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Into
the Fray
Media,
the Web and a Virginia Library
Did
you know that an estimated 50 percent of the
world’s Internet traffic travels through cables
running under the Old Dominion? In fact, the Internet
Traffic Report lists stats on three major
Virginia routers; many states report on only one (in
tech-speak, a router is a device that forwards data
across networks).
The
underground wiring must have really been humming
during the first few days of 2007. At 9:55 p.m. on
January 1, John Miller posted a criticism of the
Fairfax County, Virginia’s public library system
on the National Review Web site. His slam was
based on a misleading Washington Post article
that came out in print the next day -- January 2.
John Miller read the article on the Post’s
Web site before the printed version even hit the
streets; within hours Web heads around the world
were galvanized, and the Fairfax County Public
Library was wrongly accused of literary genocide for
several weeks by bloggers, e-mailers, listserv
subscribers and newsgroup readers from across the
U.S.
They
thought Fairfax County librarians were targeting
classic literature for elimination (which is totally
and completely not true). The Washington Post
article mentioned books that frequently occupy the
top tier of the Western canon: "For Whom the
Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway, "To Kill
a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, "Jane
Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte, and works by
Faulkner, Proust, Fitzgerald and others. The Post
stated that these books were “on the chopping
block” in Fairfax. The fact that the Washington
Post had completely misrepresented the universal
library practice of “weeding” -- for instance,
trimming the number of copies of "For Whom the
Bell Tolls" in the county-wide system from 110
to 108 -- seemed irrelevant as blogs spread the
misinformation around the globe.
The
blogger brigade was aided and abetted by John
Miller’s Wall Street Journal article titled
“Checked Out: A Washington-Area Library Tosses Out
the Classics.” Further flaming the fire was the
Associated Press, which distributed the Washington
Post article far and wide. A quote from the
article even appeared in the January 15 issue of Time
magazine. Not to be left out of the fray, broadcast
media such as ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, NPR and others got
wind of the story.
Shocked
by the misinformation spread by broadcast and print
media, booklovers from as far away as Italy
contacted the Fairfax County Public Library.
Nonprofit organizations frantically checked to see
if we would donate the books we were supposedly
wantonly discarding. The library even received an
e-mail from Jamaica asking for book donations! And
of course, our county’s elected officials, library
board members, friends and supporters were also
impacted by the backlash.
The
library responded by posting an explanation
on our website and a rebuttal
on our moderated discussion site. We also got
letters to the editor published in The
Washington Post and The
Washington Times. We were able to make a
thorough explanation of the issue in an article
titled “Fairfax
libraries clarify mischaracterizations of ‘weeding’”
published by the National Association of Counties. A
positive article even appeared in Il
Domenicale, the literary supplement to Il
sole 24 ore, which Milan University professor Guido
Martinotti told us is the “most well-read
[newspaper] in Italy.”
While
we cringed at being so badly misrepresented and
scurried to keep up with a story that just kept
going and going and going (you can listen to the Sam
Clay interview with “The
Book Guys” on your computer), at least cyber
citizens reinforced what librarians have known all
along: There are those who still love the book.
As
one librarian’s blog put it: “Books have a
symbolic significance — even in the web 2.0 world
— as something sacred. The symbolism of throwing
out ‘Hemingway’ is the perfect story for a media
outlet to sensationalize because it stands at the
heart of some serious moral concepts like ‘art,’
‘education,’ ‘freedom of expression’ and
‘culture.’"
NEXT:
Virginia Royalty: Kings and Queens in the Old
Dominion
--
January 22, 2007
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