silveradept | Time To Talk About Intellectual Freedom: Librarian Stuff Ahead

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."

Recently, several groups that can be charitably described as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) have been reserving for themselves library spaces and then advertising events for members of the public to pay and attend. Current guidance from entities such as the American Library Association say that, based on case law, if a library chooses to provide space for the public to use, it must do so equally to anyone who asks and cannot choose who gets into the library's meeting spaces based on the viewpoints that will be expressed in the public meeting space.

As one might expect, the communities around the spaces where these groups are meeting have expressed their concerns to the libraries in question, indicating that the library giving space to these groups, regardless of the disclaimers that every library has about the presence of any given viewpoint in the library is not the library's endorsement of that viewpoint, is viewed as granting legitimacy to positions that should be deplatformed. Things get further complicated when libraries also state that part of their mission is to be a community organization that is responsive and takes into account the community and their needs.

Most of the discussion around Intellectual Freedom is on this last idea, that often is summarized as the tension between "libraries are neutral" and "libraries cannot be neutral", which usually places the abstract Platonic ideal of "neutrality" against the reality of libraries as institutions in contexts and with a particularly terrible history of upholding and exporting whiteness (or even WASPiness) into communities that don't look anything like the people at the desks. Unsurprisingly, you'll find that same divide of "Nice White Ladies" and "the marginalized community at large" in staffing at many libraries, because of how those "Nice White Ladies" were used in white savior narratives, and as "civilizing" influences and with the same kind of vocational awe as coined by Fobazi Ettarh that applies to teachers (who also have the same narratives and history attached to them, often much more explicitly than what happened with libraries).

So, the #timetotalkaboutIF campaign is for this discussion of how to handle it when groups that are looking to legitimize hate and platform their opinions specifically target libraries as places to help them in this, because libraries will hide behind "neutrality" and "intellectual freedom" so as not to invite court challenges, even though they will do significant harm to their communities in doing so, and they may often do so on the advice from their legal counsel, because of the precedent that's been set.

So, with the idea in mind that the same principle is being used to defend libraries from being overseen by censor boards with unlimited powers to pull materials and to defend not having to do anything about people with retrograde ideas using the library as a legitimizing platform, let's begin.

What do you see as barriers to discussing IF?

There's the first and biggest barrier, which is that intellectual freedom is touted as a core value and one of the pillars of the library's ethics. To call into question the idea that intellectual freedom is anything other than an unvarnished good is to suggest that the library as an institution has been something other than an unquestioned force for good and progressivism in its existence. It's not hard to prove that libraries are not the shining beacons they want to cast themselves as, especially if you look in the United States during the era where segregation was legal, but there's a lot of wanting to whitewash that history and pretend that it was bad actors rather than institutional policies and structural racism that produced those results.

I think another barrier to discussing intellectual freedom is that a significant amount of the press and attention that ALA gives to the concept of intellectual freedom is concentrated in things like Banned Book Week, where the focus is on defending and reporting on outside censorship challenges to library material. This conveniently dovetails with the image that libraries want to have of themselves as stalwart defenders of the freedom to read, and similarly convenient erases the very real decisions that libraries and library workers make every day about what to purchase, what to remove, and what sort of access they are negotiating for and willing to pay for to materials. A library is much more willing to portray themselves as the victim of an outside attack or as an entity that has their hand forced by outside decisions and call it intellectual freedom than to stand up and admit they are making decisions that may or may not be what their communities around them want them to make, and they are also applying the idea of intellectual freedom to these decisions as well.

In what ways does the current approach to IF undermine the human rights of marginalized groups of people?

The next question will lead into discussing the problems of the conflict between doing right by your community and staying committed to intellectual freedom, but for this one, I'm going to say that the absolutist approach favored and promoted by ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom is absolutely undermining the rights of marginalized groups of people, specifically by putting the principle as the most important thing, rather than the person or the community. I'd like to believe that most people in the library profession are smart enough (or, at least, people who are joining as library workers in these days are smart enough) to be able to tell that the local Conservative Christian Groups boycotting and attempting to leverage pressure against a library because they're hosting a Drag Royalty Story Time with members of the drag community and a TERF group looking for meeting room access are in the same general category. They're both looking for legitimization of their position by appealing to the library as arbiter of cultural norms. After all, things you can find (or access) in the library are normal and/or the default. So if you can have your meeting, or your book, or your event in the library, you become part of normal. This is a terrifying power, given to libraries as part of their inception and initial missions, with the understanding that libraries would be used to push one very specific, very white, very WASP, idea of normal into all the communities where they were built, through the delivery mechanism of the staff and the collections.

The current approach to IF wants to maintain this power that libraries have been given, but without having to accept the consequences that come from having that power and using it unwisely, or using it in the service of advancing specific ideologies that have real and direct harms to communities. And speaking of our communities…

How can library workers maintain and build relationships in the community when upholding IF conflicts with a commitment to inclusion?

Unless the conflict is resolved, they can't. Because communities, especially communities of marginalized people, will notice immediately when an institution like a library is talking out both sides of its mouth. And while library workers can do their best to build trust and demonstrate that they are people who understand and will do what they can to make things more welcoming and better for the community they are in, their efforts will never be anything more than those library workers trying to make things better in their communities. Something about not being able to serve two masters, I'm sure. Which is not to say that a library with a firm commitment to inclusion is going to get it exactly correct all of the time. There's still so many ways to fuck it up past not understanding your own role, your own history, and putting in place things that will produce actual change and accountability for people at all levels of the organization. But until a library is willing to sacrifice intellectual freedom or give it secondary importance compared to other principles, I can't really say that efforts past the individual level will have any sort of success. (And, we might note, there's a lot of lionization of the individual in the library culture, even though it's also one of the ones with a high rate of collective bargaining in place.)

In what ways are the collections libraries build different than the ways the space is made available to the public?

To some degree, that depends on the mission of the library. Certain academic collections might keep papers and monographs with very outdated views on society because those materials are very important to the researchers that are studying those time periods and values so they can document their presence in a society that insists it no longer has them. The meeting spaces of that library, however, might be only available to people associated with the institution, and matters of interest to the public or events that the public wishes to have may be placed in different spaces on the campus.

For most of the history of the public library, it has been charged with carrying collections that will be informative, educational, and of high quality to the people who come into the space. Often along the lines of bringing civilization and good material to the uneducated, unwashed masses of poors, blacks, and browns through the materials and the Nice White Ladies staffing the locations. It is a relatively recent shift to the idea of carrying popular materials, or materials that will have much more enjoyment value than they have educational value, and you can still hear the echoes of those complaints and the vice-grip that attitude has in school libraries, where their collections are arranged according to textual complexity metrics that are being abused to classify and restrict the reading choices of students to a narrow band, rather than encouraging wide reading of things that are enjoyable and interesting to the student.

New forms and formats, such as graphic novels, were decried as not "real books" for a significant amount of time, before their use in encouraging the "reluctant reader" and getting boys (and notice how much of the time, "boys" really meant "black and brown boys the education system was failing miserably by") to partake in reading sufficiently such that the habit of reading inculcated (and, coincidentally, getting those students to put sufficient effort toward learning the skills associated with reading, even with the associated social cost that came from being seen reading). Once it became possible to align materials like graphic novels to the goals of the system, they started gaining widespread acceptance and a place in library collections. Even though, at the same time, the Comics Code Authority had been dismantled and the range of available topics a child might be exposed to through comics was back to a much less wholesome space than what was available during the reign of the Comics Code.

One of the other main strains of complaint about library collections are about what has enough "literary merit" to be included in a library collection. The people wielding this argument are often doing so with the idea they can then promote their position in the culture war and insist on such things as:

people on the QUILTBAG+ acronym, through their very existence, promote deviance from a moral norm as a way of life and are attempting to recruit impressionable young children to join them in being deviants as well

children and teenagers need to be shielded from any work that talks or touches on subjects such as race, prejudice, abuse, questions of identity and orientation, or other such "adult topics" until they are adults, regardless of whether that child or teenager is experiencing those topics in their life right now
books enjoyed by and written by women, especially in genres that focus on romance, can't possibly be objectively good and their popularity is an indictment of how far underneath an acceptable minimum the taste of women in the United States is

books that depict the accurate experiences of people who aren't white, written by people who aren't white, are to be shunned in favor of white people writing stereotype about people who aren't white, because stereotype will sell far better than reality. (The "urban" genre gets hit really hard on the "no literary merit" department, because it is usually by people of color, about people of color, romance can be a part of it, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it's marketed in a way to suggest that it'll be idfic from the front to the back.)

What really makes collection development difficult for libraries and librarians is that just about every industry that libraries rely on to create a collection that reflects their community have decided they're not interested in libraries. Print publishing regularly rejects things that should be greenlit and printed that would make the pool of available materials much more diverse and give the librarians a much wider selection to choose from. If the most popular press for, say, "urban" fiction only prints 1,000 of any given work, on as cheap a paper and binding as it can, because those 1,000 will sell at a price that can turn enough of a profit to get the next book through the press, there's no way that press is going to appear in Baker and Taylor or BWI for libraries to select from. It would crush the press to have the entirety of the library market decide they wanted that book, and multiple copies, please, to be delivered so they can be processed anywhere in the United States and/or Canada and put on library shelves within a week. Elsewhere, having decided they would much rather license than have to sell anything, electronic-everything is not being pressed to physical-anything much. Netflix doesn't have library agreements, even as they collect more and more content and don't make physical discs of it. Publishers make ridiculous demands in money and other insistences for electronic materials to libraries, and know they can get it, because otherwise, the library doesn't get the content that the people who use the library (and therefore, are the ones funding it) want.

Further complicating the issue, of course, is that libraries have limited space and budget to purchase materials with. So while in a perfect world with infinite space, time, and money, a library practicing Platonic IF would have everything that it could possibly have from as many points of view as possible, every day the practical realities of space and budget essentially mean that no library is ever going to have a complete collection of materials perfectly suited to each member of their community. Intellectual freedom routinely takes a backseat to "there's no space on this shelf" or "we have to spend the tax revenues that we collect wisely," and while there are occasionally complaints about the fact that a library gets rid of books, especially the ones that aren't circulating or that haven't been current since the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for the most part, people understand that materials have to be gotten rid of for new ones to arrive. (The shift to e-materials was supposed to help alleviate this problem, as a digital copy of a book exists only in its file size on a server somewhere, potentially infinitely expanding the possible available material such that the smaller groups that are interested in less super-popular things can have copies of the things they want. Publishers screwed this up, too, in their increasing quest to try and cut libraries out of the picture entirely.)

So what makes it different when intellectual freedom comes in conflict with other library policies, or the lives, identities, and validity of the communities that libraries are situated in? And what makes meeting space specifically different than library collections? For an IF absolutist, nothing changes, and all people are able to access the meeting room to put on whatever programs they want, so long as the meeting itself doesn't violate the rules the library has set for the meeting space. Space has also been the subject of some court cases alleging discrimination against the First Amendment right to not have speech restricted by a government entity (which many libraries are, as departments of their city or county government), leading to the current guidance that says

Publicly funded libraries are not obligated to provide meeting room space to the public. If libraries choose to do so, such spaces are considered designated public forums, and legal precedent holds that libraries may not exclude any group based on the subject matter to be discussed or the ideas for which the group advocates. However, if a group's actions during a meeting disrupt or harass others in the library, library policies regarding acceptable behavior may apply. If libraries adopt policies that are perceived to restrict potentially controversial groups’ access to meeting rooms, they may face legal and financial consequences.

Even in that guidance, however, there is acknowledgement that other policies of the library still apply to groups wishing to use the meeting room. I am reasonably sure that many groups are less interested in using my organization's meeting room space because of the rule in place that said all events in our space must be free and open to the public, which prevents any such group from charging admission or closing the meeting as a way of screening out people unsympathetic to the viewpoints being expressed.

To get back toward answering the actual question asked, the difference between collections and meeting spaces often has to do with the ability of the person to control their experience. People can choose to read or not read, view or not view, listen or not listen to the things that are in the collection, and, at least in theory, each person's individual choice with the collection should be contained to that person. (It doesn't work in practice, of course, see the most common complaint about what adults are watching on the adult computers, but that's the theory.) For the most part, with the collections, we say that the things selected have value to the community, and that the community chooses what things they wish to engage with, for whatever reasons they have. With the meeting rooms and their groups, however, even with the ability to close and keep the sound out of the meeting room, things become less detached and more personal. At that point, there are people in the community doing things that are potentially harmful to the community, and the library isn't doing anything about it. Since it's in their space, this is often perceived as a tacit endorsement of those ideas by the library, even with all the disclaimers posted everywhere that things that aren't library events aren't endorsed by the library.

This gets even more potentially complex when you have conflicting policies and agendas in the library, as discussed in the answers to the earlier questions. Committing to being a force for progressive values in the community will bring a library into conflict with intellectual freedom and the vaunted value of "neutrality" that generally refuses to acknowledge that the "neutral" position is anything but when viewed with lenses that place whiteness out of the unmarked default. Everything that the library construes as passive things are active decisions, with active policies behind them. Until the library world moves to this position and begins to reframe itself as making deliberate choices about what it wants to promote, collect, and have in its space, and sees all of these things as unified and connected, we're going to keep getting caught up in situations like these.

How are we assessing risk in decision making related to IF? How can leadership best prepare to meet such challenges?

Libraries as a whole are notoriously risk-averse. As entities whose major funding depends on taxpayers thinking of the library as a good and necessary place, there is a strong incentive for libraries to be as anodyne as possible to the people who are most likely to have influence on their funding. Intellectual Freedom and the promise of "neutrality" are attractive to an entity that wants to keep its continued funding by keeping away from anything controversial, unless that controversy can be spun to make libraries into the good guys. As much as libraries want to position themselves as champions of freedoms and free thought, most libraries are waiting for another library to try and do something neat, see what the community reaction is, evaluate the same program in the vein of their own community's norms, and then decide from there whether they want to follow suit and put on the program themselves. We are, after all, conservative institutions in the whole, many placed in conservative communities. We have to make decisions about what we, as the library, are going to do, in relation to how those decisions will affect the community's perception of us and whether that shift in perception will damage the library's ability to stay funded.

I think a lot of risk assessment around IF is this kind of risk assessment. If a group expressing retrograde opinions wants to use the library's space, and members of the community make vocal complaints about this, there's an assessment involved about whether adhering to philosophy and policy is worth the cost of alienating that group of the community. If library staff want to put on a program in conjunction with their local drag performers, a risk assessment happens as to whether doing the program and featuring a segment of the community will be worth the risk of another segment of the community finding the library not in accord with their own values and acting accordingly, whether by voting against the library's continued tax funding or by getting legislators to introduce bills establishing censorship boards to make sure no library steps out of line from their values ever again, on pain of prosecution, fines, and/or jail time.

The tension between pragmatism and philosophical absolutism is often unacknowledged by library leadership, and I wonder how many decisions made find their policy justifications after the decision gets made on other reasons. Intellectual Freedom, with a few exceptions, almost always comes down on the side of "we don't want to intervene, unless we have to because of other reasons." And yet, we can tell, through example, that not all program ideas or meeting room bookings receive equal attention from the community.

Leadership needs to be better prepared for things related to IF by proactively, as much as they can, making decisions and writing policies about where they think the limits of IF are. Personally, I'd add "with the understanding that IF is one of many considerations the library takes into account when making a decision," but that's because I want to be transparent about the not-primacy of IF in the library world. If a library wants to say that the limits of IF are things like available space and budget, then they should be willing to state that in policy so their community knows what will happen. If a library wants to say the limits of IF are the community's norms, they should also be willing to state that in policy so the community knows. I think there's space for a library to say "intellectual freedom, as we understand it, protects the right of the individual to seek information, hold opinions, and act as citizens on society. Intellectual freedom does not mean every opinion is welcome in the library and to use library space and resources. Intellectual freedom does mean the library will try to present and allow a diverse range of opinions and programs, so long as those opinions and programs do not advocate for the inhumanity of others or espouse discriminatory attitudes toward others (modulo "legally protected classes", most likely)." Partisans can be in, and can debate vigorously about policies, but TERFs and White Supremacists aren't allowed in. At least into the programs and meeting rooms. They might still be in the collection, because there is potential value in having materials the community can select, regardless of the opinions of the author, because the community gets to choose or not choose. That's probably also something in this hypothetical IF policy Idea - the difference between being able to choose for oneself what one is exposed to versus antisocial behavior that another person does to you. What we need are leaders, both as executives and as library board members, that are willing to examine the philosophical underpinnings of the library as an institution and think through what sort of consequences derive from those philosophies and whether those philosophies are really what a library wants to espouse, and whether those philosophies are actually a good fit for a mission that is at least nominally about raising the level of the discourse and being an entity that is responsive to the needs of all community members, rather than the comfortable majority. That very well may mean risking getting sued and trying to get precedent to go on the direction of working toward justice. It'll take a library willing to put up the costs of that and to defend themselves on principles they can be proud of.

It really is time to talk about IF. Or, at the very least, the maximalist interpretation that's being taken by ALA and that doesn't comport with the reality of what things are like on the ground. If that's a thing that libraries want to commit to, they need to be up front about it and abandon whatever efforts they have to try and court minorities or others for whom that maximalism harms more than it helps. I think it's a bad strategy, especially in a world where libraries and library staff are (painfully) slowly shifting from thinking of themselves as the place with all the answers that can be taught reside to a place where the community has space and resources to pursue their aims and interests. And where libraries have the power to decide that certain values are normative and enforced in their space, even if (especially if) the community around them doesn't see the value in doing so.

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There's an ongoing row at the Scottish Poetry Library, which just decided members arguing to no-platform TERFs (anywhere, not just at the library) is 'bullying', must stop and is threatening to 'ban' authors who don't comply:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/05/transphobia-row-leaves-scottish-poetry-scene-in-turmoil

And on this basis, I assume 'they' believe that racists, fascists, misogynists et hoc genus omne should be given equal right to the use of public space?

Sigh :o(

That's pretty much what I asked them on Twitter. No reply, surprise that.

It seems to me that there is some kind of distinction to be drawn between using library resources to access *information* on a topic, and using library spaces to *meet*. That it should be, for instance, possible to obtain information about eugenics (including the texts of some eugenicists - Marie Stopes, for instance, if not straight up hitler in your local library), but using library spaces to meet and advocate for eugenics would be qualitatively different.

I am well aware that the corollary of this is that the library might carry books that discuss homosexuality but decline queer youth groups, but I would be surprised if that were not already so in many places.

You would think, but Intellectual Freedom according to the maximalists doesn't make that distinction. We're supposed to be "neutral" and let the marketplace of ideas figure it out.

Your corollary is correct, and if you listen carefully, you can hear the difference between a library refusing because the library (staff) thinks queer people are icky and the library refusing because the community thinks queer people are icky and exert their outsize influence to make politicians suggest censorship boards as a good idea, to demand the funding be taken away from the library, or to be a presence at the library specifically intended to dissuade queer people from coming to the library or having their lives represented in the collection.

Very well written.

...the difference between being able to choose for oneself what one is exposed to versus antisocial behavior that another person does to you.

If other means of phrasing it are useful, that fundamental question might also come to: do we allow people to use our space to pursue goals that harm the fabric of the community?

Of course, that presupposes that people accept supremacist organizations as harm. *sigh*

And it's not like those groups say "Hi, we're the TERFs from TERFtown, and we'd love to TERF in your turf! Whaddya say?"

But, even if they did, ALA and the court cases suggest we couldn't turn them away solely because they were TERFs, and most libraries will follow that line.

It's a real problem, but I snickered at your phrasing.

It sounds like the ALA on an organizational level would prefer to keep their changes either minimal, or accidental. That's frustrating.

They don't exactly have competition from many other library or library-related organizations, and it's becoming increasingly clear that ALA cares more about the institutions than the workers or the community.

I've been chewing this over a bit, because there was A HooHah some 18 months or so ago involving An Institution with which I have some connection, which far from having or requiring any public funding is an organisation of considerable wealth.

But anyway, they were sponsoring an event as part of a festival in the general area to do with issues around gender and sexuality (to which yrs truly was making some contribution) and this was being promoted in terms which got picked up, it being the time of year when there was not much else going on, by journalists of the omg-pc-run-mad brigade, as They Have Sold Out To Woke Snowflakes.

So the Press team immediately started doing damage limitation and reputation management without due consultation or even informing actual organisers, and there was bad feeling over this as well as anxieties as to how this would affect the event.

In fact it went off without awful incidents, but a sour taste was left.

That sounds like said institution was trying to preserve good relationships with their community, but their community was not the same as the people that were being advertised to by the event.

Also, one of those large institutions with perhaps less than stellar channels of communication between its different parts... though not, I think, a phenomenon confined to large institutions.

Certainly not confined to large institutions. Any institution that finds itself ambushed by spin-focused reporting might react less than optimally.

Time To Talk About Intellectual Freedom: Librarian Stuff Ahead

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