Monday, February 2, 2009

Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act

Have you been hearing about the proposed Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act? It is designed to provide higher protection levels to consumers from harmful products such as lead and phthalates. It would require all sorts of raw materials as well as finished products to be tested. As written, this included books. The ALA was one of the organizations lobbying to change or emend the act, since it would require every book in every library to be tested, and if the tested were not completed or the items to fail the test, it would require libraries to ban children 12 and under.

However, the School Library Journal reports that the law has been delayed a year. This is good news and gives everyone a breathing space to figure out just what should be included in this law and what the economic impact will be.

Read the SLJ article though to see what steps libraries are taking now with their teacher kits, summer reading prizes, and children's area toys! What steps, if any, do you think ALD should take?

2 comments:

Hannah said...

This sounds like a pretty harsh issue. It would be very hard for every book to be tested as the libraries would then have very little in circulation to offer patrons any one time. This would then decrease the satisfaction level of our patrons which could then lead to less people coming into the libraries. Also, let's say the parents want this law to pass because they don't want their kids exposed to anything harmful all of a sudden in the libraries. I would have to assume that they would then be upset about the low amount of books we have for their child(ren) when they need to do a report. It sounds like a double-edged sword and a chaotic, if not, ridiculous move to pass such a law that would involve books.

MelissaZD said...

We now have talking points about this issue on StaffNet. FYI!