Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Collection Development Policy Analysis

I have been working on my collection development policy analysis. I am finally finished, except for minor editing, which I must do tomorrow. I need to get away from it to look at it again and tweak it. I was able to find many different kinds of collection development policies. I am not sure why people in class seemed to have such a hard time finding these. I do understand why school personnel may not know about a policy, but every school system has to have one. You just need to find out who to ask or get on the internet and browse. I found a brief but interesting one that turned out to be from Australia. I went to Wake County Public Schools' website because I figured they are usually up-to-date with the latest educational bandwagons, so I figured they would have a pretty good policy--and they did. First, I asked the librarian I am working with on my Action Learning project and she pointed me in the right direction, complete with her own editorial about what the former school board did to edit the policy. Overall, I thought the policy was a good one, but it did include a brief section that was objectionable and in my opinion, completely impossible to uphold.
"All portions of media containing sexually inappropriate content, profanity, vulgar,and obscene language or the insinuation thereof will be excluded from all audio and video media in the B____County Public School System and shall be edited." Ummmmmmm....... Who will decide what is deemed sexually inappropriate content, obscene language, or how about "the insinuation thereof?" Just how is this editing to take place? Do the authors mean that these materials are to be discarded, blacked out, offensive material removed? I just think this section is completely inappropriate as is because it is impossible to uphold in its current language. This section was probably added in recent years, by a school board majority with an agenda of censoring literary material. That majority has since been elected out of office by the outcry of the public, but the policy still stands after the elected officials serve their terms in office.

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