Director Briefing - March 27, 2023

Beyond Book Challenges

Many of you may have seen or read about the Hilton situation that took place last week, if not here are two articles, WXXI News: "Children have a second school day disrupted by anonymous bomb threat in Hilton" and Rochester First: "Hilton CSD receives second bomb threat in one week.".

According to the first threat, the district had an LGBTQ+ book titled “This Book is Gay,” which was the reason why the anonymous writer made the threat. MCSO says that both emails appear to have originated from the same domain.

Superintendent Kosiorek says that the district will continue to work to make sure that students who identify as LGBTQ+ feel welcome at Hilton’s public schools.

“I would tell the students of the district that belong to that community that they are welcome here at Hilton Central School District as students within our public schools,” Kosiorek said. “We love them as we love our other students. We are absolutely sorry that a debate around a piece of literature is making them feel as if they are not included or welcome.” Source: RochesterFirst.com

The American Library Association has weighed in on this as well. You can view their press release here.

Coinciding with this awful event was a recent opinion piece published in the Times of Wayne County where State Representative Claudia Tenney was quoted saying, "we have all heard stories of libraries full of graphic pornographic books."

While the focus has been primarily on School Libraries, these instances are troubling for all library-types, even ours. There has recently been a complaint along with a possible challenge of the book in question, This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson, in our own OverDrive collection. If/when we receive a formal challenge we will review it within the context of our collection development policy. I will send the review along to all of you so you may use it if you run across similar situations.

Because of the sensitivity of this situation and the threat of violence at Hilton Schools, OWWL Library System will be first drafting a response to our local representatives then Claudia Tenney's office on the comments that were made in her opinion piece. This will be a follow up to the letters sent in July 2022 to our state representatives alerting them to the potential of Book Challenges in their districts.

I will keep you all posted as we learn more and take additional action.

Internet Outage Troubleshooting from CANS

The Internet Outage Troubleshooting sheet has been updated and can be found on OWWL Docs.

There is a sheet for each library containing a specific flowchart depending on whether you have cable or fiber, a phone number for either Spectrum or FirstLight, and your account number.

We recommend that you print a copy of the sheet for your library and post it near your network equipment (firewall, router, modem) so that it is easily accessible in the case of an internet outage.

Upcoming Trustee/Director Workshops

• Trustee Handbook Book Club: The Board-Director Relationship, Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 5:00pm via Zoom - Click here to register.
• Trustee Workshop: Q&A with Ron at Wadsworth Library in Geneseo, Thursday, April 27, 2023 at 6:00pm in-person at Wadsworth Library or Online via Zoom - Click here to register.
  • You can click here to submit questions ahead of time.

OWWL Library System Open House

We hope you will join us for OWWL Library System's Open House on April 19, 2023 at 1 PM. We will be joined by special guest Lisa Kropp, President-elect of NYLA.

Please click here to RSVP .