News Briefs

Staff -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2001

Wagon Train

In addition to the usual ribbon cutting, the opening ceremonies for the Ft. Worth (TX) Public Library's new Summerglen branch featured local kids arriving with 3,000 books they'd collected for the cause.

New Voice in Children's Literature Honored

Lee & Low Books has awarded its first annual New Voices Award to Linda Boyden of Pukalani, Hawaii, for her picture-book manuscript, The Blue Roses. The book tells the story of a young girl's relationship with her grandfather and how they fit into the circle of life. Boyden is of Cherokee and French Canadian ancestry and has been adopted into the United Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, descendents of a Native American community composed largely of Cheraw Indians and other Siouan-speaking Indians.

Boyden is a retired schoolteacher who now spends her time storytelling, writing, and spoiling her grandchildren. As the winner of the New Voices Award, she received a cash prize of $1,000 and a publishing contract with Lee & Low.

Ohio Governor May Freeze Funds
Public library advocates throughout Ohio are concerned about Governor Bob Taft's proposed $44.9-billion, two-year budget that would freeze funds for local libraries. Three-quarters of the state's 250 libraries depend solely on state money for employees, books, and Internet access--the rest pass local levies to supplement their needs. The Columbus Metropolitan Library has already tabled plans for at least $6.7 million in new branch buildings, while the Ohio Public Library Information Network expects its funding to be cut by $15 million. The proposed freeze is puzzling to librarians, considering the governor's commitment to boosting education spending. "Public libraries are tremendous partners with schools and provide an awful lot of services with the schools, so it seems counterintuitive," says Lynda Murray of the Ohio Library Council.

N2H2 Criticized
N2H2, the Seattle company best known for Bess, its popular Internet filtering service, has come under criticism among educators and privacy advocates for selling reports on young people's most visited Web sites to various companies and agencies, including the Pentagon.

For the past several years, N2H2 has been collecting aggregate data revealing which sites young people have visited--and for how long. In September 2000, the company teamed up with Roper Starch Worldwide, a global marketing research and consulting firm, to produce and sell "Class Clicks"--reports created from this data--to corporations and organizations. On January 26, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn why the U.S. Department of Defense had purchased a year's worth of Class Clicks.

Allen Goldblatt, N2H2's director of corporate communications, stresses that instead of reporting where individual children go online, the company passes along aggregate information, such as the Web sites that children in a three-state area visit. Goldblatt, who is sensitive to privacy concerns, claims the sale of the reports will result in kids using the Web better.

At the end of February, N2H2 announced that it would no longer sell Class Clicks. Goldblatt told CNN that the controversy over the sales was "a distraction for us. What we do is work on filtering." --Walter Minkel