Censorship in a school library

When I first started in my role at this library, a teaching staff member went to the shelves, found a copy of Ben Elton's Post Mortem, opened it to an explicit scene and brought it to show me. She wasn't outraged or offended, but felt the text was unsuitable for students at the school.

I read the page as she watched. It was explicit, as she had said, and contained high level obscene language. I agreed to consider the place of the book in the collection, put it in my desk, read it again, put it back in my desk - eventually, the next time we weeded, I included it in the deselected items. We had other Ben Elton that students could read, I told myself. It was old, and dog-eared. It had to go.

What I was doing, in effect, new to my job, eager to please faculty, was placing myself in the position of censor, whatever rationale I was using to justify my actions to myself. I read a page of a popular novel, and judged it to be unsuitable for students using the library, and had thus withdrawn it from circulation.

Is that appropriate? In Kentucky, it was not appropriate for library staff to withhold The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from an 11 year old library user who wanted to read it. My context is slightly different, as my salary, at a high-end private school, is paid by parents, not by county taxes; I work under Thai law, which has a different commitment to information than American law; most of my library users are adolescents, or younger; I was removing the text from circulation, rather than refusing to let a specific user borrow it.

My rule of thumb is to not purchase texts which will be offensive to users. This is reflected in the library purchasing policy. But I know that there are advanced students, leaving for Unversity later this year, who may benefit from reading American Psycho (they are studying sexuality in the American novel); the graphic novel collection would be richer, and probably better, if I was willing to select items that contained challenging content. I also feel that I am imposing my interpretation of 'social conscience' on the library and its users.

So what is the solution? I don't think it is to have a drawer of controversial texts that are issued to users signalled as mature enough to cope; or even to mark the due date sticker with 'Year 10 and above only'. It is not appropriate, to my mind, to extract a book from the collection because it has a passage of writing that may revolt or horrify or titillate the reader. But is it correct operating procedure to, alternatively, fill the shelves with mature content?

My compromise is to not buy every book I feel I should, and to take the middle-ground, motivated by the context of the library, and my perception of the requirements of the library stakeholders. If there are disputed texts, I now consult with those stakeholders before making a decision. However, if a student requests the library purchase a text, I will almost always approve that request.

But I still feel that my selection hand is too heavy, and that rather than facilitating straightforward access to information, my caution is in effect a form of defacto censorship - and that leaves me feeling just a little bit grubby.