Books Displayed In Children’s Section Of Oconee Library Might Not Be Put There By Staff, Patron And Librarians Say

***Display Also Has Two Meanings***

When a parent told the Oconee County Library Board of Trustees earlier this month that he didn’t want his child to see the book, A Child’s Introduction to Pride, on display on a shelf at the Oconee County Library, he acknowledged a problem.

He said he didn’t know who opened the book so its cover was on display next to other books with only their spines showing on the library shelf.

It could have been a library staff member who pulled the book out for display, he said, or it could have been anyone else using the library.

Oconee County Branch Manager James Mitchell said after the meeting perhaps hundreds of books are on display in the open space at the end of shelves or on the top of those shelves in the Children’s Section of Oconee County Library.

After checking with full-time and part-time staff, Mitchell reported last week that none of them remembers putting A Child’s Introduction to Pride out for display.

But Mitchell said that pulling a book off the shelf, opening it so its cover is shown, and putting it in an open space on the shelf is a frequent but casual thing that the library staff does.

He also said that patrons do this, for a variety of reasons, including that they want to promote a book or that they simply don’t know where to restack a book once they have removed it from the shelf.

Staff goes around and restacks books and pulls some out for display when time allows, he said, but it is not done on a regular schedule, so a book pulled out by a patron could remain on display for an uncertain amount of time.

Mitchell also said this casual display of books at the end of or on top of a shelf is very different from a formal library display, which is a collection of materials organized in a thematic fashion.

Second Complaint About Display

Arik Garcia held up his phone with a picture he said he took at the Oconee County Library in Wire Park at the April 8 meeting of the Oconee County Library Board of Trustee and then walked around the table to show the image to each of the Board Members and to the Library staff .

Books Displayed Children's Section 4/9/24

“The reality is it is not really appropriate for my child to walk in and see,” he said.

“But when it is on public display,” he continued. “I just think that it is something that we should be aware of.”

Garcia said the Library should consider not displaying any books as a solution to the problem he identified.

At the April 2 meeting of the Oconee County Board of Commissioners, Julie Mauck, Administrator of the Oconee County 411 (GA) Facebook Group, also had raised concerns about library displays.

“There were a couple people who emailed me shortly after it (the new Oconee County Library in Wire Park) opened about some displays in the children's section with gender bending books that people were offended by,” she said.

Mauck had published an image on Oconee County 411 that consisted of separate pictures of two different books, each on a shelf.

Mauck asked Commission Chair John Daniell at that meeting if he had located surveillance video that would show who pulled these books out for display.

Surveillance Video

Daniell told me in an email message on April 8 that “no video exist.”

Athens Regional Library System Director Valerie Bell, in a conversation after the April 8 Library Board meeting, said that surveillance cameras had not yet been installed at the Library at the time of our conversation.

She also said that the cameras that are being installed will be for security and will not be able to document what a patron is reading or even pulling from or placing on a library shelf.

Bell said she can say with certainty that “the staff did not put those on display,” referring to the books shown in the image published by Mauck.

Branch Manager Mitchell told me in an email a few days later that he was able to say with certainty that staff did not display those two books “because there was a time line and I just had to speak with staff who worked during that time frame and it was within a few days of the display.”

He said it was more difficult to respond to the picture Garcia showed to the Board because Garcia did not say when he had taken it.

Purpose Of Displays

“You put things on display to peak children's interest in reading,” Bell said. “I believe in displays.” Book stores pull books out to display to sell them, she said, and the Library is doing the same thing with its books.

Curated Display Of Books
Children's Section 4/9/2024

Mitchell said there are two types of displays in the Library.

One type of display is when “we put a bunch of books together” in a thematic display. Mitchell referred to this as a “currated display.”

“And there is display in the sense that everywhere you go in the library there is just books facing out,” he said. The books in the picture Mauck published “were two that were facing out in the children's department," he said.

“We do that all the time,” he said of pulling books to face out to attract attention, though he said the staff had not pulled out the books Mauck's picture showed.

“You go to the library, it is covered with books. There's probably close to 200 books in the children's department right now sitting on top of the shelves, in the shelves.”

“It is just like in a bookstore or anywhere else,” he said. “There's not always a lot of thought. Sometimes you just grab a book that has a nice cover that might catch someone's eye. That's most of the time how a book is chosen.”

Mitchell said sometimes a patron pulls a book off a shelf and decides they don’t want to take it home and just places it at the end of the shelf.

“Or their kid pulls the book out and they say no, don’t take that, and they put it back,” he said.

And they might put that book in an open space at the end of a shelf in what the next patron might consider a “display,” he acknowledged.