Several Peel District School Board students, parents and community members are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new book weeding process intended to ensure school library books are inclusive, but that appears to have led some schools to remove thousands of books published in 2008 or earlier.
It sounds more like they’re removing books well before they need to in the name of them being old, but not replacing them.
15 years is not that long for a book, although in a school library that might be different.
In a school library there shoukd be a mix of older and newer books so that students are exposed to a wide variety of content, writing styles, etc.
In this context, “older” refers to the age of the physical book, not the date it was first published.
No, in this context it is not the physical age of the books themselves as the whole thing is about promoting being inclusive by assuming any book older than 15 years is less inclusive.
The subtitle of the article is “Books published in 2008 or earlier removed from school library amid confusion around new equity-based process”.
sounds a lot like Fahrenheit 451.
Unfortunately they won’t be able to read it because it was published before 2008.
As a German: “First time?”
They will not stop at removing books, you know…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Libraries across the country follow weeding plans to dispose of damaged, moldy and outdated books and to ensure their collections remain a trusted source of current information.
Libraries not Landfills, a group of parents, retired teachers and community members says it supports standard weeding, but shares Takata’s concerns about both fiction and nonfiction books being removed based solely on their publication date.
CBC Toronto reviewed a copy of the internal PDSB documents Ellard’s group obtained, which includes frequently asked questions and answers provided to school staff by the board, and a more detailed manual for the process titled “Weeding and Audit of Resource in the Library Learning Commons collection.”
The documents lay out an “equitable curation cycle” for weeding, which it says was created to support Directive 18 from the Minister of Education based on a 2020 Ministry review and report on widespread issues of systematic discrimination within the PDSB.
PDSB’s “equitable curation cycle” is described generally in the board document as “a three-step process that holds Peel staff accountable for being critically conscious of how systems operate, so that we can dismantle inequities and foster practices that are culturally responsive and relevant.”
Bernadette Smith, superintendent of innovation and research for PDSB, is heard responding on the recording, saying it was “very disappointing” to hear that, because she said that’s not the direction the board is giving in its training for the process.
The original article contains 1,667 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It they are digitized or have digitized version that students can just download for free then I don’t really mind they recycle them. Heck, even held a auction for old books about to be removed and let the book lovers get them cheap.(then recycle the rest.)
The digitized version won’t be sitting on a shelf catching the eye of curious students though. Discoverability suffers significantly.
not to mention digital books are more accessible to kids who don’t need them: kids who have easy access to lots of connected digital devices.
Absolutely!
This is my big hate for online stores in general, but books especially. I find browsablility far superior to searchability. Being searchable obviously has its place, as do recommendation systems, but nothing beats just looking around and discovering what you didn’t even know existed.
