The Annoyed Librarian's Take

And just in time for the end of this course, the Annoyed Librarian weighs in on questions of intellectual freedom.

While overly strident in his opinion piece, I think he raises some good points. The blog post was a little long so I'll respond to the high points.

I think he's right to point out that challenges are not the same as government censorship. This was even discussed in the lectures in this class. But seems to be trying to use this to say that challenges thus shouldn't be a concern, which is something I disagree with.

He talk about how most challenges are made to school and public libraries for "language, sexuality, or age appropriateness" - and I suspect he's right that teh vast majority of these are for children's books, or young adult books which is an age group he didn't address and could be even more likely to be challenged. And here he seems willing to just let any challenge go through. Even when we've seen even completely inoffensive books are challenged - Harry Potter, for example.

In the end he seems to just exclude the middle - either we must ensure that any sort of material is accessible to anyone, even 6 year olds with Penthouse; or the ALA should just give it up and not oppose any challenge. Which is a bit silly. No one is shelving Penthouse in the children's section because it doesn't belong there.

While he makes us think about how we decide what material goes into section of the library and what material the library ought to buy, he does so by essentially declaring that anyone opposing any sort of censorship or challenges in the library are ideological loons. Yes, the OIF may come of as overly concerned about certain relatively minor matters at times, but that's the nature of groups focusing on a single issue.

In all, I think the AL's blog post is thought provoking and he makes a few interesting points, but he goes too far in caricaturing the ALA OIF's position and the position of anyone that agrees with them.

Differing perspectives

One of our most recent lectures touched on something that's been a recurring theme in the class. Well, technically it was an interview with a lobbyist, not a lecture, but close enough. The interview subject said that to persuade legislators, he needs to approach them and the issue from their perspective. What is it they find important? What is it that they care about?

Throughout the course we've been touching on this overall idea that everyone surrounding this issue has their own priorities and goals. And it's important to understand those and engage with them in order to hopefully come to some reasonable resolution.

Librarians tend to place a high priority on intellectual freedom; the freedom to speak, read, see, and think whatever you like.

Some parents and others place a high priority on protecting children from immoral or negative influences. (Whether the materials they oppose are actually immoral or a negative influence on children is beside the point of this post.)

Some people, often represented by law enforcement agencies, place a high priority on keeping honest citizens safe from harm.

But these priorities will come into conflict. We'd all like to live in a place where we have absolute intellectual freedom, and law enforcement is able to keep us perfectly safe without intruding on our freedoms, and no child (or adult) is exposed to material that may traumatize them or lead them to immoral actions. Unfortunately such a society is impossible.

So we're left in this imperfect world where we each struggle for our priorities. But each of these groups have a reasonable goal, we just disagree on how far the goals of the others should be compromised for our goal. And by attempting to see issues from the perspective of the other side, we can hopefully find some common ground and language to resolve issues as they arise.

<sarcasm>Unless they're trying to ban the dictionary; that's just crazy.</sarcasm>

Patriot Act renewed

For our presentation for the class my partner and I will be talking about the Patriot Act, focusing on its relation to libraries. The presentation is more timely than I thought it would be as certain portions of the Patriot Act that were due to sunset have just been renewed for another year.

Doing this presentation has been a good reminder of what all is in the Patriot Act and how it changed the legal landscape for law enforcement to pursue and acquire information. One book I've been reading, Refuge of a Scoundrel, places the Patriot Act nicely in the larger context of a shift to greater government power and also greater government secrecy.

These two movements both affect libraries. Government power comes into play in new powers to request library records including circulation information and computer access logs. Simultaneously government secrecy has impacted the ability of people to do research by restricting the information available to the people from the government. In many cases this was apparently innocuous information that was unclassified or had been declassified for a long time.

It appears that these forces are on the wane a bit. At least this time the sunsetting Patriot Act provisions were renewed for only a year, and that after some debate and an emergency two month extension. Here's hoping for a better result next February! Don't forget you can write your representative and senators to make your opinion known!

Neil Gaiman on Intellectual Freedom

Author Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Coraline, many others) had a recent post on his blog that talked about a recent conviction of someone for owning "obscene comics". While this has some relation to our class, I thought a link from that post to a older post was even more appropriate (and I highly recommend reading the whole post). Entitled "Why defend freedom of icky speech?", it is a long response to a fan questioning why it was worth defending the defendant in this case.

And this question reminded me of a similar question that seems to have come often over this term about what materials should be in a library's collection and if there are any materials that are just "out of line." And the answer varies between libraries, given their different focuses and collection policies. And obviously libraries concern only a subset of our First Amendment rights - there may likely be things that ought to be free to publish but that don't belong in your library due to its collection policy and the interests of patrons.

But Gaiman's older blog post had some gems of wisdom in it that are appropriate for us to consider. Why should the library have potentially offensive materials? And what about a book that offends the librarian personally? As Gaiman puts it,

You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.

In this case, we're talking about library collections rather than law, but I think the basic point remains the same. We allow things that we find offensive in our collections because the alternative is that we have rules to prevent "offensive" material - and those same rules would be used to remove things we do think are worth defending. "One person's obscenity is another person's art."

News coverage of challenges

For our assignment this week, we have to write a paper on an "intellectual freedom challenge" in a library. So, I went looking for challenges to write about. I've ended up writing about the semi-famous "Bunny Suicides" challenge, but that's tangential to the point of this post.

In looking for challenges, I came across a nice, convenient list put together by the ACLU of Oregon (see the right sidebar on this page). In looking through the list a few different challenges caught my eye, but when I went to find information about them it was often hard, if not impossible, to find even a single news article. It seems that often challenges, whether in public libraries or school libraries, just don't make the news.

It's not clear from the ACLU site whether it's challenges list includes only formal written challenge, or whether complaints that are resolved purely verbally are counted too. But in either case, I wouldn't have expected that 18 challenges were made in Oregon public libraries last year - largely because I saw no news about any challenges.

Another oddity in news reporting of challenges that I encountered was that news organizations don't always follow the whole story through to the end. In the case of the Bunny Suicides there were a fairly large number of stories about the initial case, but not as many organizations actually reported about the final decision three months later. (For the record, the book was retained in the library.)

Ideal vs Actual Meeting Room Policies

I thought this week I'd compare an actual meeting room policy to the idealized version from the ALA. Specifically, I'll be looking at the meeting room policy of the Eugene Public Library (PDF warning), my local library.

The EPL has three meeting rooms open for public rental. It may look like four at first, but the Tykeson and Bascom rooms are adjacent and can be combined into a single room. A fee is charged for the use of the rooms, and it's a bit more if the rooms are to be used outside the library's normal hours.

The ALA Interpretation suggests that the meetings ought to be restricted only by time, place, and manner, not by content. The EPL doesn't stress content in it's handout, but it does say that the rooms are open "to all persons or groups" which implicitly includes indicates they don't discriminate between renters based on the content.

There is a restriction on the frequency of reservations - no more than once per month. There is also a restriction that all meetings must be free and open to the public. But these restrictions are explicitly allowed for in the ALA Interpretation: "Written policies may include limitations on frequency of use, and whether or not meetings held in library meeting rooms must be open to the public."

The ALA Interpretation suggests that libraries include a section on admission fees and the EPL policy does, stating that meetings must be free and open to the public.

The only place I can see some conflict between the two statements is that the Eugene Library charges a fee to the group for use of hte room. The Interpretation encourages libraries to avoid this in order to preserve equitable access to all aspects of the library; this applies to indirectly restricting access based on the ability to pay. However, the fees are pretty low and I think it's clear that the EPL had intellectual freedom in mind when it drafted the policy.

A week for banned books

I knew books were challenged sometimes, but this week really had some interesting cases.

First, dictionaries removed from classrooms in one California school district. Apparently a parent complained because one can find definitions of words they consider "inappropriate." Personally, this just seems crazy but apparently is being discussed seriously by a panel there.

Second, a Virginia district switching to a different edition of the Diary of Anne Frank. I didn't realize there were different editions. I understand that the traditional edition is a version expurgated of certain content by Anne's father Otto. My quick thought is that if it was in Anne's original diary, then clearly it's representative of thoughts that naturally occur to kids in the 13-15 year old range. So I'm not sure I can see why someone would believe it'd be particularly traumatizing for them to read.

But I suppose the take away for me on these is that people will challenge books for reasons I just can't fathom. These are the cases that it's easy for me to oppose, but it's equally important to oppose the other cases as well. As librarians we are responsible for making information available to people and letting the accept or reject it as they will.

FBI Access to Records

Not to keep harping on the same subject, but I found this article about the FBI obtaining phone records based on little more than a post-it note relevant to our thinking about Intellectual Freedom issues in libraries.

Unlike libraries, phone companies don't seem to have much of a culture of protecting customer/patron information. As a result they were sometimes all too eager to go along with any request from an FBI agent, assuming that the information requested must be urgent and important to an investigation. Perhaps they weren't even aware of the system of warrants/subpeonas that are meant to offer some independent oversight that the requests really are relevant to an ongoing investigation.

While I'm sure there are librarians out there who aren't entirely on board the intellectual freedom train, and may be willing to provide information to a police officer or FBI agent, especially when pressured, I would hope that no one would give up that information based solely on a polite question and a scribbled post-it note. But maybe I'm being overly optimistic here.

Records privacy vs professors and others

In the past I've considered the privacy of library records primarily in relation to government requests for that information. This is perhaps because the most dramatic examples come from that direction. However, I've recently read/heard about a couple other cases that I think are pretty interesting.

The first: I've recently started volunteering at my local library.  One of the items that came up during the volunteer orientation involved the privacy of library information. How we should given the impression that we neither know nor care about what the patron is reading.

An aside - this was also interesting in that it was reinforced that we shouldn't make positive comments on the patron's selection because it draws attention to the fact we have this knowledge. And perhaps the patron will be led to thinking, "Well, sure they like that I'm reading this, but do I really want them to see that I also want to read that? Better not to check it out."

 As part of the privacy training, one example of records privacy was mentioned - that even family members shouldn't get a pass to see what their wife/son/whatever has checked out. We don't know their personal situation and it's just better for everyone if we don't give out that information as policy, even if the requester says it's for some innocuous purpose like making sure to collect all the books coming due soon from the house.

The other example that struck me was in reading the ALA's Guidelines for Developing a Library Privacy Policy which included a mention of a professor seeking evidence for plagiarism in Section III.

The mere fact that students are enrolled in courses should not jeopardize their privacy rights. Thus, student circulation records for course-required and reserve reading should be protected from inquiry with the same rigor as their circulation records for personal reading. Librarians assisting in investigations of plagiarism should take care to protect the usage records of individual students.

It occurred to me that I would naturally be sympathetic to the professor's plight, whereas I've been somewhat culturally conditioned to be wary of the motives of government agents asking for similar records.

The unifying theme of these two separate examples it the way it's driven home that we need to be wary of going along with someone because their motives seem reasonable to us. Privacy protections mean more than just privacy from the request of government representatives, but also from the requests of others no matter how innocuous they may seem.

How absolute should Intellectual Freedom be?

First post of the blog.  And I think I'll start by looking at how absolute should we take Intellectual Freedom to be.  I'll be looking at it particularly from the perspective of what sort of materials should we have on our shelves at the library.

The second point of the ALA's Library Bill of Rights says, "Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view."  This sounds pretty absolute to me, and at a first read is something I'd readily agree with. But then I start thinking of how far this reaches. After all, the first sort of material I thought of was points of view I had agreed with that had been subject to challenges.  But that's the easy stuff - the hard questions are how you handle material you don't agree with.

And so I started to think about material I would find objectionable.  I doubt I'll shock anyone if I go on record as being against racial prejudice.  The Library Bill of Rights would say that a library collection should not avoid material due to it advocating segregation or racial superiority/inferiority.  This is backed up by the Diversity in Collection Development interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights. Our text calls this out by discussing books such as Little Black Sambo.  And so I had to give this principle some real thought.  Do I agree that libraries ought to carry all sorts of material, even material that advocates racial prejudice or other views I find abhorent?

In the end I agree with the ALA's Bill of Rights that the library ought not shy away from such works. As the ALA's policy statements argue, democracy implicitly relies on the idea that "the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad." In the end we must trust our neighbors to choose for themselves what they believe and trust that the truth will shine through. To exclude books in the library for their point of view, even in the service of ideals we believe strongly in, is to prevent society from being able to fully consider, and hopefully reject those viewpoints.