Research in the Community - Observations in a Local Library

To research in a library, I visited a library in my hometown. It is a fairly small library, because it is located in the basement of the community center. In a lot of ways, I like this library more than the larger libraries, because I have been there so many times so I know where pretty much everything is.

Because this library is so small, there is not as much variety as one would expect there is in a library. Surprisingly enough, the children's section makes up the majority of the library. It is very cozy in the children's section, designed to look like a place that a kid in elementary school would just want to come to and curl up with a book and read. There are all kinds of books there, and while there is evidence of an attempted system for ordering the books, everything is all over the place and the books are quite chaotic. Like the bookstore, it is hard to find anything specific among all the books, unless you were lucky enough to stumble upon it. This is interesting because children don't usually have as much of a direction as adults would like the world to have, but when they stumble upon something that wasn't expected it just kind of works for them.

Blog Post 5 - Banned Books

Before the lesson about banned books, I did not even realize that there were children's books that had been banned for any reason at all. It was interesting to learn the strong feelings associated with why books are banned at all, and it just strengthened my stands on social issues in general.

When I saw the books that everybody brought in, I noticed that they all had to do with very controversial social issues that are constantly being debated in the political world and the media. Most of the books were banned because they featured characters that were different somehow, particularly families with a same gendered married couple. In certain parts of the country this is an issue that people feel strongly about, and parents who do not support this would not want their children reading about such things. Because I support gay marriage and believe all people should be treated equally, I thought it was quite silly that books featuring this kind of issue were banned. I believe that gay marriage is becoming an ever-increasing normality in our society, and it is important to expose children to all aspects of the real world.

Another reason for banning books that I thought was quite silly was books that supposedly taught a bad lesson to children, such as the idea that the book The Witches promoted running away. Most of the reasoning behind banning these books were barely subliminal, and I'm pretty sure that as a child I would not have thought of these messages the way the adults that ban them do.

Research in the Community - Observations in a Local Bookstore

For my observations in a bookstore, I visited a Barnes and Noble in my hometown. It is both very small and a bookstore I have been to many times, so I already knew where most things were located in it. There are not very many books that are immediately obviously about diverse cultures or books that highlight social issues; it takes looking at various books very closely to find books about either of those things. When these book are found, they are usually in the most random of places throughout the store. More often than not, the travel guides in the travel section tell the most of diverse cultures. These books are sort of in the background, not hidden exactly, but certainly not displayed in a way that would immediately catch a customer’s eye. More often than not, you find books like these in the bargain section, where lots of random stuff that people don’t usually buy are located. The authors of these book are pretty diverse, though they are usually authors that most people have never heard of. They are mostly accessible to adults only, because they are located in the part of the bookstore that kids will not usually visit. A lot of the time, the cover of the book portrays some sort of cultural stereotype, with the supposed purpose of attracting the attention of a customer, since a customer will usually be more receptive to something that they already had an idea about. These books will usually have some sort of happy ending, while using the characters to either completely defy or completely reinforce the stereotype that the book displayed to begin with. This bookstore that I visited is located in a neighborhood where mostly minorities live. This might help explain the lack of cultural books in the bookstore, as the store’s marketing team might be under the assumption that the people that live in this neighborhood would not appreciate the culture of books about other cultures or social issues.