Thomas Co. Public Library reshelves 23 books
Published 12:43 pm Friday, May 5, 2023
THOMASVILLE- Since September 2022, the Thomas County Public Library has reshelved 23 distinct titles from their original placement to the adult section.
According to library documents, the reshelved titles include “It’s Perfectly Normal,” “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” “Let’s Talk About It,” “The Other Boy,” “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” “My Friend Dahmer,” “What Are Girls Made Of,” “The Female of the Species,” “The Upside of Unrequited,” “Last Night at the Telegraph Club,” “The Glass Castle,” “Damsel,” “This One Summer,” “Clockwork Princess: The Infernal Devices Book 3,” “The Opposite of Innocence,” “Like a Love Story,” “Living Dead Girl: A Novel,” “Perfect,” “Emergency Contact,” “Juliet Takes a Break,” “The Infinite Moment of US” and “Felix Ever After.”
The nature of complaints included sexual situations, sexual content, gang membership, drinking, demons, bullying, suicide, divorce, profanity, promotion of transgender agenda to children and others.
Other titles that were requested for reconsideration that were not reshelved include “Out of Nowhere,” “Looking for Alaska,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” “Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything,” “Concrete Rose,” “Thirteen Reasons,” “The Poet X,” “Eleanor & Park” and “I’ll Give You the Sun.”
Stephen Whigham, Interim Library Director, said that the process for reconsideration began with a form available to the public that is on their website.
“We have a reconsideration form,” he said. “If you have a book that you have questions about and so forth, you fill out that form and it has various things for you to fill out, author, title. You can then submit that form at the front desk and the form comes to me, in the past it went to the previous director, just so you have a point person.”
From there, Whigham said that the heads of each area of the library, including circulation, children’s area, young adult area, reference/adult area and the collection development area, where books are ordered and processed, meet as the materials reconsideration committee.
“And then we meet and get a group of reconsideration requests and the young adult librarian, primarily, researches each of those books,” Whigham said. “Sometimes, we don’t even have them. Sometimes we’re asked to move them to adult and they’re already in adult.”
Whigham said since he took his position in late January, a majority of the requests for reconsideration have been for young adult books.
“Most of the requests are to move it to adult,” Whigham said. “So our young adult librarian, she gathers those books up, finds them on the shelves, sometimes they’re checked out, so she waits for them to come in.”
He continued on to say that she goes through each book, checking professional reviews for content and examining the book’s circulation activity in recent years and where they are placed in other libraries through the PINES library system.
After that, the committee has a meeting each month to go over each book up for reconsideration and decide whether it should remain where it is shelved or be moved to a more appropriate area.
“We have a meeting and we go over each book and we decide whether to keep it in the young adult section based on some of its content, and that’s usually what the reconsideration is about, saying from some samples,” Whigham said. “In these reconsiderations, we don’t give people a hard time. That’s their opinion, they’re putting down the things they’re concerned about in these books for young adults and it can be things like profanity or adult language, could be things like possible sexual conduct, behavior. Sometimes things that are just more adult oriented facts of life, like heavy stories, and things that younger young adults shouldn’t be learning about.”
Once the decision has been made, with exceptions for appeals being brought to the board, the book cannot be reconsidered again for one year, according to the Whigham.
“Our policy for book complaints, or reconsideration requests, is that once a book has been brought up for reconsideration and the decision has been made, that book cannot be brought back up for a year. No one has come back except with appeals,” Whigham said.
Regarding the decisions of the committee, Whigham said that they aim to remain professional in each decision and that the actions of the committee do not necessarily reflect the personal opinions of those who make the committee up.
“I don’t have a personal view on it, I have a professional view on it,” Whigham assured. “I take full responsibility for those decisions, for the committee’s decisions. We had discussions and that’s what we ended up doing with our choices there, we kept some of them in YA and we moved some of them, as a professionals.”