I guess the bright thing here is that books deemed against board policy are not being removed from the whole library collection, but merely being relocated to the adult section, where they can still be checked out by teens. But, the sheer amount of money and staff time involved ($114,000-$300,000 in terms of financial costs, a year and over 8,000 estimated staff hours in terms of time) will detract from the acquisition of new materials and presenting library programmes, and that's a shame. All because of the current cultural war on libraries. I was a medical librarian, not a public librarian. But this is all very disheartening and against the training of most librarians. I do wonder if fewer of us want to work in libraries, especially in red states. While censorship comes from both the right and the left, this sort of thing seems to be the latter. Teens are learning about life and will deal with all sorts of decisions regarding sex, relationships, menstruation, drinking/drug use, reckless behaviours and the like. Why can't we have books to start a discussion on those topics so they can think and be prepared for what happens in real life rather than keeping them in the dark till they're 18 and then letting them loose in the world?
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