School Library Acquisitions

RWHEC met with Hall County Assistant Superintendent of Teaching & Learning and the Executive Director of Secondary Education.

Regarding the topic of school library acquisitions, RWHEC learned about the criteria considered. That criteria follows:

  1. What the Supreme Court had to say about obscenity (which SCOTUS has turned back to the States to define)

However, the Court acknowledged “the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression,” and said that “State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited.” The Court, in an attempt to set such limits, devised a set of three criteria which must be met for a work to be legitimately subject to state regulation:

    1. whether the average person, applying contemporary “community standards,” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
    2. whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law (the syllabus of the case mentions only sexual conduct, but excretory functions are explicitly mentioned on page 25 of the majority opinion); and
    3. whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
  2.  American Library Association (ALA) recommendations
  3. What students want to read / view ( could not ascertain how that is determined)
  4. Media parents want their children to have access to (could not ascertain how that is determined)
  5. Media that upholds the community standards ( could not ascertain how that is determined)
Back To Top