Forum - View topicNEWS: Washington Library Responds to Complaint About Child Borrowing Yaoi Manga
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yotsubafanfan
 Posts: 653 |
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What kind of Library has Yaoi anyway?!
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SereneChaos
 Posts: 384 Location: Middle of Nowhere, USA |
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She also could have searched using publishers. That's how I search for manga from different branches and it works fairly well. |
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ljaesch
Posts: 299 Location: Enumclaw, WA |
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I looked up the publisher for the title in question (Digital Manga), and used that as the keyword in my search at the KCLS catalog. It came up with 126 results, which is 13 pages worth. I really don't see any rhyme or reason to the categorization. Hmm. The third volume of Hero Heel shows up on the first page, and it's the ninth result. She could have possibly found it this way, assuming she knew the name of the publisher. Unfortunately, there's a lot of questions we'll never have answered, so all we really can do is wonder and speculate about this situation. |
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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Totally disagree with you there because there are plenty of books that blur the line between fiction and non, and I personally don't think that should take precedent over one or the other. Take for example poetry. Is poetry fiction or non? What if it's the Illiad? What if it's Edgar Alan Poe's the Raven? What if it's just a bunch of pretty poems observing nature? Are you going to have a fiction and non-fiction poem section? What if the books for the poems contain both? It's been pointed out before, but again this is where the dewy decimal system is seriously flawed. Graphic novels are not generally by default non-fiction. I work at an academic library (my school is an art school with a comic program) and a nice fraction of those are non-fiction thanks to people like Art Spiegleman and Marjane Satrapi. Go to any library with a library of congress system and you'll find your graphic novels, fiction and non, in PN 6700-6790, right between Film books and Foriegn/English Lit. It doesn't matter if they're fiction or not. With the library of congress system the subject, and then the author matters. An authors non-fiction books can be on the shelf right next to the fiction ones. Sure I have a problem with how some of the decimals in the graphic novel section play out (especially lately with having to redo all the call numbers on some books because the head librarian just figured out that Neil Gaiman is a BRITISH writer) but in general as long as you know what sections the book you're looking for can fall under it's extremely easy to work your way through a library of congress library. Dewy Decimal libraries drive me nuts now. The library I work at also participates in ILL and World cat, and since we have such a vast collection of graphic novels we're constantly sending them out to other libraries, a majority of which are public libraries. A lot of which, when they're mainstream super heroes or manga, I assume are going to kids or teens. Persepolis is something we send out constantly, and I for one like to think kids are reading it even if volume two has a sex scene or two. Does that make the comic porn? I sure as heck don't think so, especially since my library has a huge section dedicated to photography and various painters that do nothing but nudes, or have subject matter in the erotic category (God bless you Aubrey Beardsley). Do we categorize them as porn? God no. Do we ban the high school program kids during the summer from browsing and checking out books? Ha. Why would we do that? That's not our job. We're too busy doing everything else that is part of running a library, and believe it or not we are constantly busy. It is not our job to question whether people are ready for a book, and heaven knows it's not our job to know the content of each and every book in the library as much as some of us may like, that would be near impossible. The library is the internet without the wires. Parents are the ones that need to set up the porn blockers. Right now I'm working on getting a copy of Alan Moore's Lost Girls for our collection, especially since we just celebrated Banned Book month with nice big display of visual art books. A lot of those books were comics. |
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Sunday Silence
 Posts: 2047 |
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I remember my high school library had a model book full of naked people for use by artists to practice drawing. Got stolen like a week after I saw it (checked computer to see if it was checked out; it wasn't). |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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underlock
 Posts: 247 |
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Lazy and overprotective parents are so bloody annoying. Keep your damn kids inside a cage won't you.
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Gilles Poitras
Posts: 476 Location: Oakland California |
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These days libraries often search out works of potential use to sexual minorities such as gay men and lesbians. A good library will stock BL if they feel it serves their community. Also not all BL is explicit, there are a variety of age ranges within that genre. For that reason the Cartoon Art Museum store in San Francisco recently split their BL section into older teens and adult only. |
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rioka
Posts: 6 |
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Not only that but if you have ever searched for materials in library catalogs, you either a) have to know the authors name or b) the title of the book to get to the specific title you are looking for.
If you search for a keyword with something generic like graphic novel, you'll have to sort through all the library's (and other libraries within the library system) collection of books which can be hundreds of pages long. Personally, I think this girl specifically knew what she was looking for and yes, you can place holds on catalogs yourself. |
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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I don't think I've seen it mentioned, but the listing includes:
Subject: Gay men Genre: Gay erotic comic books strips etc. Although, other than the cover art showing two guys being intimate, there is no indication of it's "adult" nature without expanding the tabs. The parental advisory sticker would have made it clear on arrival however... |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16941 |
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Sounds like a damn affective system. Why don't we have that here? Of course they could use mommy or daddy's card but the librarian could simply say they have to use their own if under 16 or have the parents there. |
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Gilles Poitras
Posts: 476 Location: Oakland California |
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On the subject of blocking:
Do you block all books in the adult section of library including auto repair and tree pruning? Do you set up, with funding pulled from other parts of the budget, a system of review that decides what titles get blocked and which do not? Would books once considered obscene, such as Joyce's Ulysses, Ginsberg's poem Howl, etc be on that list? What of other books which have been objected to such as To Kill A Mockingbird, Huck Finn, etc? For more on the difficulty of selection see this list: http://abcnews.go.com/US/banned-books-week-10-books-censors-jumping/story?id=17332239#.UIK40bQyg0A |
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SereneChaos
Posts: 384 Location: Middle of Nowhere, USA |
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Exactly. The problem with banning anything is where to draw the line and how to draw it consistently. One of my favorite "Teen" books is so graphic, bloody and gory that it puts even the worst horror manga I've read to shame. A novel by the same author with considerably less gore but more swearing and sex scenes is considered adult. How does that make sense? How do you decide what's right for everybody? I've loved horror since I was 12. I'd be pretty pissed if someone told me I couldn't read or watch something that I enjoy. I'd want to read it all the more if someone told me I couldn't, which is counterproductive. Besides, the internet allows someone to read practically anything. What would have prevented this 10 year old girl from looking up scanlations of the manga? Nothing. I'm currently doing a project on demons and demonology for a religion class. Should I not be allowed to check out books for this project because they're "satanic"? If the library did stop me, then what would prevent me from simply Googling it? Absolutely nothing. Any blocks they put in place would be ridiculously easy to get around. |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5124 |
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This thought -- however belatedly -- occurs to me: Since she has presumably seen volume number one, a fairly safe assumption may be made to the effect that her libido is developing at a healthy pace..... (The goddesses alone know exactly how her uncle would react to such an observation!
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Those books of Satan corrupted her! Everybody knows girls aren't supposed to have dirty thoughts until their wedding night!
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I just tried that myself, and got the exact same result. It doesn't really seem to be in any order that I can easily recognize (i.e. alphabetical).
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