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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.’"
January 22, 2007
(Got a question? Check out Ask
a Librarian Live.)
Nice & Curious
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