silveradept | Mar. 5th, 2020

I'm doing this in a space away from my professional self, one, because it's well past when the Twitter chat happened, and two, because I think these questions have effects that will take longer than the 280 characters a Tweet usually entails.

Also, this whole post is essentially shop talk for librarians. It affects everyone, but it's unapologetically Librarian.

So, a quick primer: in the library world, when we talk about intellectual freedom (usually styled Intellectual Freedom or IF), we're specifically talking about the rights of people to seek information they wish, without barriers or censorship by governments, institutions, or libraries, within the boundaries of the law. This usually has a few different permutations. Most commonly, it results in the conversation of "yes, people are allowed to look at pornography here in the library." Often times, behind that, there's an unstated "we really wish they wouldn't do it in a public place, and if there are any accompanying behaviors, like a hand down the pants, or they try to get people to watch what they are watching, we'll happily chuck them for those behaviors, but watching porn by itself is not a library crime."

Past that, intellectual freedom also says that libraries should provide a collection with diverse viewpoints, which can often be interpreted as "a good library collection has something in it that offends everyone," but is usually more on the idea of "a person's reasons for seeking information and opinions are their own, and the library's place is to help them find the best of that information in the time the person is interacting with the library."

( And now, to the meat of the matter, of TERFs and meeting rooms and absolutists versus community focus. )

I suppose the big question about IF in this case ultimately comes down to this: is the library a fundamentally conservative institution or a progressive one? Because the idea of intellectual freedom can be put to use to both of those philosophical outlooks, whether in the conservative, hands-off "neutral" way, or in a more engaged progressive way that says the library's collections and spaces are meant to reflect the whole of the community, and therefore the library is making strategic decisions about programming and collections to bring marginalized voices into a more equitable position.

But first, it seems, we need to convince ourselves that we are making choices by choosing not to change, and then ask whether or not these choices are ones we want to actively choose, rather than passively let happen.