In the fall of 2022, Nixa was one of the first school districts nationwide to make headlines for its book restrictions. Now, at the Christian County Library, Some Nixa residents have petitioned for a new labeling system.
Nicholas Holladay, director of communications for the Christian County Library, said that debates about book labeling have stemmed from a push by community members to mark books with LGBTQ+ content in them back in 2022.
“The ask was to put labels on children’s materials that qualify to have a label,” Holladay said. “It was a vague request on how to do it and what qualifies. They provided some resources that committee members were using, one of which was called bookLooks.org, but BookLooks was like a Wikipedia crowd sourcing of parents to read a material and then upload their rating of what they think based on a criteria that BookLooks provided.”
As more resources become available, conversations about what should belong in libraries have become more frequent.
“Public libraries as a whole have been around for a very long time, and concerns about what’s in the library and if that material is representative of the entire community have come along,” Holladay said. “What we have seen recently is a flare-up in that conversation and throughout time, that the tools to have those conversations are different than what they used to be.”
The Christian County Library’s “Request For Reconsideration” page allows people to make submissions based on whether they think a book needs to be relocated, removed or reconsidered.
“They were almost all exclusively LGBTQ+ content,” former executive director of the Christian County Library, Renee Brumett, said. “That was the commonality in them. I had a big batch of [submissions] over a few months, and it was a few people doing several. … I took the time to read every book that was requested to be looked at and did research on, ‘Do other libraries have this? Do we have it in the same place that other libraries do? How is it? Is it well reviewed?’”
When labeling, finding a definitive way to categorize can be difficult.
“Labeling something LGBTQ+ doesn’t inform the reader of what kind of information they’re getting,” Brumett said. “It can also be very subjective. … A child’s book with a family that has same sex parents is very different from something that might be in our Adult Nonfiction section.”
The proposed book rating system would range from zero, labeled “For Everyone,” to five, for “Aberrant Content.” Community members in favor of a book rating system referenced the Motion Picture Association’s film rating system as a guide for the labeling.
“Books aren’t rated like that,” Holladay said. “There are some exceptions, but that’s also not how we can categorize materials.”
Student-run organizations joined the conversations at the library. Sophomore Hanna Egley is a core member of Nixa Students Against Book Restrictions, an advocacy group of students fighting book bans in the Nixa area.
“With SABR, we’re working specifically during the school board meetings,” Egley said. “We had several students go to these meetings to show … that we are against the book bannings.”
The books being requested for removal at the library surprised some staff members.
“I was kind of prepared to have a lot of books that had that detailed sexual content,” Brumett said. “The reality is, most of the books that were asked to be reconsidered … were children’s picture books that didn’t have [explicitly] detailed content. It was simply that there was a character and maybe some information about them and their family or their life.”
Finding a way to remain unbiased while labeling can raise questions about legitimacy.
“If someone’s trying to push an initiative or if they have their own specific biases, which everyone has, … they could place something on a book with those specific labels that may not inherently be accurate,” Egley said.
A local group in favor of some book restrictions, Moms for Liberty, was contacted, but did not respond to a request for an interview.
The organization has been featured in various news articles nationwide about book restrictions. According to MomsForLiberty.org’s mission statement, they focus on protecting parents’ rights.
“We are dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government,” the site says.
These debates have placed stress on librarians locally and nationally.
“I have had some conversations where I have felt some fear … personally about how those individuals felt about me,” Brumett said. “I 100 percent respect that they are very passionate about protecting their children, and want to make sure that their children are not exposed to things that they worry will harm them, and I am a parent myself, and I respect that. I understand that there’s a lot of fear behind that, and sometimes that makes people … try to fix something that … their fear is stemming from. I think a lot of these conversations come from a very understandable place, but it ends up with librarians in general, being sometimes characterized as trying to override parents and trying to push particular ideas on children, and that’s just not true.”
Egley said that in a time where finding accurate information can feel challenging, finding ways to better understand other perspectives is important.
“There’s so much information in the world, and to simply hold your world lens to one perspective is damaging,” Egley said. “People need to look more outside the box and research the things they’re talking about, rather than just blanketing an opinion … when they should be looking into all the details about it.”