library, but considering the fact that they spend most of their time in school and may be more likely to go to their school library, I think it's pretty wrong for the school librarians to not buy it for their collections. A whole big group of librarians (the Newbery committee) concluded that this work was the best of the year and that counts for something.

My least favorite part of the whole thing is the defense of some of the school librarians that basically goes, "I don't want to have to explain to a child what a scrotum is." Aren't we supposed to be librarians? If we really didn't want to embarrass ourselves so much as to explain such a thing, couldn't we say, "Let's go look it up in the dictionary."? Isn't it our job to help people (even children, who some apparently think of as not-people) get information?

Lastly I would just like to point out that I'm sure a good portion of most kids in elementary school know what a scrotum is, and if the target audience for the book (probably 4th grade and up) doesn't already know, I think there needs to be some discussion at school/home.

Susan Patron, the author of the offending book, just happens to be speaking to my children's services class today on the topic of collection development. She's a good friend of my professor's, and a librarian at LAPL, and was on the docket long before she even won the Newbery. It will be interesting to hear her talk about the very subject of choosing books for a collection!