December 2000

I just finished reading the article "Losing Our Drawers" (October 2000). It is my opinion that the article did a grave injustice to all the various automation systems evaluated. First of all, numbers were chosen by each analyst for the categories you provided. Is my "2" the same as someone else's "2"? Are they both of equal weight? Of course not, how could they be?

Second, you allowed people to analyze only the systems that they are using. It would have been much fairer to have analysts evaluate systems that they are not familiar with, in Consumer Reports style.

We have been using Winnebago since 1986. We are using Spectrum and like it very much. I have used Follett Circ/Cat and find it does not compare favorably to the Winnebago Spectrum system, yet you have rated Follett much higher than Winnebago. I have been a senior high school librarian for 33 years, and I feel I am qualified to give that kind of evaluation. Also, our elementary schools switched from Follett to Winnebago. One of their complaints was that they had to wait days until customer support called them back. I have yet to wait over two hours until Winnebago calls me back.

I do not think that you have done your homework with this comparison. It is too subjective and the way the analysis done is faulty, as I mentioned above. You need to have qualified librarians analyze all the systems together in order to get a reliable analysis. As it stands, the numbers in your analysis mean nothing to me, because as I mentioned at the beginning, my "2" is not the same as someone else's "2." I hope that the next time you do something like this, you do it more equitably in order to have more reliable results.

Dave Piscitelli
Librarian
Wilson Senior High School
West Lawn, PA

I was disappointed in the focus of your article "Losing Our Drawers." If 90 percent of school library media centers have an automation system in place, why write an article about choosing one? A better topic might have been upgrading or changing systems, as my district is preparing to do this year.

Your article also ignored price, something a media professional almost never does. Our current product has been owned by three corporations in the last 10 years. We are no longer dealing with the same personnel, philosophy of service, or policies that factored into our decision to purchase. Our "maintenance" fees have outpaced our ability to pay.

Your article also ignored the differences in overall quality among the products you discussed. I suspect the top three products for the school market are the most inexpensive and the least sophisticated.

Perhaps a future article could concentrate on the hierarchy of products available.

Gerald Clark
Media Specialist
Scranton Middle School
Brighton, MI

Editor's Note: In doing this survey, it was not our intent to proffer the ultimate judgment as to which vendor provides the best automation system--a tricky proposition and perhaps a fruitless one, since everyone's situation is different. Rather, we wanted to let SLJ readers see how hundreds of school librarians rated their own systems.

Small Town or Racy Paradise?
I'm certainly glad I read Walter Minkel's October column ("Burden of Spoof," October) as one of the last articles in your current issue, because I would have been too disgusted to read further.

He refers the reader to a Web site that depicts the town of Mankato, MN, as a tropical paradise site. He recommends using this site with students to teach them not everything is trustworthy on the Internet. What happened to character education? This site is certainly not one I would ever consider using to teach my students. I am shocked that you folks apparently did not preview this site before allowing the column to run in your journal. It is extremely off-color and offensive, and borders on soft-porn. Definitely not at all suitable for any school students, elementary, middle, or high school.

So much for character-building education at SLJ. I am certainly glad I decided to cancel my subscription this year for other reasons. This puts the icing on the cake.

Suzanne Thomas
Library Media Specialist
St. Gabriel's Hall School Library
Audubon, PA

A Puff Piece
As an employee of the only school district on earth currently using librarycom, I almost croaked when I saw the little puff piece in the September issue ("A Free Automation System?" p. 44). As either software or a service, these folks are definitely not ready for prime time.

Many parts of the system simply don't exist. Most of the librarians in our district have boxes of books they are unable to circulate. Theoretically, getting them on the system should be a simple process; they are mostly paperback copies of books already in our database, and simply need to be "linked" to an existing record. But we need the "holdings" module of librarycom, and to quote Gertrude Stein, "there is no there there."

We never even planned to have librarycom handle all of our cataloging; we buy as much as we can preprocessed. Then it's supposed to be a "simple" matter of getting that processing data uploaded to the system. Librarycom does this--once a month. We sat through the month of September, unable to circulate the books that had arrived over the summer, waiting for the data to be entered into the system.

Why did we adopt this system? The last sentence in your piece has the answer: the price is right. We are not a very small library system, but our district has been putting less and less money into libraries each year.

Virginia Rankin
Librarian
Bellevue School District
Bellevue, WA

Potter Redux
In her editorial in your October issue, Lillian Gerhardt made some assumptions about the way we handled the release of the fourth Harry Potter book, without bothering to check with us why we did it the way we did. She said that the blackout on reviews until after the book's release was an "old sales ploy," and that "librarians, their reviewers, and the general public all deserve better than this 'I've got a secret' approach to book sales."

The embargo on review copies was not a "sales ploy." It was, in fact, at the express wish of J. K. Rowling herself. She didn't want kids' enjoyment of the book spoiled by early leaks. And for the same reason, she wanted kids everywhere in the world to get the book at the same time, avoiding some of the problems in the past when books were released at different times in different countries. The worldwide release date of July 8, and the embargo on any review copies before that date, was laid down internationally, and as the U.S. publisher of the book, we had to play by the rules.

Once one takes the trouble to find out the facts, one gets a better understanding of why certain things are the way they are.

John Mason
Library and Educational Marketing Director
Scholastic, Inc.

Accessible to All
As chair of the Association of Jewish Libraries' Sydney Taylor Book Award committee, I just finished reading Howard Schwartz's The Day the Rabbi Disappeared: Jewish Holiday Tales of Magic (Viking, 2000; August, p. 207) and must disagree with the reviewer's assertion to the effect that the book requires a knowledge of Judaism and is therefore inaccessible to a non-Jewish audience. I find that throughout the book, Schwartz clearly explains terms that may be unfamiliar to the non-Jewish reader. About Rosh Hodesh, a fairly obscure holiday, he says that "Rosh Hodesh marks the beginning of a new Jewish month. The new Jewish month begins when a new moon appears" (p. 13). Rosh Hashanah is "the Jewish New Year" (p. 20). The Tetragrammaton is the "secret name of God" (p.21). Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is observed by Jews the world over "by praying and fasting, soul-searching and repenting, seeking God's forgiveness." The Jewish idea of justice is explained by reference to the Declaration of Independence (p. 27). The sukkah, in which Jews eat and sometimes sleep during the holiday of Sukkot, is clearly described. Indeed, the one flaw I found in the book, a factual error on page 41 stating that King David visited the witch of Endor (it was King Saul), is not noted by your reviewer. The Day the Rabbi Disappeared is not only good reading for a general, i.e., non-Jewish, audience, but it includes a glossary and is distinguished by excellent background and source notes.

Linda R. Silver
Librarian
Jewish Education Center
Cleveland, Ohio

Our reviewer replies
After rereading Schwartz's stories and his explanatory notes on the central characters and themes, I still feel that young people who have not been taught the basic tenets, customs, and ceremonies of Judaism do not possess the background to understand or appreciate the meaning of most of the stories in this volume. I have no dispute with the reliability of the author's Judaic knowledge or with his writing ability. While his notes on the stories' sources and backgrounds are good, the tales themselves are essentially mystical interpretations of various Jewish beliefs. The ability to appreciate these Kabbalistic tales relies on a basic knowledge of those Jewish beliefs.

The tales that Schwartz has selected are religious parables, all but one involving rabbis who (in tradition) had innate mystical powers: a burning synagogue saved, unblemished, by a flock of angels; a group of Jews, sentenced to death, rescued by a ship of miracles drawn by a young boy on a prison wall; four rabbis, invited to heaven to study the mysteries of Kabbalah, who leave their eyes behind so they cannot look at God. These are not folktales that teach a simple lesson in life or an appreciation for the culture, but parables originally recounted in order to offer hope to the Jewish community in times of fear and duress resulting from persecution.

A number of fine collections of Jewish folktales published in recent years, including several by Howard Schwartz, are far more accessible to general audiences than The Day the Rabbi Disappeared, which is a very appropriate title for Jewish secular and religious school libraries.

Susan Scheps
Librarian
Shaker Heights Public Library
Shaker Heights, OH

Clarifying LifeMatters
The August 2000 issue of School Library Journal included a review of two books in the LifeMatters imprint of Capstone Press. These books, Violence in Public Places and Violence in the Media, are part of LifeMatters' Perspectives on Violence series, which is intended to provide accessible, factual information for teens on current issues of violence in our culture.

We would like to clarify and correct some information presented in the review to give your readers a more accurate picture of the books' intent. First, the review states that in Violence in Public Places, "Gun control is mentioned as a means of controlling violence, but alternate views on gun ownership are not provided." To clarify, this book is not about guns or gun control. The topic of gun control is discussed in Chapter 4, Preventing Public Violence, and in Chapter 6, Moving Ahead. Guns are among the causes of public violence, as are abuse of alcohol and other drugs, media violence, political violence, and lack of anger control and impulse control. Gun control also plays a part in the solution to public violence (an estimated 60 percent of teens say they could get a handgun if they wanted one). Presenting alternative views on gun ownership would stray from the book's focus: what is public violence, what are the causes and effects, how can teens protect themselves from and prevent public violence, and what can teens do to initiate change.

Second, the review states that quotes from teens appear in both books, and gives this example: in "â?¦[Violence in Public] Places, an adolescent influenced by rap calls his girlfriend 'a nasty bitch.'" This teen quote actually appeared in Media. In Chapter 6, Violence in Music and Video Games, this quote is part of a scenario describing how a teen who liked rap music would sometimes sing the lyrics to his girlfriend. His girlfriend found the lyrics offensive and confronted the teen. The teen ultimately agreed to be more sensitive to his girlfriend's wishes. The point of the scene was to show how some song lyrics could promote violence against women or other groups of people. By ascribing the quote to the wrong book and using it out of context, the review may mislead the reader.

These books tackle a tough subject that most teens feel directly affects them, regardless of where they live or go to school. By clarifying these two points, we feel librarians will better understand this series' purpose and how it will best serve their collections.

Martha Fahrenz
Managing Editor
LifeMatters Imprint
Capstone Press
Minnetonka, MN

Editor's Note: The statement about alternate views on gun ownership was a statement of fact about content, not a criticism of the book. As to Ms. Fahrenz's second point, we regret the error; this was an editorial mistake and not the reviewer's.--T. E. J.

Correction
The entry on the Contributors page for Monica Edinger ran with the wrong photograph. Ms. Edinger is shown here.