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silveradeptI listened to a presentation recently entitled Library Neutrality as Public Service in Liberal Democratic Governance, presented by the Heterodox Academy. I mention the name, and their tagline, "great minds don't always think alike," so that you understand the presenters believe themselves as outside library orthodoxy and the majority opinion. They're not, not even close, but I understand why they want to position themselves that way, as outsiders, so that the rest of the library community won't dismiss them without listening first and seeing if they continue to advocate for a flawed or broken system.
I was mostly disappointed by the presentation. It had good things in it. A general call for people being critical of "library neutrality" to be specific about what they mean to avoid misunderstanding, for example. The presenters then claimed that most criticism of library neutrality is conflating one form ("we are objective and our perfect data is not tainted by the presence of opinion or bias") for another ("we strive to avoid injecting our personal biases into our processes, goals, and operations"). I think they're misreading some of the scholars they claim are doing the conflation, and I also know that library workers experience both of those arguments when trying to push back against neutrality as a governing principle, so much of the good from the initial request went out the window.
Where my disappointment lies most, however, is in two major claims that the presenters make in their attempt to convince the audience that neutrality of the second form ("avoid personal biases, make sure all stakeholders have the same information and opportunity to collaborate, make your processes equitable and don't waver from them") is a desirable goal for libraries to strive for. Their first claim is that libraries aren't perceived as vested with the power to create social change. That may be true for many of the places in the world, including Canada, where the speakers are from (and, I'm going to guess, where they have the most experience with libraries), but in the States, that didn't seem as true as they're asserting. The speakers do acknowledge there's a difference in how Canada and the United States have structured themselves: "Peace, Order, and Good Government" versus "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," but they don't really elaborate on how those differences play out and they still assume that their position is good for both countries. (With an example of how Canada transitioned from a much more individualistic nation to a nation with a robust social safety net and an expectation of the same within fifty years or so was what's possible with an institution that does have the perception of and ability to make social change.)
In the United States, while there is a perception of libraries that positions them as little more than warehouses of materials (and thus, easily replaceable and interchangeable with any other warehouse of materials that could be provided at "lower" cost to the taxpayer), a more prominent interpretation is "the people's university," the place where those who can't attain or afford formal credentials can still achieve a fine education through self-study and the available materials. Or, in a less flattering fashion, the idea that the public library is a force of assimilationism, a public service designed to bring the immigrant and the Other inside and teach them to adopt the values of cishet white Christians for the greatest ease of fitting in to U.S. society, using white women as the means to do so. (Because women are just born nurturers and carers and would gladly accept this sacred calling to "raise" the ignorant immigrants and dark-skinned people to the standard of whiteness. Blech.)
If libraries were really primarily conceived as passive warehouses of materials, I think there would be much less interest in determining what materials they can and can't carry on their shelves. The presentation was given in April 02022, so right in the thick of the censorship fights happening all across the country, so there's no reason to believe the presenters are ignorant of this context. The fights are not new, because book banning is always about the latest moral panic, but even a cursory analysis of where book challenges are coming from indicates challenges almost always center around the access of materials by children. It's more intense this year than many years previous because legislators and officials in various states sense they have enough people who think like them that they can get their real agendas passed and signed into law without suffering electoral consequences, but the focus about whether queer people are allowed to exist and whether anything that portrays people of color in topics other than slavery, sports, and hip-hop should be allowed to exist (or exist in ways that aren't stereotypes by white people) clearly indicates that somebody (a lot of somebodies) believes that libraries, and especially school libraries, have some amount of power to shape and influence the ideas of those that use them. In the broad sense of "the marketplace of ideas," where the solution to bad speech is supposed to be more speech, the active censorship attempts underway would be at least a tacit admission that their speech and position can't survive in the marketplace without heavy interference, even as they accuse their opponents of exactly that kind of heavy interference. For the purposes of the talk, though, the context of April 02022 (and all of 02021, and all of 02020, and...) should disprove the supposition that libraries are not perceived as institutions that create social change, through selection of materials and programming. People don't send threats or do acts of violence against those they believe are powerless (unless they are sadists gratifying themselves like Proud Boys attempting to intimidate storytime attendees): it's wasted effort.
There's been a shift between the first type of neutrality assertion ("we are objective," only really possible when "objectivity" meant "there is One Right (White) Way, all others will be suppressed and ignored") toward the second ("our materials and spaces are available for everyone and we do not discriminate who can use them based on their viewpoints") as a principle of librarianship, with the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read Statement, and other such pronouncements from ALA and similar organizations making that shift more explicit and codified, but the second form is unable to handle the problem of bad faith actors, persons who will not follow the stated procedures for registering their opinions on materials and programming, and persons who will not abide by a decision to keep materials and programming they have registered complaints about. To their credit, the presenters acknowledge that even their neutrality proposal can't beat bad faith actors, and they couch the proposal as an aspiration to strive for, rather than as a result that can be achieved concretely and in all situations. It sounds like what they want, as an aspiration, is the idea expressed in the "Libraries are For Everyone" graphic available from Hafuboti, where everyone can use the library harmoniously and without conflict. Except, of course, that such a premise taken to the logical terminus produces the paradox of tolerance, where entities set upon the destruction of the library or its constituencies are still allowed to use the library to further their goals without interference or opposition. And, often, because such things are political, libraries and their workers are often forbidden from speaking up for themselves in their official capacities, or enacting policies and practices for their own self-preservation in the face of a determined and hostile force. (Even more so when the hostile force is not external to the organization, but internal and likely in a supervisory role.) So, even with the adoption of the presenters' aspirational neutrality, the library as an institution will still find itself unequipped to handle the most pressing issues of today, and even though the presenters say neutrality of this sort is not passive, they don't quite appear to get how much work, very non-neutral work, is necessary to dismantle the systems in place that bias even the supposedly neutral before there can be a conversation about whether what gets built in its place will ever have the capacity to get anywhere near the aspirational neutrality outlined here.
I also think that any argument that proposes neutrality as a way of sidestepping or preserving the idea of the library as an entity unaffected by politics is wrong both on the history and the current era. A belief that this is "new" usually elides the past, both recent and far-reaching, in favor of the wrong idea that the people of the past were generally homogeneous in their attitudes, even in eras where there's an entire movement afoot to try and stop legalized segregation and discrimination against $GROUP. If our conception of history is mostly drawn from textbooks, then it is surely incomplete. At this point in time, politics with regard to libraries and their collections is unavoidable, and the partisans who oppose libraries and their collections will not decide to pull punches or stop their campaigns if we can protest strongly enough to them that we are neutral and have been collecting sufficient amounts of their point of view as well. Their objection is that we have the material or the programming in the first place, they will not consider it victory until that material is removed and cannot return (and, increasingly, that the person or persons responsible for opposing their enlightened viewpoint are punished in such a way as to make it clear that getting anywhere near a thing they disapprove of will be met with similar action and results.)
The second disappointment came right after the discussion of the presenters' approach to what neutrality in libraries could be, where they rewrite the ninth principle of the ALA Code of Ethics to incorporate their approach to neutrality and to scope the principle down to what they believe is within the remit of libraries. The revised principle takes away the calls for social justice and dismantling systems and entrenched biases and instead proclaims that the thing that the library really wants to do, the thing that they can do while remaining neutral in the way the presenters outline to us, is provide access. Which is consistent with the current neutrality-centric material in existence, but entirely removes an active role from the library and the library worker in favor of passive acquisition. It's a rollback to the pre-ninth principle era, where the library as institution envisioned itself was collecting as many points of view as possible and displaying them without making any value judgments about the content of those materials. (I say "rollback," as if that isn't still the dominant mode of libraries right now.) The suggested revision also severely curtails the role of the professional human in managing and curating the collection by making it all about "access." Access is an easy goal, one with quantifiable metrics where numbers going up is good, numbers going down is bad, and it neatly sidesteps those complicated questions and "wicked social problems" the presenters'refer to as the complex causes of social ills. We just have to provide the materials to the people using the library and and show them how to access them, and they'll take it from there to whatever conclusions they draw from the resources and how they want to justify those conclusions. We provide, they decide.
A focus on access combined with a neutrality stance doesn't care what purpose the information is put to, only whether it is available for someone. Which pretty well guarantees that the library is at least passively supporting institutions and decisions that have racist (or other -ist) outcomes, and providing justifications to people who are looking for reasons to believe their ish is a true and logical conclusion about the world. Yet, despite this clear reason not to think of the library as an institution on the side of justice or in favor of social progress, people still trust the library to find them accurate and trustworthy information, to the point where it's almost a reflex answer. Of course the library and the librarians can help me find good information, it's what they do. And yet, when there's talk in the profession about the possibility that librarians might have to reorient their collections for something other than pure access, so as to preserve the reputation they have for accurate information, or to ensure a proper representation of their communities, or even to perhaps retire material that has been around for a while and has had all of its very glaring flaws discussed and agreed to in many a school classroom and academic paper, there's almost always someone coming into that discussion immediately talking about how inappropriate and unethical it is for librarians to practice censorship on their collections and to impose their personal opinions about what should and shouldn't be collected. (Because the Code of Ethics and their interpretations unequivocally prohibit both of these things.) We're (mostly) not allowed to say that someone is wrong, that would be unethical. Yes, there are places where we are allowed not to carry someone's materials for being factually wrong if they're marketing them as being factually correct, but if someone is marketing their book as an opinion piece on politics or other social issues, even if they are wrong, demonstrably so on every thing that they cite or assert, not carrying that book would potentially be "censorship" if we didn't have a more practical reason not to carry it, like a lack of space or budget to buy out to this particular tip of the long tail.
A commitment to access as the primary motivator means fascist and factually inaccurate material appearing in collections with library branding, filed and categorized into the search algorithms in such a way as to make them, rather than factually accurate material, the top results for people searching in their library's holdings. Or services that believe it's a selling point to say that no human ever touches their algorithm, even when those services promote, with library branding, materials that are racist and factually inaccurate. Or things that might be new records, but rebought items that don't need to be cluttering up the true new books. Or they're new books by people who already have a full marketing blitz behind them, instead of someone surviving on a good review somewhere who needs the boost that being in the new items publication could give. If all we care about is access, then there's no real reason to make selection decisions and to promote certain authors or subjects in anything more than a general interest way, instead of giving space to the marginalized and not wasting it on people who don't need the hand sell. But if we talk more openly about those things that are aspects of our job and that we've been trained for was things that requires judgment and careful consideration, then it's "bias" or "wokeness" or inappropriate personal judgment applied to a system that the presenters ultimately seem to suggest could function perfectly, if given the perfect set of inputs and decision-makers that could avoid bringing themselves into the picture at all.
That idea of the perfectable, content-neutral process, focused on access, even as an aspiration and with the acknowledgement that we'll never get there, is an idea that ultimately seeks to replace the humans with algorithms, or to tie the humans' hands so thoroughly with policy and procedure bindings that the humans themselves will be little more than robota. It's an extremely limiting view of what's possible and what's demanded of a library worker, and places a lot of restrictions on a library worker that wants to move the institution in a direction that makes it more tolerant and accessible to members of the community who are not invested in the destruction of the community or the library. I can't accept the idea of a neutral library, even if I think that the framework the presenters lay out s a good one to use on subjects where there isn't a higher moral or ethical imperative or a situation where one of the sides of a supposed debate has crossed over the line of tolerability. To make libraries safe enough for many of our communities to be in and use, other communities must be excluded, their works unbought, and their actions condemned and resisted when they attempt to impose their view of the world on everyone else.
Those were the major disappointments from the presentation. I don't believe the presenters are arguing their case incompletely or ineffectively, and the way they take analogues from urban planning and the phases that it went through over time is smart and explains their position well. I disagree with their fundamental principles and goals and think they are arguing from an ahistorical place about the purpose and function of the library as a civic institution over time, at least as regards the history of libraries and society in the United States.
(The presenters, and the Heterodox Academy Libraries entity that put on their presentation, were also signatories to a widely-panned (at least in my social circles) open letter to ALA-OIF arguing for neutrality as a core principle that needed to be written into the Code of Ethics, opposing other principles like "radical empathy" and "cultural humility" that they argued were improperly personal, emotional, and were an imposition of one group's values in all library professionals. (As opposed to library neutrality, which they characterize in both presentation and letter as a commitment to process rather than an orthodoxy imposed by fiat that will erode trust in libraries and invite political polarization.) Now that I read it again, if you don't want to watch the presentation, you can read the letter and get a good summary of the ideas expressed in the presentation. I still think they're arguing from wrong fundaments.)
And then, because the universe likes me and wants me to be happy, not that long after the viewing and the reading, my manager forwarded on to us a suggestion from a user to purchase a magazine called Salvo. It's not a magazine about guns and ammunition or famous bombardments, broadsides, and volleys of military history, but instead it's supposed to be a magazine in the style of Rolling Stone and Wired, but from a mainstream-appearing non-denominational Christian perspective. The reality is that while they claim no denominational affiliation, they are very much ideologically aligned with the worst of the theocrats, the gender-essentialist "helpmeet" types, and the white supremacists trying to make "critical race theory" into a shibboleth instead of the narrowly defined legal theory that it is. Because my organization defiant have policies in place that day we don't collect that kind of material and make it available, because it's harmful to our communities, I had to couch my objections in more "neutral" terms, like a concern for the factual accuracy of their material, since they give serious treatment to intelligent design theories, but from the perspective of already believing that intelligent design is true, rather than examining it with scientific curiosity and methodology, or the perception we might give off by having only this particular Christian perspective without anything to balance it, or how we would need to do a much better job of convincing library users that the presence of materials on our shelves did not constitute an endorsement of that material. I think I did a good job of making it clear that these were not people that we wanted on our shelves, and hopefully with enough reasons that wouldn't be decried as censorship or using my personal beliefs inappropriately. I should be able to say, "no, they're transphobic and homophobic, they're white-supremacist friendly, and they use 'scientism' as a heading on their website, trying to position the scientific method as a dogma and an orthodoxy instead of an outline for acceptable rigor in praxis. If we get their magazine, were saying to a whole lot of communities 'Don't trust us to do the right thing.' " That would be in accord with Principle 9 to say a thing is against our goals and the ethics of the organization. We'll see if there's pushback of the "must represents proper diversity of values" variety.
I was mostly disappointed by the presentation. It had good things in it. A general call for people being critical of "library neutrality" to be specific about what they mean to avoid misunderstanding, for example. The presenters then claimed that most criticism of library neutrality is conflating one form ("we are objective and our perfect data is not tainted by the presence of opinion or bias") for another ("we strive to avoid injecting our personal biases into our processes, goals, and operations"). I think they're misreading some of the scholars they claim are doing the conflation, and I also know that library workers experience both of those arguments when trying to push back against neutrality as a governing principle, so much of the good from the initial request went out the window.
Where my disappointment lies most, however, is in two major claims that the presenters make in their attempt to convince the audience that neutrality of the second form ("avoid personal biases, make sure all stakeholders have the same information and opportunity to collaborate, make your processes equitable and don't waver from them") is a desirable goal for libraries to strive for. Their first claim is that libraries aren't perceived as vested with the power to create social change. That may be true for many of the places in the world, including Canada, where the speakers are from (and, I'm going to guess, where they have the most experience with libraries), but in the States, that didn't seem as true as they're asserting. The speakers do acknowledge there's a difference in how Canada and the United States have structured themselves: "Peace, Order, and Good Government" versus "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," but they don't really elaborate on how those differences play out and they still assume that their position is good for both countries. (With an example of how Canada transitioned from a much more individualistic nation to a nation with a robust social safety net and an expectation of the same within fifty years or so was what's possible with an institution that does have the perception of and ability to make social change.)
In the United States, while there is a perception of libraries that positions them as little more than warehouses of materials (and thus, easily replaceable and interchangeable with any other warehouse of materials that could be provided at "lower" cost to the taxpayer), a more prominent interpretation is "the people's university," the place where those who can't attain or afford formal credentials can still achieve a fine education through self-study and the available materials. Or, in a less flattering fashion, the idea that the public library is a force of assimilationism, a public service designed to bring the immigrant and the Other inside and teach them to adopt the values of cishet white Christians for the greatest ease of fitting in to U.S. society, using white women as the means to do so. (Because women are just born nurturers and carers and would gladly accept this sacred calling to "raise" the ignorant immigrants and dark-skinned people to the standard of whiteness. Blech.)
If libraries were really primarily conceived as passive warehouses of materials, I think there would be much less interest in determining what materials they can and can't carry on their shelves. The presentation was given in April 02022, so right in the thick of the censorship fights happening all across the country, so there's no reason to believe the presenters are ignorant of this context. The fights are not new, because book banning is always about the latest moral panic, but even a cursory analysis of where book challenges are coming from indicates challenges almost always center around the access of materials by children. It's more intense this year than many years previous because legislators and officials in various states sense they have enough people who think like them that they can get their real agendas passed and signed into law without suffering electoral consequences, but the focus about whether queer people are allowed to exist and whether anything that portrays people of color in topics other than slavery, sports, and hip-hop should be allowed to exist (or exist in ways that aren't stereotypes by white people) clearly indicates that somebody (a lot of somebodies) believes that libraries, and especially school libraries, have some amount of power to shape and influence the ideas of those that use them. In the broad sense of "the marketplace of ideas," where the solution to bad speech is supposed to be more speech, the active censorship attempts underway would be at least a tacit admission that their speech and position can't survive in the marketplace without heavy interference, even as they accuse their opponents of exactly that kind of heavy interference. For the purposes of the talk, though, the context of April 02022 (and all of 02021, and all of 02020, and...) should disprove the supposition that libraries are not perceived as institutions that create social change, through selection of materials and programming. People don't send threats or do acts of violence against those they believe are powerless (unless they are sadists gratifying themselves like Proud Boys attempting to intimidate storytime attendees): it's wasted effort.
There's been a shift between the first type of neutrality assertion ("we are objective," only really possible when "objectivity" meant "there is One Right (White) Way, all others will be suppressed and ignored") toward the second ("our materials and spaces are available for everyone and we do not discriminate who can use them based on their viewpoints") as a principle of librarianship, with the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read Statement, and other such pronouncements from ALA and similar organizations making that shift more explicit and codified, but the second form is unable to handle the problem of bad faith actors, persons who will not follow the stated procedures for registering their opinions on materials and programming, and persons who will not abide by a decision to keep materials and programming they have registered complaints about. To their credit, the presenters acknowledge that even their neutrality proposal can't beat bad faith actors, and they couch the proposal as an aspiration to strive for, rather than as a result that can be achieved concretely and in all situations. It sounds like what they want, as an aspiration, is the idea expressed in the "Libraries are For Everyone" graphic available from Hafuboti, where everyone can use the library harmoniously and without conflict. Except, of course, that such a premise taken to the logical terminus produces the paradox of tolerance, where entities set upon the destruction of the library or its constituencies are still allowed to use the library to further their goals without interference or opposition. And, often, because such things are political, libraries and their workers are often forbidden from speaking up for themselves in their official capacities, or enacting policies and practices for their own self-preservation in the face of a determined and hostile force. (Even more so when the hostile force is not external to the organization, but internal and likely in a supervisory role.) So, even with the adoption of the presenters' aspirational neutrality, the library as an institution will still find itself unequipped to handle the most pressing issues of today, and even though the presenters say neutrality of this sort is not passive, they don't quite appear to get how much work, very non-neutral work, is necessary to dismantle the systems in place that bias even the supposedly neutral before there can be a conversation about whether what gets built in its place will ever have the capacity to get anywhere near the aspirational neutrality outlined here.
I also think that any argument that proposes neutrality as a way of sidestepping or preserving the idea of the library as an entity unaffected by politics is wrong both on the history and the current era. A belief that this is "new" usually elides the past, both recent and far-reaching, in favor of the wrong idea that the people of the past were generally homogeneous in their attitudes, even in eras where there's an entire movement afoot to try and stop legalized segregation and discrimination against $GROUP. If our conception of history is mostly drawn from textbooks, then it is surely incomplete. At this point in time, politics with regard to libraries and their collections is unavoidable, and the partisans who oppose libraries and their collections will not decide to pull punches or stop their campaigns if we can protest strongly enough to them that we are neutral and have been collecting sufficient amounts of their point of view as well. Their objection is that we have the material or the programming in the first place, they will not consider it victory until that material is removed and cannot return (and, increasingly, that the person or persons responsible for opposing their enlightened viewpoint are punished in such a way as to make it clear that getting anywhere near a thing they disapprove of will be met with similar action and results.)
The second disappointment came right after the discussion of the presenters' approach to what neutrality in libraries could be, where they rewrite the ninth principle of the ALA Code of Ethics to incorporate their approach to neutrality and to scope the principle down to what they believe is within the remit of libraries. The revised principle takes away the calls for social justice and dismantling systems and entrenched biases and instead proclaims that the thing that the library really wants to do, the thing that they can do while remaining neutral in the way the presenters outline to us, is provide access. Which is consistent with the current neutrality-centric material in existence, but entirely removes an active role from the library and the library worker in favor of passive acquisition. It's a rollback to the pre-ninth principle era, where the library as institution envisioned itself was collecting as many points of view as possible and displaying them without making any value judgments about the content of those materials. (I say "rollback," as if that isn't still the dominant mode of libraries right now.) The suggested revision also severely curtails the role of the professional human in managing and curating the collection by making it all about "access." Access is an easy goal, one with quantifiable metrics where numbers going up is good, numbers going down is bad, and it neatly sidesteps those complicated questions and "wicked social problems" the presenters'refer to as the complex causes of social ills. We just have to provide the materials to the people using the library and and show them how to access them, and they'll take it from there to whatever conclusions they draw from the resources and how they want to justify those conclusions. We provide, they decide.
A focus on access combined with a neutrality stance doesn't care what purpose the information is put to, only whether it is available for someone. Which pretty well guarantees that the library is at least passively supporting institutions and decisions that have racist (or other -ist) outcomes, and providing justifications to people who are looking for reasons to believe their ish is a true and logical conclusion about the world. Yet, despite this clear reason not to think of the library as an institution on the side of justice or in favor of social progress, people still trust the library to find them accurate and trustworthy information, to the point where it's almost a reflex answer. Of course the library and the librarians can help me find good information, it's what they do. And yet, when there's talk in the profession about the possibility that librarians might have to reorient their collections for something other than pure access, so as to preserve the reputation they have for accurate information, or to ensure a proper representation of their communities, or even to perhaps retire material that has been around for a while and has had all of its very glaring flaws discussed and agreed to in many a school classroom and academic paper, there's almost always someone coming into that discussion immediately talking about how inappropriate and unethical it is for librarians to practice censorship on their collections and to impose their personal opinions about what should and shouldn't be collected. (Because the Code of Ethics and their interpretations unequivocally prohibit both of these things.) We're (mostly) not allowed to say that someone is wrong, that would be unethical. Yes, there are places where we are allowed not to carry someone's materials for being factually wrong if they're marketing them as being factually correct, but if someone is marketing their book as an opinion piece on politics or other social issues, even if they are wrong, demonstrably so on every thing that they cite or assert, not carrying that book would potentially be "censorship" if we didn't have a more practical reason not to carry it, like a lack of space or budget to buy out to this particular tip of the long tail.
A commitment to access as the primary motivator means fascist and factually inaccurate material appearing in collections with library branding, filed and categorized into the search algorithms in such a way as to make them, rather than factually accurate material, the top results for people searching in their library's holdings. Or services that believe it's a selling point to say that no human ever touches their algorithm, even when those services promote, with library branding, materials that are racist and factually inaccurate. Or things that might be new records, but rebought items that don't need to be cluttering up the true new books. Or they're new books by people who already have a full marketing blitz behind them, instead of someone surviving on a good review somewhere who needs the boost that being in the new items publication could give. If all we care about is access, then there's no real reason to make selection decisions and to promote certain authors or subjects in anything more than a general interest way, instead of giving space to the marginalized and not wasting it on people who don't need the hand sell. But if we talk more openly about those things that are aspects of our job and that we've been trained for was things that requires judgment and careful consideration, then it's "bias" or "wokeness" or inappropriate personal judgment applied to a system that the presenters ultimately seem to suggest could function perfectly, if given the perfect set of inputs and decision-makers that could avoid bringing themselves into the picture at all.
That idea of the perfectable, content-neutral process, focused on access, even as an aspiration and with the acknowledgement that we'll never get there, is an idea that ultimately seeks to replace the humans with algorithms, or to tie the humans' hands so thoroughly with policy and procedure bindings that the humans themselves will be little more than robota. It's an extremely limiting view of what's possible and what's demanded of a library worker, and places a lot of restrictions on a library worker that wants to move the institution in a direction that makes it more tolerant and accessible to members of the community who are not invested in the destruction of the community or the library. I can't accept the idea of a neutral library, even if I think that the framework the presenters lay out s a good one to use on subjects where there isn't a higher moral or ethical imperative or a situation where one of the sides of a supposed debate has crossed over the line of tolerability. To make libraries safe enough for many of our communities to be in and use, other communities must be excluded, their works unbought, and their actions condemned and resisted when they attempt to impose their view of the world on everyone else.
Those were the major disappointments from the presentation. I don't believe the presenters are arguing their case incompletely or ineffectively, and the way they take analogues from urban planning and the phases that it went through over time is smart and explains their position well. I disagree with their fundamental principles and goals and think they are arguing from an ahistorical place about the purpose and function of the library as a civic institution over time, at least as regards the history of libraries and society in the United States.
(The presenters, and the Heterodox Academy Libraries entity that put on their presentation, were also signatories to a widely-panned (at least in my social circles) open letter to ALA-OIF arguing for neutrality as a core principle that needed to be written into the Code of Ethics, opposing other principles like "radical empathy" and "cultural humility" that they argued were improperly personal, emotional, and were an imposition of one group's values in all library professionals. (As opposed to library neutrality, which they characterize in both presentation and letter as a commitment to process rather than an orthodoxy imposed by fiat that will erode trust in libraries and invite political polarization.) Now that I read it again, if you don't want to watch the presentation, you can read the letter and get a good summary of the ideas expressed in the presentation. I still think they're arguing from wrong fundaments.)
And then, because the universe likes me and wants me to be happy, not that long after the viewing and the reading, my manager forwarded on to us a suggestion from a user to purchase a magazine called Salvo. It's not a magazine about guns and ammunition or famous bombardments, broadsides, and volleys of military history, but instead it's supposed to be a magazine in the style of Rolling Stone and Wired, but from a mainstream-appearing non-denominational Christian perspective. The reality is that while they claim no denominational affiliation, they are very much ideologically aligned with the worst of the theocrats, the gender-essentialist "helpmeet" types, and the white supremacists trying to make "critical race theory" into a shibboleth instead of the narrowly defined legal theory that it is. Because my organization defiant have policies in place that day we don't collect that kind of material and make it available, because it's harmful to our communities, I had to couch my objections in more "neutral" terms, like a concern for the factual accuracy of their material, since they give serious treatment to intelligent design theories, but from the perspective of already believing that intelligent design is true, rather than examining it with scientific curiosity and methodology, or the perception we might give off by having only this particular Christian perspective without anything to balance it, or how we would need to do a much better job of convincing library users that the presence of materials on our shelves did not constitute an endorsement of that material. I think I did a good job of making it clear that these were not people that we wanted on our shelves, and hopefully with enough reasons that wouldn't be decried as censorship or using my personal beliefs inappropriately. I should be able to say, "no, they're transphobic and homophobic, they're white-supremacist friendly, and they use 'scientism' as a heading on their website, trying to position the scientific method as a dogma and an orthodoxy instead of an outline for acceptable rigor in praxis. If we get their magazine, were saying to a whole lot of communities 'Don't trust us to do the right thing.' " That would be in accord with Principle 9 to say a thing is against our goals and the ethics of the organization. We'll see if there's pushback of the "must represents proper diversity of values" variety.
