Summary
A man checked out 100 books from Beachwood Library in Beachwood, Ohio, covering Jewish history, African-American history, and LGBTQ topics, and later posted social media videos showing the books with captions referencing “cleansing” libraries before burning them.
Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative alerted the library about the posts.
The books were worth about $1,700. Since they are not overdue, the library will bill the man later.
Police say the matter is civil unless he fails to pay. He is now banned from returning to the library.
I worked at an elementary school (public) in a very red state.
I had been overhauling the library computers (I was IT) all day and had been chatting with the librarian. Cool chick, probably 10 years older than me, so late 30s. I was dating my wife at the time, so I wasn’t looking to date, but got invited out for drinks with other librarians from the district.
After a few rounds, the topic turned to censorship, book bans, etc.
Every single one of them, from the churchy prim and proper lady, to the more alternative types, we against banning books and discussed how to get the kids access and and encourage them to read them, without losing their jobs.
I had to shutdown their plan to distribute cheap flash drives with banned material on them a la guerilla distribution - ie, leave it where kids would find them.
And that is why next week Mr. Case’s cyber security BS thing was about how we don’t plug random shit we find in to computers.
They got the spirit! Libraries and librarians are some of the most fundamental “good” in society. They’re basically the canary in the coal mine - when they start to go, we all know there’s nothing but toxic gas in the room, and need to do something about it.
It is a shame that there’s very few ways of going “rogue” with access to digital information that doesn’t involve tremendous security risks to the uninitiated.
“We want to secretly give kids the ability to get whatever information they want!”
“Great… let’s start with ‘don’t ever accept packets of digital information from unidentifiable sources’”