Did you know that the Orem city library separates its religious books into different areas depending on whether they are written by Mormons or not even though they have the same call numbers? I realized this the hard way when I had to find a book written by Rabbi Kushner for my ethics class this weekend. Would it really be that concerning if books by Rabbis occasionally touched books that were written by Sheri Dew? I was curious to see if they separated Stephanie Meyer's books to a holier plane than other books about vampires, but I had a cold, pregnant wife in the car, so I didn't do more research on the matter.
4 Responses to "Segregation"
Touch not the unclean thing eh?
I wonder if it's a duct-tape way of keeping books of specifically anti-Mormon literature from touching other books about Mormonism.
I'm not sure if I agree with the practice or not. I'd be happy to see Rabbi Kushner sitting next to Sheri Dew, but I feel a little weird knowing that Martha Beck is there too. Putting her on a separate shelf seems like a better option than banning her altogether.
True ideas should be able to stand up to challenges from other ideas, no? If one is certain of Sheri Dew, why is Martha Beck so threatening?
This unique library organization probably resulted from the sheer number of questions Utah librarians hear at the Reference Desk from patrons who want to know where they can find LDS books, or books by LDS authors. The Logan Library used to have a separate LDS section as well, but they recently got rid of it and just combined all the LDS books in with the rest of the 200s. They have several booklists on their website listing books in different genres by LDS authors to try to meet the huge demand for easy location of these books, but we still get a lot of patrons who are very disappointed that they can't browse through an LDS author only section the way they used to be able to. Thus, I think it's more the prejudice of patrons who only want to read LDS authors than the prejudice of the library itself.
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