Dragon Ball Forum

Amidst the community of manga bloggers and experts online are a handful of people involved in libraries, public or school. As such, the recent news that the original Dragon Ball manga had been challenged and removed from a school library shared between elementary and middle school students leads to an excellent roundtable at the School Library Journal. Started off with MangaBlog.net's Brigid Alverson, the brief roundtable went through the thoughts of Brooklyn school media specialist Esther Keller, Brookline Public Library Reference and Teen Librarian Robin Brenner, Alameda Free Library child librarian Eva Volin, and manga blogger Katherine Dacey.

It's an interesting piece from the librarian's point of view, and they seem to mostly agree that a librarian can most certainly make a mistake in the book-buying process and that such a mistake should be corrected. However, they do point out the need for more information-- preferably from manga publishers --about what's in manga, to make the decisions easier for librarians. They also note that at least the library has a process for dealing with problems like this, though they hope that we all take a little lesson and take library challenges to the library directly before heading to the city council.

It's a good read, and not too long, so be sure to check it out.

They approached it in the reasonable manner I wish everyone would.  I too think a number of problems would be cleared up if they had more information on what is behind the ratings for each book, not just for their own purposes but also so that they could pass it along to the parents so they could make more informed decisions too.