Free speech infringement by a California public library results in a $70,000 USD settlement and points to the need for libraries to vigorously defend speech protections in their spaces.
Very useful article. Would be interested to know what the authors think about the fact that in the same era (post-2000) that "intellectual freedom" has become part of the curriculum for LIS training, we've seen exactly that generation of librarians lead the book banning / deplatforming / indoctrination charge?
Thank you. Point well taken: the perceived tension between intellectual freedom and critical social justice priorities is well-recognized. It would be interesting to see if available data on the extent to which views regarding intellectual freedom have changed over that time period, in particular over the past 5 years.
I think my perspective is, what if it hadn't been added? Also, it is I believe only mandatory to take intellectual freedom training in one MLIS program in Canada. Finally, it takes a huge culture shift for people to embrace intellectual freedom, even if it is a required course there will not be much support unless the culture in librarianship supports intellectual freedom. Toronto Public Library is doing a lot of work that appears to me to be include instilling a culture that embraces intellectual freedom and gets curious about it. The curiosity part is key, because people need to find their own reasons to embrace intellectual freedom, people don't generally hold strong beliefs that can cost them their comfort unless they fully embrace them. Curiosity can lead people to learn why intellectual freedom could be important to them.
I just read an essay by Kevin Mims on Quillette about a young adult fiction book that came out in 1974 that has apparently been the frequent source of trouble for librarians. The book is "The Chocolate War", which I'd never heard of before. Mims essay is kind of a book review in that he argues that a better reason for not providing the book in school libraries is that it is not very good and it is dated, not that there is anything going on in it that they should be "protected from". But the problem librarians have come up against is that if they don't go along with having copies available, they get accused of censorship.
The problems is, all libraries have a lot of books that aren't very good _and_ that nobody reads much either. The printing press hasn't been around for very long, but with every year that passes, there will be more books in existence that were written a while ago. Many books were written a long time ago now and are still very much worth reading for one reason or another. Most of the great classics of Britsh fantasy are "dated"; the framing story of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is that the children are sent from London to the countryside to live with a stranger because London is being bombed; it was written around WWII and that scenario would have been familiar to many adults and children, too.) I haven't been alive for so very long, but the time I have been alive is still a substantial fraction of the entire time books have been able to be produced in large quantities via the printing press. Libraries have to get a better general policy for handling and preserving older materials as well as for selecting new; the books they are buying now are dated, too, to 2024, and many will age very rapidly. My best example of "should never have been bought", because bad and dated when purchased is this book: https://mvlc.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/mvlc/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:1090881/one?qu=bowie%27s+bookshelf&rt=false%7C%7C%7CTITLE%7C%7C%7CTitle . The only part of it I could stand was the front cover illustration. Yet 1/5th of the libraries in my local consortium bought it anyway. Sigh.
Of course, you are right. And with limited budgets, buying bad books nobody will read is also doubled by lost opportunity cost - the money could have bought something people would read. But going the other extreme and only buying what will be most popular isn't a good solution either. Electronic books may end up solving that problem, in that the storage costs become minimal. That is IF they solve the telescoping copyright problem. Print copyrights time out eventually. It's a fair trade: author gets a period of time of maximum profitability for his creation; society gets free rights to it eventually in exchange for bringing the grinding weight of the law to defend an author's copyright during that period. But electronic media is now treated differently, and apparently the owners are able to telescope the expiration dates of copyrights out ad infinitum. Disney's copyright on the various early Disney creations, for example, have been extended about four times. The royalties that "archivers" have to pay - just for having it in their collection on offer, becomes prohibitive and they adjust be reducing their inventories accordingly. Look at what happened to Netflix, as an example. They had an inventory of almost 30,000 titles in DVDs when they were doing the mail order thing. When they added streaming the streaming inventory was over 12,000 and climbing rapidly up until when the copyright owners successfully lobbied Congress to change the laws so they got paid royalties whether the titles were being streamed or not. Consequence? Netflix now maintains a rotating inventory of barely over 3000 titles. All "most popular" titles, too. I dropped my subscription a number of years ago, partly because they went woke and biased, but mostly because my wife and I couldn't find anything we wanted to watch anymore. Their foreign inventory is dismal. Their Indie inventory the same. And by the time you reach seventy and have seen every popular drama plot four hundred times, those formulas are too boring and predictable for words. But if we could check out older movies we would probably have held onto the subscription. Now we have to rent them on Youtube or hope our local library has some of them.
An amusing aside about copyrights of anything that can be represented in a computer file. I wrote an article on this once with a demonstration. You can take any file and convert it into a number. Think about it as a sequence of binary bits - ones and zeros. I used a poem of Emily Dickenson's as a demo. It had 361 characters in it, counting spaces and linefeeds. You can exactly represent it as a decimal integer that is 761 characters long. That's a big number, but one that can be turned back into the poem with a short piece of code. Change it by one digit and you don't get the poem back - you get gibberish. So here's the question: is that number also copyrighted? Apparently. Because back in the eighties there was a legal battle that was won by the Govt plaintiffs against a graduate student mathematician who posted a big prime number on a blog site, which could be turned into text which was also the computer code to illegally decrypt the DeCSS enryption system that Big Media had just come out with to try to prevent media piracy. DeCSS encryption failed, but the lawsuit succeeded. The mathematician was quite clever about it. He worked out a way to not only represent the code as a number, but he made it come out as a very big prime number. Big prime numbers are the subject of intense scrutiny in the field of number theory. So what this lawsuit did was say that some of them can't be studied. It's like punching wholes in the number line. It is weird beyond belief. This is "crony capitalism" at it's worst. Actually, there's nothing capitalistic about it. It's just cronyism.
Oh - here's the Emily Dickenson: 733210010510110032102111114329810197117116121329811711632119971153211599971149910110651001061171151161011003210511032116104101321161111099844108710410111032111110101321191041113210010510110032102111114321161141171161043211997115321089710511010731103297110329710010611110511010511010332114111111109461010721013211311710111511610511111010110032115111102116108121321191041213273321029710510810110063103970111114329810197117116121443932733211410111210810510110046103965110100327332102111114321161141171161044432116104101321161191113297114101321111101015910871013298114101116104114101110329711410144393210410132115971051004610106511010032115111443297115321071051101151091011103210910111632973211010510310411644108710132116971081071011003298101116119101101110321161041013211411111110911544108511011610510832116104101321091111151153210497100321141019799104101100321111171143210810511211544106511010032991111181011141011003211711232111117114321109710910111546
Any programmer worth their salt could turn that back into the poem.
I myself think that libraries buy too many copies of bestsellers, some of which are entirely ephemeral. I know that they expect to dispose of some of the copies as soon as the rush is over, but I think that their policies could be improved around that. An example is Kendi's "How to be an Anti-Racist". 2 and 1/2 copies for every library in my local library system, none checked out. A year ago it was more like 3 copies per library or maybe even more.
A similar meeting room use fracas occurred with the library in Chelmsford in MA. Here is an article about it that is not behind a paywall: https://www.christianpost.com/news/library-allows-pastor-story-hour-event-after-previously-canceling.html . Chelmsford has a "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" committee, and there's a real possibility that this organization put pressure on the library to withhold the use of their meeting room as I suspect that several of the library staff were competent to know that rescinding the meeting room reservation would put them on the wrong side of the law.
Very useful article. Would be interested to know what the authors think about the fact that in the same era (post-2000) that "intellectual freedom" has become part of the curriculum for LIS training, we've seen exactly that generation of librarians lead the book banning / deplatforming / indoctrination charge?
Thank you. Point well taken: the perceived tension between intellectual freedom and critical social justice priorities is well-recognized. It would be interesting to see if available data on the extent to which views regarding intellectual freedom have changed over that time period, in particular over the past 5 years.
I think my perspective is, what if it hadn't been added? Also, it is I believe only mandatory to take intellectual freedom training in one MLIS program in Canada. Finally, it takes a huge culture shift for people to embrace intellectual freedom, even if it is a required course there will not be much support unless the culture in librarianship supports intellectual freedom. Toronto Public Library is doing a lot of work that appears to me to be include instilling a culture that embraces intellectual freedom and gets curious about it. The curiosity part is key, because people need to find their own reasons to embrace intellectual freedom, people don't generally hold strong beliefs that can cost them their comfort unless they fully embrace them. Curiosity can lead people to learn why intellectual freedom could be important to them.
Because anyone can believe in free speech that they agree with. :-)
Thanks for writing this. The multidimensional library netrality application is particularly useful. You might want to note a recent case in Ontario: https://www.bradfordtoday.ca/local-news/bradford-library-reverses-course-will-screen-film-200-meters-8708929
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You're welcome, and thank you for the comments. That's another great example, thanks!
I just read an essay by Kevin Mims on Quillette about a young adult fiction book that came out in 1974 that has apparently been the frequent source of trouble for librarians. The book is "The Chocolate War", which I'd never heard of before. Mims essay is kind of a book review in that he argues that a better reason for not providing the book in school libraries is that it is not very good and it is dated, not that there is anything going on in it that they should be "protected from". But the problem librarians have come up against is that if they don't go along with having copies available, they get accused of censorship.
https://quillette.com/2024/06/13/too-much-chocolate-robert-cormier-chocolate-war/
The problems is, all libraries have a lot of books that aren't very good _and_ that nobody reads much either. The printing press hasn't been around for very long, but with every year that passes, there will be more books in existence that were written a while ago. Many books were written a long time ago now and are still very much worth reading for one reason or another. Most of the great classics of Britsh fantasy are "dated"; the framing story of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is that the children are sent from London to the countryside to live with a stranger because London is being bombed; it was written around WWII and that scenario would have been familiar to many adults and children, too.) I haven't been alive for so very long, but the time I have been alive is still a substantial fraction of the entire time books have been able to be produced in large quantities via the printing press. Libraries have to get a better general policy for handling and preserving older materials as well as for selecting new; the books they are buying now are dated, too, to 2024, and many will age very rapidly. My best example of "should never have been bought", because bad and dated when purchased is this book: https://mvlc.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/mvlc/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:1090881/one?qu=bowie%27s+bookshelf&rt=false%7C%7C%7CTITLE%7C%7C%7CTitle . The only part of it I could stand was the front cover illustration. Yet 1/5th of the libraries in my local consortium bought it anyway. Sigh.
Of course, you are right. And with limited budgets, buying bad books nobody will read is also doubled by lost opportunity cost - the money could have bought something people would read. But going the other extreme and only buying what will be most popular isn't a good solution either. Electronic books may end up solving that problem, in that the storage costs become minimal. That is IF they solve the telescoping copyright problem. Print copyrights time out eventually. It's a fair trade: author gets a period of time of maximum profitability for his creation; society gets free rights to it eventually in exchange for bringing the grinding weight of the law to defend an author's copyright during that period. But electronic media is now treated differently, and apparently the owners are able to telescope the expiration dates of copyrights out ad infinitum. Disney's copyright on the various early Disney creations, for example, have been extended about four times. The royalties that "archivers" have to pay - just for having it in their collection on offer, becomes prohibitive and they adjust be reducing their inventories accordingly. Look at what happened to Netflix, as an example. They had an inventory of almost 30,000 titles in DVDs when they were doing the mail order thing. When they added streaming the streaming inventory was over 12,000 and climbing rapidly up until when the copyright owners successfully lobbied Congress to change the laws so they got paid royalties whether the titles were being streamed or not. Consequence? Netflix now maintains a rotating inventory of barely over 3000 titles. All "most popular" titles, too. I dropped my subscription a number of years ago, partly because they went woke and biased, but mostly because my wife and I couldn't find anything we wanted to watch anymore. Their foreign inventory is dismal. Their Indie inventory the same. And by the time you reach seventy and have seen every popular drama plot four hundred times, those formulas are too boring and predictable for words. But if we could check out older movies we would probably have held onto the subscription. Now we have to rent them on Youtube or hope our local library has some of them.
An amusing aside about copyrights of anything that can be represented in a computer file. I wrote an article on this once with a demonstration. You can take any file and convert it into a number. Think about it as a sequence of binary bits - ones and zeros. I used a poem of Emily Dickenson's as a demo. It had 361 characters in it, counting spaces and linefeeds. You can exactly represent it as a decimal integer that is 761 characters long. That's a big number, but one that can be turned back into the poem with a short piece of code. Change it by one digit and you don't get the poem back - you get gibberish. So here's the question: is that number also copyrighted? Apparently. Because back in the eighties there was a legal battle that was won by the Govt plaintiffs against a graduate student mathematician who posted a big prime number on a blog site, which could be turned into text which was also the computer code to illegally decrypt the DeCSS enryption system that Big Media had just come out with to try to prevent media piracy. DeCSS encryption failed, but the lawsuit succeeded. The mathematician was quite clever about it. He worked out a way to not only represent the code as a number, but he made it come out as a very big prime number. Big prime numbers are the subject of intense scrutiny in the field of number theory. So what this lawsuit did was say that some of them can't be studied. It's like punching wholes in the number line. It is weird beyond belief. This is "crony capitalism" at it's worst. Actually, there's nothing capitalistic about it. It's just cronyism.
Oh - here's the Emily Dickenson: 733210010510110032102111114329810197117116121329811711632119971153211599971149910110651001061171151161011003210511032116104101321161111099844108710410111032111110101321191041113210010510110032102111114321161141171161043211997115321089710511010731103297110329710010611110511010511010332114111111109461010721013211311710111511610511111010110032115111102116108121321191041213273321029710510810110063103970111114329810197117116121443932733211410111210810510110046103965110100327332102111114321161141171161044432116104101321161191113297114101321111101015910871013298114101116104114101110329711410144393210410132115971051004610106511010032115111443297115321071051101151091011103210910111632973211010510310411644108710132116971081071011003298101116119101101110321161041013211411111110911544108511011610510832116104101321091111151153210497100321141019799104101100321111171143210810511211544106511010032991111181011141011003211711232111117114321109710910111546
Any programmer worth their salt could turn that back into the poem.
I myself think that libraries buy too many copies of bestsellers, some of which are entirely ephemeral. I know that they expect to dispose of some of the copies as soon as the rush is over, but I think that their policies could be improved around that. An example is Kendi's "How to be an Anti-Racist". 2 and 1/2 copies for every library in my local library system, none checked out. A year ago it was more like 3 copies per library or maybe even more.
Yes. Thriftbooks has as many copies as you want right now for under $5.
"2 and 1/2 copies" ? ! Is an ebook a 1/2 copy? ;-)
A similar meeting room use fracas occurred with the library in Chelmsford in MA. Here is an article about it that is not behind a paywall: https://www.christianpost.com/news/library-allows-pastor-story-hour-event-after-previously-canceling.html . Chelmsford has a "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" committee, and there's a real possibility that this organization put pressure on the library to withhold the use of their meeting room as I suspect that several of the library staff were competent to know that rescinding the meeting room reservation would put them on the wrong side of the law.