Need some DU help... - Democratic Underground

Versailles

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Mon Dec-20-10 02:44 PM
Original message

Need some DU help...

Bear with me as I tend to be slightly long winded...

I work in a library doing cataloging. During my tenure over the past year or so, I've noticed a very disturbing trend of only the most vile and disgusting of right wing smear books coming across my desk to be put into the system. I am not a part of acquisitions and generally speaking have very little say in what materials the library purchases. However, I am the only one who apparently looks as circulation statistics for weeding and thus have a very good sense of what our library has on the shelves. Before I moved to cataloging, I also worked at the circulation desk where I got a good sense of patron traffic and what areas are most frequented. As one might expect, best selling fiction is the most frequent of the the adult books to go out (i.e Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Evanovich, Grisham, etc). obviously this is not my area of concern. I noticed that the majority of people check out non-fiction books from the 000s (General - though the checkout from this section are almost exclusively computer books), 100s - Psychology/Philosophy, 200s - Religion, and the 300s - Social Sciences. After that, the areas tend to be more specific and only patrons looking for books on that subject check them out...basically, people don't go browsing for a book in those other areas.

The problem I've run into is that in just a cursory check of the biggest author names on the left (Olbermann, Krugman, Clinton, Obama, Franken, etc) and on the right (Beck, Limbaugh (both of them), Coulter, Palin, Bush, Malkin, etc) yields some very interesting results. Our library appears to favor hard right books almost 3 to 1. Even more frustratingly, the books that are hard right are almost all in the Political Science section (300s where people browse) while even the moderately left books are stuck in the History area (with the oldest most musty books) and, get this, the HUMOR section. While I have been trying to rectify the situation by correcting the placement of books, I've gotten some flak for it as that is not my primary job. When I confronted the acquisitions person about getting more of a balance politically in the library I was given a deluge of excuses...the most strenuous being that she chooses books that are at the top of the NYT Best seller lists (which as many of us know are influenced by massive right wing activist groups purchasing to inflate numbers). I basically attempted to back her into a corner where she would agree to purchase more left learning books...the price being no hard confirmation of purchase, I had to provide a list of books to consider, books have to be justified and expected to circulate (despite my pointing out that the few liberal books we do have circulate almost 4 times as much as all the right books) and there is no certainty in purchasing them.

So my plea is this, I need some DU help in pulling together a broad range "comprehensive" list of liberal/progressive/left learning political science books to present to our director and acquisitions librarian. While I can do this on my own, it is a time consuming task (expedience is key here as we are at a new fiscal year at the library and there is less fighting for funds) and I would be likely to choose books that I prefer and may miss some that perhaps aren't along my mindset but are still great books. Again, I'm looking for non-fiction politically left books that I can say are popular enough to circulate. I greatly appreciate the help anyone could provide! Thanks again!