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silveradept(That's "ultimate" as in "final, the last one after all others have been considered and discarded," not as in "pinnacle" or "unassailable.")
There was a comedy piece that happened to me a couple of days ago. One of the people who's part of the actual branch leadership team (as in, people with supervisory authority, rather than a librarian that gets told they can't supervise, but they are occasionally the person in charge) showed me a formal request for reconsideration form where a CD of "essential classics for kids" was being challenged because the person believed that hearing a preschool-age voice chant "Nobody likes me, everyone hates me, guess I'll go eat worms" was absolutely inappropriate for the audience the CD was intended for.
Not "Several of the tracks on this disc have their origins in minstrel shows, blackface performances, and other very racist lyrics." Not "Some of the tracks on this CD sing about children being injured or killed from the decisions they've made around animals or bad food." No, instead the objection is that there's a small voice singing about being hated and eating worms because of it. (The rest of the song is pretty gross-out by lyrics, since it describes the eating of the worms.)
This piece of comedy came after a supervisor at a different location had mentioned they'd dealt with several materials reconsideration requests in the last year that I am pretty sure were more serious than this one (first I'd heard of it, and I said as much), and in the greater climate of censorship attempts in the United States. The ALA State of America's Libraries Report for 2024 indicates a 65% jump in unique titles challenged in 2023 compared to 2022, for a total of 4,240 books. [PDF] That's unique titles, and that's titles that ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom has had reported to them or they've tallied through media reports.
Also in the week before this comedy bit, someone wrote in to our reference service to complain that a graphic novel series for teenagers, Lore Olympus, had themes that were too adult for teenagers and the books needed to be moved to the adult section immediately. The person who handled that e-mail forwarded the complaint to the selector responsible, who sent back a "yeah, I've been looking at that for a while, we'll move it to adult." I mentioned this sequence of events to the teen librarian, whose eyes went up, because she'd read the series and while the elements that were in the complaint were certainly present, they were not graphic in the graphic novel. I did some cursory research and looked for reviews while I was trying to formulate a possible response to the person, and even on a site that I belatedly realized was using a strongly Christian lens to review the materials concluded that the books were for ages 14+. The teen librarian also mentioned that the change might have happened because other libraries in our region file the series in their adult collections when I asked a follow-up about it recently.
Seeing this play out in my own organization gave me a certain amount of visceral insight into something I had only studied at a distance, or dealt with in other concepts, like how my library still subscribes to a service that puts together newsletters and recommendation lists that they proudly tout have as little human touch on them as possible. Even when those materials send out and broadcast that we've bought the latest conspiracy theory for our collections, because lots of people have been asking for it. Or that we've bought yet another book by a known racist, a known queerphobe, a known person who is antithetical to the values of the library or is demonstrably telling untruths and disguising by saying the book is about some other topic.
The question at the heart of any and all collection development decisions (buying, withdrawing, placement, and so forth) is a matter of trust and expertise. But you'd get a large question mark if you asked people who deserves the trust of the final decision for what's in the library and what isn't, and where that material gets placed. The library asserts that the librarians, the ones who are professionally trained, are the people who have the final say about what's there. But librarians buy shitty books (that's a technical term) all the time, because sometimes being popular overrides the judgement of the professional.
In fiction, we don't have to care that much about the presence of shitty books, because they tend to live on the shelf for their popularity and then move on once the fad does. And there are strong arguments that if a book gets someone to read it, then it did its job, and the person reading it gets the practice, and that's what we should care about for fiction. We may not think highly of Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie, but if that's the book that children want to read while they develop and practice their reading skills, then we shrug, because it turns out that fiction readers are pretty vicious about making sure that crap gets flushed out pretty quickly. (At least, when it's not being propped up for political purposes that are often orthogonal to whether or not the fiction itself is any good.)
In nonfiction, we have to care a lot more about shitty books, because non-fiction tends to be the kind of books where people do things after reading them, or they take what they've read and spread it around as actual knowledge, because it was in a non-fiction book. Conspiracy theories masquerading as social commentary, or a book that recommends dangerous practices in the care and feeding of humans or animals, those kinds of things have academic value for those scholars that want to study them, but they're not really supposed to be on public library shelves. (And yet, at depressing rates, popularity of the book overrides the judgment of the professional. Or the professional has a misguided notion that their collections have to be balanced and neutral, because viewpoints are all equal and the library isn't allowed to make judgments on truth, because truth has now been sufficiently politicized, and so they must purchase shitty books to make sure they balance the good ones.)
So, the librarians say they're the ones who should be given final trust. The publishers want to sell materials, so they do work making sure that the finished product they want to sell will be appealing to the audience they want to read it. Lore Olympus is sold as a book for teens. Reviewers often make judgments on whether the book is being correctly marketed and what ages they think the book should be read by. Lore Olympus is often reviewed as a book for teens, even with knowing up front that there are some heavy topics in it. And yet, librarians have often decided that Lore Olympus goes in the section for adults, instead. Is that based on our professional judgment of having read the material thoroughly and evaluated it? Or is it because we've received complaints and other requests, from either the public or our administration, to move the material to adult because of the content inside, and we're more interested in quelling the complaint by giving in than in standing by our own judgement and saying that a book needs to stay where it is? If Lore Olympus moves to adult because of a complaint from a user, then whose judgement ultimately is used as the final trust? Not the publisher. Not the reviewer. Not necessarily even the librarian who is knowledgeable, but the member of the public who complained and the person who decided the complaint was more important than professional judgement and review. (Sometimes that person is a government person, rather than an administrator, a selector, or a librarian.)
For MAGAts, Moms for Liberty types, cult leaders, and an awful lot of religious folks in the "Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell/Fred Phelps/Jack Chick (non-exhaustive list) evangelical" departments, the answer to the question of "who deserves the ultimate trust to determine what is best for everyone in this situation?" is "ME!" They may claim to be acting on behalf of a higher and more moral authority who has either entrusted them with the power to act in this situation, as the only person who can truly divine the will of that higher authority, or as the representative of that higher authority that absolutely will support them in this decision, even if they don't claim to have been formally invested with that authority. They may claim to be acting on behalf of the vulnerable, to protect the vulnerable, or to execute the will of the vulnerable. They may disclaim the belief that they are rejecting your reality and demanding to substitute their own. But, ultimately, that is what's being asked of our professionals, sometimes with the threat of violence, sometimes with the threat of the carceral state, sometimes with the threat of financial ruin through loss of work, sometimes with the ability to bury someone in frivolous and ruinous lawsuits. "Use my way of thinking instead of your own considered professional opinion and processes, and you will not be subjected to the punishments that I will bring to bear on you."
The difficulty with many of these lines of thought and who deserves the ultimate trust decision is that while reconsideration forms often say things like "have you read/listened/watched the whole thing?" to try and weed out people who are copypasting from someone else's list in the hopes they can find someone who will buckle under at the slightest possibility that someone might disapprove of them, they very rarely ask the question "And who are you, to claim that your judgement is superior to ours?" Expertise is not a shield against having to give proper consideration to requests, but I am more inclined to believe in the legitimacy of a petition if it makes good arguments. If the person who wants the CD removed because of one portion of one track can provide something that gives a good reason why it's sufficiently offensive as to require the removal of the entire CD, then the request is more likely to go over well. "I don't like hearing a child sing about being alone and eating worms" does not carry expertise behind it, or reference the expertise of others. When I looked over the track list of the CD, as I noted above, there's a few of them by title that I suspect have their origins in racist songs or minstrel songs. Pointing that out and then providing backing evidence makes the case stronger. (It may not succeed, but if a challenger demonstrates they've put time and thought into crafting their argument and supporting it, their concerns are likely to be taken more seriously than not. Which is why we're looking at trying to make sure a variety of authors and cultures are represented in our fiction sections and we're not looking at whether or not our fiction sections are balanced over the political viewpoints expressed in the stories.)
Children and teenagers especially are the ones whose collections get targeted the most, and the justification for those requests to reconsider is often "I am an adult and therefore I automatically know what is best for all children and teenagers." This is not a sound argument, and generally speaking, a person who makes that argument would be incensed if some other adult did something to their children or teenagers on the same belief that they knew what was best for all children. Which swings us back to Lore Olympus, and a greater discussion around what content is "appropriate" for children and teenagers of various ages. Remarkably absent from those discussions, much of the time, is the considered opinion of the children or the teenagers, or the expertise of people who work with and do research with them frequently. When they are consulted, children, teenagers, and experts generally conclude that children and teens will put down books they don't feel ready for or that are distressing. And also that they need books where difficult topics are addressed, in both fiction and non-fiction. Sometimes because they are curious. Sometimes because those things have happened to them and they are seeking similar stories. Sometimes because they want to be supportive of someone those things have happened to, and they need information, or they need a fictional account and how it is worked through to help themselves come to their own conclusions about how to give support, or how they want to move forward. The considered expertise of those affected and those that work with them closely is that having materials available on "inappropriate" topics is a net good, for the ability to see oneself in a character, or to find an informative work that helps give words and descriptions to what is happening in their lives, both internally and externally. Almost all of the topics that are under fire for being "inappropriate" for children and teenagers are things that those children and teenagers are either experiencing, forming opinions about, or having to handle the fallout or splash damage from when it happens to others. These things are happening well before they reach some plateau of adulthood when they are supposedly mature enough to learn about those topics, or to learn that there are other perspectives than a very tightly controlled official line on the subject.
Trust in libraries, educators, professionals, governments, and experts in general is tied to how well those people conform to the conscious and unconscious beliefs of the dominant culture of the area. As institutions begin to move away from the official narrative of the dominant culture, especially in places where that culture is wrong and destructive and there is plenty of evidence of this, they stop being trustworthy, and start becoming targets. As more and more institutions lose their trustworthy status, "me" becomes the authority for everyone, because "me" is still always trustworthy, even when nothing else is. (Insert Principal Skinner meme here.) Unfortunately, that also means that "me" becomes vulnerable to hucksters that want to convince "me" that doing what the huckster wants will restore that lost trust and return those institutions to the greatness they once had. Usually by deploying the power of the government and the state's monopoly on sanctioned violence of various forms against those institutions if they stray from the only authorized narrative. The grifters part the fools and their money, the demagogues part the fools and their votes, and eventually there are enough of the demagogues in positions of power to force their ideas on everyone, at which point a whole bunch of people realize, too late, that they've been suckered. But you can do a lot of damage in the meantime, so long as you always make sure to justify what you're doing by saying that you're doing it to hurt Them, the people who are already untrustworthy. If it hurts you, well, then you were one of Them, too, and we've already established that "ME!" is the best authority for everyone.
As a final note, it should not be surprising to anyone that the professions constructed with explicit intents toward taking in everyone and making sure they were instilled with the values and narratives of the dominant culture, usually through the application of people from the dominant culture sold on the idea of "civilizing," "uplifting," or "saving" those people who needed indoctrination, are the ones getting the harshest blowback when they stop being in synchronization with the dominant culture's narratives and values. Teachers and librarians are getting the hammer hard because they have been the sanctioned vehicles of this indoctrination for a very long time. If the teachers and the librarians no longer indoctrinate the generations, the dominant narrative and culture loses its dominance and status as the unquestioned default, which also makes it harder for the demagogues and the grifters to convince the fools that the mythic past existed and can be re-achieved again if only they decide to eschew all expertise and institutions and trust in "me," whether that "me" is themselves or the charlatan planting the idea in their head.
There are no pat solutions or universal rules for this situation. The librarians will be wrong. The teachers will be wrong. The experts will turn out to have made shortcuts and let greed and profit twist their results or their advice into something monstrous. You will not always be able to "trust, but verify," as gets quoted by some of the same hucksters and grifters hoping to get something other than your expertise to make the decision for you. Recognize your expertise, and use it for the betterment of humanity. Recognize your limits, and try not to be in a situation where you are past them and will do harm. Admit your mistakes, apologize, and do better.
And if you do want to challenge materials in a library, bring your strongest, most well-supported arguments to the table, find the parts of the policy that support your claim, and lay out your evidence. Treat that decision with the seriousness it deserves, because the people on the other side of your complaint are usually bringing their expertise to the table to inform the ultimate decision that gets made, and they will be unhappy with you if you waste their time, ignore that expertise, or behave in a way that says you're not willing to extend them the trust you reserve to yourself.
There was a comedy piece that happened to me a couple of days ago. One of the people who's part of the actual branch leadership team (as in, people with supervisory authority, rather than a librarian that gets told they can't supervise, but they are occasionally the person in charge) showed me a formal request for reconsideration form where a CD of "essential classics for kids" was being challenged because the person believed that hearing a preschool-age voice chant "Nobody likes me, everyone hates me, guess I'll go eat worms" was absolutely inappropriate for the audience the CD was intended for.
Not "Several of the tracks on this disc have their origins in minstrel shows, blackface performances, and other very racist lyrics." Not "Some of the tracks on this CD sing about children being injured or killed from the decisions they've made around animals or bad food." No, instead the objection is that there's a small voice singing about being hated and eating worms because of it. (The rest of the song is pretty gross-out by lyrics, since it describes the eating of the worms.)
This piece of comedy came after a supervisor at a different location had mentioned they'd dealt with several materials reconsideration requests in the last year that I am pretty sure were more serious than this one (first I'd heard of it, and I said as much), and in the greater climate of censorship attempts in the United States. The ALA State of America's Libraries Report for 2024 indicates a 65% jump in unique titles challenged in 2023 compared to 2022, for a total of 4,240 books. [PDF] That's unique titles, and that's titles that ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom has had reported to them or they've tallied through media reports.
Also in the week before this comedy bit, someone wrote in to our reference service to complain that a graphic novel series for teenagers, Lore Olympus, had themes that were too adult for teenagers and the books needed to be moved to the adult section immediately. The person who handled that e-mail forwarded the complaint to the selector responsible, who sent back a "yeah, I've been looking at that for a while, we'll move it to adult." I mentioned this sequence of events to the teen librarian, whose eyes went up, because she'd read the series and while the elements that were in the complaint were certainly present, they were not graphic in the graphic novel. I did some cursory research and looked for reviews while I was trying to formulate a possible response to the person, and even on a site that I belatedly realized was using a strongly Christian lens to review the materials concluded that the books were for ages 14+. The teen librarian also mentioned that the change might have happened because other libraries in our region file the series in their adult collections when I asked a follow-up about it recently.
Seeing this play out in my own organization gave me a certain amount of visceral insight into something I had only studied at a distance, or dealt with in other concepts, like how my library still subscribes to a service that puts together newsletters and recommendation lists that they proudly tout have as little human touch on them as possible. Even when those materials send out and broadcast that we've bought the latest conspiracy theory for our collections, because lots of people have been asking for it. Or that we've bought yet another book by a known racist, a known queerphobe, a known person who is antithetical to the values of the library or is demonstrably telling untruths and disguising by saying the book is about some other topic.
The question at the heart of any and all collection development decisions (buying, withdrawing, placement, and so forth) is a matter of trust and expertise. But you'd get a large question mark if you asked people who deserves the trust of the final decision for what's in the library and what isn't, and where that material gets placed. The library asserts that the librarians, the ones who are professionally trained, are the people who have the final say about what's there. But librarians buy shitty books (that's a technical term) all the time, because sometimes being popular overrides the judgement of the professional.
In fiction, we don't have to care that much about the presence of shitty books, because they tend to live on the shelf for their popularity and then move on once the fad does. And there are strong arguments that if a book gets someone to read it, then it did its job, and the person reading it gets the practice, and that's what we should care about for fiction. We may not think highly of Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie, but if that's the book that children want to read while they develop and practice their reading skills, then we shrug, because it turns out that fiction readers are pretty vicious about making sure that crap gets flushed out pretty quickly. (At least, when it's not being propped up for political purposes that are often orthogonal to whether or not the fiction itself is any good.)
In nonfiction, we have to care a lot more about shitty books, because non-fiction tends to be the kind of books where people do things after reading them, or they take what they've read and spread it around as actual knowledge, because it was in a non-fiction book. Conspiracy theories masquerading as social commentary, or a book that recommends dangerous practices in the care and feeding of humans or animals, those kinds of things have academic value for those scholars that want to study them, but they're not really supposed to be on public library shelves. (And yet, at depressing rates, popularity of the book overrides the judgment of the professional. Or the professional has a misguided notion that their collections have to be balanced and neutral, because viewpoints are all equal and the library isn't allowed to make judgments on truth, because truth has now been sufficiently politicized, and so they must purchase shitty books to make sure they balance the good ones.)
So, the librarians say they're the ones who should be given final trust. The publishers want to sell materials, so they do work making sure that the finished product they want to sell will be appealing to the audience they want to read it. Lore Olympus is sold as a book for teens. Reviewers often make judgments on whether the book is being correctly marketed and what ages they think the book should be read by. Lore Olympus is often reviewed as a book for teens, even with knowing up front that there are some heavy topics in it. And yet, librarians have often decided that Lore Olympus goes in the section for adults, instead. Is that based on our professional judgment of having read the material thoroughly and evaluated it? Or is it because we've received complaints and other requests, from either the public or our administration, to move the material to adult because of the content inside, and we're more interested in quelling the complaint by giving in than in standing by our own judgement and saying that a book needs to stay where it is? If Lore Olympus moves to adult because of a complaint from a user, then whose judgement ultimately is used as the final trust? Not the publisher. Not the reviewer. Not necessarily even the librarian who is knowledgeable, but the member of the public who complained and the person who decided the complaint was more important than professional judgement and review. (Sometimes that person is a government person, rather than an administrator, a selector, or a librarian.)
For MAGAts, Moms for Liberty types, cult leaders, and an awful lot of religious folks in the "Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell/Fred Phelps/Jack Chick (non-exhaustive list) evangelical" departments, the answer to the question of "who deserves the ultimate trust to determine what is best for everyone in this situation?" is "ME!" They may claim to be acting on behalf of a higher and more moral authority who has either entrusted them with the power to act in this situation, as the only person who can truly divine the will of that higher authority, or as the representative of that higher authority that absolutely will support them in this decision, even if they don't claim to have been formally invested with that authority. They may claim to be acting on behalf of the vulnerable, to protect the vulnerable, or to execute the will of the vulnerable. They may disclaim the belief that they are rejecting your reality and demanding to substitute their own. But, ultimately, that is what's being asked of our professionals, sometimes with the threat of violence, sometimes with the threat of the carceral state, sometimes with the threat of financial ruin through loss of work, sometimes with the ability to bury someone in frivolous and ruinous lawsuits. "Use my way of thinking instead of your own considered professional opinion and processes, and you will not be subjected to the punishments that I will bring to bear on you."
The difficulty with many of these lines of thought and who deserves the ultimate trust decision is that while reconsideration forms often say things like "have you read/listened/watched the whole thing?" to try and weed out people who are copypasting from someone else's list in the hopes they can find someone who will buckle under at the slightest possibility that someone might disapprove of them, they very rarely ask the question "And who are you, to claim that your judgement is superior to ours?" Expertise is not a shield against having to give proper consideration to requests, but I am more inclined to believe in the legitimacy of a petition if it makes good arguments. If the person who wants the CD removed because of one portion of one track can provide something that gives a good reason why it's sufficiently offensive as to require the removal of the entire CD, then the request is more likely to go over well. "I don't like hearing a child sing about being alone and eating worms" does not carry expertise behind it, or reference the expertise of others. When I looked over the track list of the CD, as I noted above, there's a few of them by title that I suspect have their origins in racist songs or minstrel songs. Pointing that out and then providing backing evidence makes the case stronger. (It may not succeed, but if a challenger demonstrates they've put time and thought into crafting their argument and supporting it, their concerns are likely to be taken more seriously than not. Which is why we're looking at trying to make sure a variety of authors and cultures are represented in our fiction sections and we're not looking at whether or not our fiction sections are balanced over the political viewpoints expressed in the stories.)
Children and teenagers especially are the ones whose collections get targeted the most, and the justification for those requests to reconsider is often "I am an adult and therefore I automatically know what is best for all children and teenagers." This is not a sound argument, and generally speaking, a person who makes that argument would be incensed if some other adult did something to their children or teenagers on the same belief that they knew what was best for all children. Which swings us back to Lore Olympus, and a greater discussion around what content is "appropriate" for children and teenagers of various ages. Remarkably absent from those discussions, much of the time, is the considered opinion of the children or the teenagers, or the expertise of people who work with and do research with them frequently. When they are consulted, children, teenagers, and experts generally conclude that children and teens will put down books they don't feel ready for or that are distressing. And also that they need books where difficult topics are addressed, in both fiction and non-fiction. Sometimes because they are curious. Sometimes because those things have happened to them and they are seeking similar stories. Sometimes because they want to be supportive of someone those things have happened to, and they need information, or they need a fictional account and how it is worked through to help themselves come to their own conclusions about how to give support, or how they want to move forward. The considered expertise of those affected and those that work with them closely is that having materials available on "inappropriate" topics is a net good, for the ability to see oneself in a character, or to find an informative work that helps give words and descriptions to what is happening in their lives, both internally and externally. Almost all of the topics that are under fire for being "inappropriate" for children and teenagers are things that those children and teenagers are either experiencing, forming opinions about, or having to handle the fallout or splash damage from when it happens to others. These things are happening well before they reach some plateau of adulthood when they are supposedly mature enough to learn about those topics, or to learn that there are other perspectives than a very tightly controlled official line on the subject.
Trust in libraries, educators, professionals, governments, and experts in general is tied to how well those people conform to the conscious and unconscious beliefs of the dominant culture of the area. As institutions begin to move away from the official narrative of the dominant culture, especially in places where that culture is wrong and destructive and there is plenty of evidence of this, they stop being trustworthy, and start becoming targets. As more and more institutions lose their trustworthy status, "me" becomes the authority for everyone, because "me" is still always trustworthy, even when nothing else is. (Insert Principal Skinner meme here.) Unfortunately, that also means that "me" becomes vulnerable to hucksters that want to convince "me" that doing what the huckster wants will restore that lost trust and return those institutions to the greatness they once had. Usually by deploying the power of the government and the state's monopoly on sanctioned violence of various forms against those institutions if they stray from the only authorized narrative. The grifters part the fools and their money, the demagogues part the fools and their votes, and eventually there are enough of the demagogues in positions of power to force their ideas on everyone, at which point a whole bunch of people realize, too late, that they've been suckered. But you can do a lot of damage in the meantime, so long as you always make sure to justify what you're doing by saying that you're doing it to hurt Them, the people who are already untrustworthy. If it hurts you, well, then you were one of Them, too, and we've already established that "ME!" is the best authority for everyone.
As a final note, it should not be surprising to anyone that the professions constructed with explicit intents toward taking in everyone and making sure they were instilled with the values and narratives of the dominant culture, usually through the application of people from the dominant culture sold on the idea of "civilizing," "uplifting," or "saving" those people who needed indoctrination, are the ones getting the harshest blowback when they stop being in synchronization with the dominant culture's narratives and values. Teachers and librarians are getting the hammer hard because they have been the sanctioned vehicles of this indoctrination for a very long time. If the teachers and the librarians no longer indoctrinate the generations, the dominant narrative and culture loses its dominance and status as the unquestioned default, which also makes it harder for the demagogues and the grifters to convince the fools that the mythic past existed and can be re-achieved again if only they decide to eschew all expertise and institutions and trust in "me," whether that "me" is themselves or the charlatan planting the idea in their head.
There are no pat solutions or universal rules for this situation. The librarians will be wrong. The teachers will be wrong. The experts will turn out to have made shortcuts and let greed and profit twist their results or their advice into something monstrous. You will not always be able to "trust, but verify," as gets quoted by some of the same hucksters and grifters hoping to get something other than your expertise to make the decision for you. Recognize your expertise, and use it for the betterment of humanity. Recognize your limits, and try not to be in a situation where you are past them and will do harm. Admit your mistakes, apologize, and do better.
And if you do want to challenge materials in a library, bring your strongest, most well-supported arguments to the table, find the parts of the policy that support your claim, and lay out your evidence. Treat that decision with the seriousness it deserves, because the people on the other side of your complaint are usually bringing their expertise to the table to inform the ultimate decision that gets made, and they will be unhappy with you if you waste their time, ignore that expertise, or behave in a way that says you're not willing to extend them the trust you reserve to yourself.
