Assorted Miscellany, et cetera.
Nov. 18th, 2022 07:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThis gets Asstd. Misc, Etc. because it's not strictly about one topic, even if there's some thematic material possibly inside.
Anyway, so now that I've posted the question and answers, I have to admit that I'm still a little salty about a rude comment left on one of my older works. The initial comment, on a specifically F/F story, was to say the story had been recommended to them, and the F/F elements were nice, but then they proceeded to complain that there weren't enough men in the story, because they would also be present in the story, surely. The final rating was just over mediocre, presumably because of the lack of men in a story that had been tagged F/F and was following that path pretty firmly.
So that got Polite Author Question #5 ("Thank you for the detailed review. You mentioned this was a recommendation. Could I see where the recommendation was made?") because I was interested in how the story had been sold to the person leaving the comment that the recommender had missed that much in doing so. There's no immediate response but after a few months, I did get a comment back saying that the recommendation had been made on the side ships channel of their specific M/M ship-focused space, and that since it wasn't open, no, they couldn't show it to me. And then, to twist the knife, they said that the work wasn't something they would ever read or recommend again. (You know, it case it hadn't been sufficiently clear the first time around that the solidly F/F work that had been recommended in side-ships to a primarily M/M focused channel was offensive to their tastes for not including men in it.)
So no, I won't be able to trace how the work was sold to someone who very clearly wasn't interested in it and who then felt they needed to express that disinterest in ways that made it abundantly clear they were judging the work on something other than the work itself. What're you going to do, y'know? (Yes, this is transparent fishing for comments of the order of "What was that person expecting, exactly?" But if you have some explanations about how this entire cycle happened that are fair and logical, I'm also interested in those, too. It'll help calm down the part of my brain going "But, but, WHY?")
Onward to today's horror story. I was at one of my regular work locations and had been asked to thin out the graphic novel collection, which is, on its best times, difficult. (Graphic novels are popular. I like this and encourage it, but it does make weeding difficult because everything circs really well.) This was before open hours, and I'm looking at the shelves, scanning them to find good candidates for what could be weeded out. And, I spot upon the children's graphic novel shelves, a work that has been completely misfiled. This would not normally make my eyes pop and set my teeth on edge. The other two works that were also misfiled didn't provoke the same reaction, so why is this one doing it?
The misfiled work was Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer.
If you didn't have a reflexive flinch at reading that sentence, then let me give you some context. Gender Queer topped the most challenged books of 2021 list, according to the ALA. It is very much meant for the adult graphic novel section, and is classed to be filed in that space in most libraries (or at the very least, in the teen area for older teens.) If you just run down the references part of the Wikipedia article, you get the distinct sense that the book has been the target of sustained censorship efforts, but you can also read the controversy section to see just how much vitriol has been spent on trying to get the book banned from schools, libraries, and everywhere else by claiming it's "pornographic" based on a small sliver of imagery and descriptions, much like other works that have occasional frank talk or imagery about being queer.
The book that has been a magnet for censorious interests had been misfiled in the children's area. Whether by accident, or by intent, or something else, I can just imagine what kind of explosive nightmare it could have been for my organization had someone taken a picture of it and allowed the context collapse to do what it does best, because it could have been shown as "proof" that librarians really were trying to push that kind of book on innocent children. It could have been a provocation, it could have been an accident, but it wouldn't have mattered once the forces marshaled had their beliefs confirmed. So. I may have averted a disaster for my organization, and they'll never know because they never had to suffer it.
On much brighter tones, later in the day, one of the users came up to me and said they were returning a disc where the content of the disc, instead of being the UK-produced mystery series advertised, was instead a fitness workout disc. I put a different disc set on hold for them, and said I would talk with the people about it once I confirmed it was there. A few moments later, I remembered we have portable DVD players for checkout that work with our public computers, so I popped the offending disc in and fired up VLC. As the user had said, Jillian Michaels' visage greeted me on the disc. The packaging was right, the barcodes matched, and the label that had been stamped at the factory all said this was supposed to be suspense, but instead it was a fitness menu. Issue confirmed. I told the user that this would qualify for "weirdest thing that happened today" (because that's not even close to "weirdest thing that happened this month/year/ever" and it never will be), thanked them for telling us, and promptly got on the phone to our materials management people to alert them of the issue and ask they recall all the copies of the set to test them for the same problem. And to work with the vendor to make sure that we got proper and correct copies of what was advertised.
Often times, when I say that libraries have weird stuff that other people don't think about, I usually mean it in ways that aren't this light-hearted nor this clearly a mistake that was completely out of our control. It was funny, and that kind of funny is something that we definitely need in this era.
Anyway, so now that I've posted the question and answers, I have to admit that I'm still a little salty about a rude comment left on one of my older works. The initial comment, on a specifically F/F story, was to say the story had been recommended to them, and the F/F elements were nice, but then they proceeded to complain that there weren't enough men in the story, because they would also be present in the story, surely. The final rating was just over mediocre, presumably because of the lack of men in a story that had been tagged F/F and was following that path pretty firmly.
So that got Polite Author Question #5 ("Thank you for the detailed review. You mentioned this was a recommendation. Could I see where the recommendation was made?") because I was interested in how the story had been sold to the person leaving the comment that the recommender had missed that much in doing so. There's no immediate response but after a few months, I did get a comment back saying that the recommendation had been made on the side ships channel of their specific M/M ship-focused space, and that since it wasn't open, no, they couldn't show it to me. And then, to twist the knife, they said that the work wasn't something they would ever read or recommend again. (You know, it case it hadn't been sufficiently clear the first time around that the solidly F/F work that had been recommended in side-ships to a primarily M/M focused channel was offensive to their tastes for not including men in it.)
So no, I won't be able to trace how the work was sold to someone who very clearly wasn't interested in it and who then felt they needed to express that disinterest in ways that made it abundantly clear they were judging the work on something other than the work itself. What're you going to do, y'know? (Yes, this is transparent fishing for comments of the order of "What was that person expecting, exactly?" But if you have some explanations about how this entire cycle happened that are fair and logical, I'm also interested in those, too. It'll help calm down the part of my brain going "But, but, WHY?")
Onward to today's horror story. I was at one of my regular work locations and had been asked to thin out the graphic novel collection, which is, on its best times, difficult. (Graphic novels are popular. I like this and encourage it, but it does make weeding difficult because everything circs really well.) This was before open hours, and I'm looking at the shelves, scanning them to find good candidates for what could be weeded out. And, I spot upon the children's graphic novel shelves, a work that has been completely misfiled. This would not normally make my eyes pop and set my teeth on edge. The other two works that were also misfiled didn't provoke the same reaction, so why is this one doing it?
The misfiled work was Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer.
If you didn't have a reflexive flinch at reading that sentence, then let me give you some context. Gender Queer topped the most challenged books of 2021 list, according to the ALA. It is very much meant for the adult graphic novel section, and is classed to be filed in that space in most libraries (or at the very least, in the teen area for older teens.) If you just run down the references part of the Wikipedia article, you get the distinct sense that the book has been the target of sustained censorship efforts, but you can also read the controversy section to see just how much vitriol has been spent on trying to get the book banned from schools, libraries, and everywhere else by claiming it's "pornographic" based on a small sliver of imagery and descriptions, much like other works that have occasional frank talk or imagery about being queer.
The book that has been a magnet for censorious interests had been misfiled in the children's area. Whether by accident, or by intent, or something else, I can just imagine what kind of explosive nightmare it could have been for my organization had someone taken a picture of it and allowed the context collapse to do what it does best, because it could have been shown as "proof" that librarians really were trying to push that kind of book on innocent children. It could have been a provocation, it could have been an accident, but it wouldn't have mattered once the forces marshaled had their beliefs confirmed. So. I may have averted a disaster for my organization, and they'll never know because they never had to suffer it.
On much brighter tones, later in the day, one of the users came up to me and said they were returning a disc where the content of the disc, instead of being the UK-produced mystery series advertised, was instead a fitness workout disc. I put a different disc set on hold for them, and said I would talk with the people about it once I confirmed it was there. A few moments later, I remembered we have portable DVD players for checkout that work with our public computers, so I popped the offending disc in and fired up VLC. As the user had said, Jillian Michaels' visage greeted me on the disc. The packaging was right, the barcodes matched, and the label that had been stamped at the factory all said this was supposed to be suspense, but instead it was a fitness menu. Issue confirmed. I told the user that this would qualify for "weirdest thing that happened today" (because that's not even close to "weirdest thing that happened this month/year/ever" and it never will be), thanked them for telling us, and promptly got on the phone to our materials management people to alert them of the issue and ask they recall all the copies of the set to test them for the same problem. And to work with the vendor to make sure that we got proper and correct copies of what was advertised.
Often times, when I say that libraries have weird stuff that other people don't think about, I usually mean it in ways that aren't this light-hearted nor this clearly a mistake that was completely out of our control. It was funny, and that kind of funny is something that we definitely need in this era.
