I agree that release months are important for valid stats.

And the ALA certainly validates Conquest’s Second Law (above in the comments).

My family does so much reading that we are heavily dependent on the library. Otherwise we would be spending a thousand dollars a month on books! So we are pretty sensitive when our titles are censored.

Oh, and my wife used to be a librarian many years ago in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica.

John

I know very well we censor. But in judging the numbers of best-sellers, be sure to check release months. It’s the non-hot titles that made me laugh. I get a kick out of ordering conservative titles and then checking to see which other libraries ordered them as well.

ALA is like a religion. I already have a religion, so I give ALA a miss.

As far as the best sellers, the problem we have observed is the relative proportion of “left” books to “right” books, and the relative proportion of “new age religion” books to Catholic books in an area that is both conservative and highly Catholic. Also damning is the relative length of hold queues on book categories. One would hope that if the hold queues would be of roughly the same length regardless of category on popular books.

An important thing to remember is that librarians, like newspaper editors, operate a censors, in the sense that they select what is not going to be read. Given limited resources, they must of course do this – they can’t buy everything. But given that they are censors, they need to be extremely evenhanded in their censorship.

If you were regularly dependent on people who you are criticizing in public, you might want to conceal their specific identity, since they are serving merely as an example of a general trend. Paranoid? Hardly… more like commense sense precaution. My wife is a former librarian. She understands how easy it is to provide inadequate service to people you don’t like, as does any service worker.

As far as conspiracy, that term is generally used in a form different than you define. See:

1.An agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act.
2.A group of conspirators.
3.Law. An agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime or accomplish a legal purpose through illegal action.
4.A joining or acting together, as if by sinister design: a conspiracy of wind and tide that devastated coastal areas.

Now I hardly imagine that there is a conspiracy of people at that library. I think their behavior is a result of their natural biases and the ideological indoctrination they received from the leftist dominated liberal arts colleges and the leftist ALA.

Now… if you were to donate a right-wing (but not looney right… just respectable right) book to the library… one which they don’t have but which is of interest to a significant percentage of their patrons… and find that it passed right through to their surplus books sale, would you consider it paranoid ramblings to conclude that perhaps there was an ideological motive behind that action?

I could go into the other behavior of the ALA, such as passing a resolution condemning supposed Israeli destruction of Palestinian libraries while refusing to pass a resolution condemning Castro’s jailing of a number of librarians, their hysterical *lies* about the impact of the Patriot Act, or other behavior, but I won’t list them all. It’s obvious the organization itself is leftist, as is easily predictable from Robert Conquest’s second law.

Here’s a helpful definition of conspiracy so you’ll know it when you see it.

1. A combination of men for an evil purpose; an agreement, between two or more persons, to commit a crime in concert, as treason; a plot.
2. A concurence or general tendency, as of circumstances, to one event, as if by agreement.

Note the words, “as if by agreement” and “two or more persons”. The goofy stuff you are suggesting requires a, say it with me, “conspiracy”…

But no, we are no longer without a voice. Talk radio was our *only* mass meda voice for many years. It was the only place to hear the other side. Now we also have Fox News, which gives us a TV alternative.

Now, it would be nice if we could get conservative books from the library with same ease as liberal books. It would be fair. And it would especially be nice if the libraries would stock more of the books which document that which the left denied for so long: the record of communism in creating death and misery throughout the world, and in affecting US opinion makers.

But the ALA is a strongly left wing organization, following Conquest’s second law:

Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.

(Note to Anne Coulter fans: the above was irony and was not meant to be taken seriously.)

Or else really fond of feces throwing.

I would suggest that you take the thorazine yourself, since you are obviously delusional. Nowhere in this article is the word “conspiracy” mentioned. It is just your hallucination.

So you’re pretty damn lucky they have a copy of Ann Coulter’s stuff at all.

(You should also probably try spelling her name correctly, if you’re such a big fan of hers.)

What happens to the old books? They generally have a booksale and you can buy used copies from them. They do this to make space for new books coming into the library. BTW, for all you accuse ‘liberals’ of leftist conspiracy, you seem to be quite paranoid yourself. Take a look in the mirror… maybe you are a closet liberal! Or maybe you’ve just forgotten your Thorazine.

Here are the full tallies of all votes cast

Here all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote