Unconscious Bias or Deliberate Censorship at Your Local Public Library?

Figure 1: Counts of items about selected United States Supreme Court Justices in the libraries of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium.

Abstract

A study of the representation of selected United States Supreme Court Justices in Massachusetts public libraries. Do these statistics reveal a bias shared by librarians across Massachusetts? Are the librarians engaging in deliberate censorship of items that do not consort well with their own ideological beliefs? Are there any other probable causes for these wildly different numbers? 

I knew what I was going to find out before I examined the data. Nothing about the numbers I found surprised me. During the five years I served as a library trustee, I had spoken to librarians and to trustees and scrutinized the shelves of my local libraries. I had learned something of the biases of trustees, of librarians, of library collections, of book vendors, and of publishers, and expected them be made apparent in the statistics I collected. 

I collected my data from the online catalog of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium (MVLC), one of a number of library consortia in Massachusetts. It has 36 members, all public libraries. There is not a single item for any age about Samuel Alito in any of the libraries in the MVLC; representing this fact on the included chart would have wasted space, so this data is omitted. 

If you glance at Figure 1 you may observe the following: 

• None of the libraries in the MVLC has a single item about Justice Thomas for juveniles or for young adults. 

• None of the libraries in the MVLC has a single item about Justice Jackson for adults. 

• The total number of items about Justice Thomas, six, is less than that for any other justice. Even Justice Jackson, whose term began just two years ago, has nine items. 

• The total number of copies of items about Justice Thomas, twenty seven, is negligible compared to the number of items about any of the other justices selected. There are some libraries in the MVLC that do not have even one item about Justice Thomas.

• There are approximately 80 copies of items about Justice Jackson for juveniles. On average there are two books about Justice Jackson in the juvenile section of every library in the MVLC. 

• There are approximately 200 copies of items about Justice Ginsburg for juveniles. On average there are five books about Justice Ginsburg in the juvenile section of every library in the MVLC. 

• There are approximately 160 copies of items about Justice Sotomayor for juveniles, so on average there are four books about Justice Sotomayor in the juvenile section of every library in the MVLC. 

These are not the only apparent facts, but they are a good starting point for the rest of the discussion. 

I understand that some may rejoice at these statistics and conclude that all these facts are evidence of a good thing. After all, they may reason, Clarence Thomas is a bad man, with bad views. Surely the children of Massachusetts should not have to know that he exists, or, at least, they should not learn that fact from their local public library. And the less seen of him in the adult section, the better. And so forth. 

This is not my view. I believe in the importance of library neutrality. I have written about the problem of censorship by public libraries in a previous article, “The Yearly Charade of ’Banned Books Week” ¹. Censorship in and by public libraries is a preoccupation of mine, because everywhere I have looked for it, I have found signs of it. I believe that Justice Thomas should be better represented in the items in the MVLC compared to these other justices, due to the length and influence of his tenure as Chief Justice, and infinitely better represented in the juvenile and YA sections, than he is now. My purpose in this article is not to justify my position, but to try to explain the forces that ensure that he is so poorly represented in the MVLC. 

The primary reason is this: The whole apparatus of publishing is biased against Justice Thomas. Publishers are less likely to publish a book about Jus tice Thomas. Book lists are less likely to include such a book. Reviewers, like Kirkus Reviews, are less likely to review these books. The New York Times will find ways to not take notice of those books in the various lists it compiles. Everywhere there is a filter which obstructs a book about Justice Thomas and prevents it from reaching an audience. To combat all these forces a librarian making decisions about purchasing in a public library must be alert and must actively seek out books about Justice Thomas. That is a lot to expect of librarians, and the bare principle of library neutrality is evidently not enough to motivate them, especially when not buying a book about Justice Thomas is the choice that is likely most compatible with their own ideological biases. 

Table 1: Ratios of Copies to Items in the MVLC by Chief Justice

Some might say that it is not the fault of the libraries that there are so few copies of books about Justice Thomas; it is the fault of the publishers, who seldom publish books about Justice Thomas. Indeed, it is true that the publishers do not publish many books about Justice Thomas. But, in many cases, multiple libraries in the MVLC will purchase a copy of one book. Table 1 shows the ratio of copies of books to individual items in the MVLC, broken down by Chief Justice. Justice Thomas has the lowest ratio of copies to items of any of the justices selected, while Justice Jackson has the highest ratio, almost twice as high as Justice Thomas’s and Justice Ginsburg’s is nearly as high as Justice Jackson’s. We can infer from this that the libraries, in the aggregate, “want” books about Justice Jackson and Justice Ginsburg about twice as much as they want books about Justice Thomas, i.e., it is not just the lack of published books about Justice Thomas that is preventing libraries from purchasing these books, but their own preferences in the aggregate. 

You can always check the data yourself if you doubt my numbers. I obtained all my counts from the publicly available online catalog of the MVLC². I did not need to log in to use the data. Even if your methodology is slightly different from mine, I do not think that your numbers will differ substantially from mine. 

There is another reason for the observed bias in library collections. If some one can muster a sufficiently vociferous mob, capable of intimidating an es pecially unprincipled and pusillanimous library board, a librarian can suffer adverse personal consequences, including termination, for adhering to the prin ciple of library neutrality in too open and principled a manner. This is what happened to Cathy Simpson, the CEO of the public library of the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake in Canada earlier this year. 

Practically speaking, is there anything that you can do about this, assuming that you subscribe to the principle of library neutrality? Yes there is. You can request and you can document. This is what I do. I request that my local libraries purchase books, and I record which books are purchased and which are not. I file book re-evaluation requests whenever, in the normal course of my reading, I come across a book that seems to be categorized incorrectly and I document the entire interaction. Even better, and this is not where my strengths lie, you can organize. In Niagara-on-the-Lake, a group of concerned citizens, justly outraged at the mistreatment of Cathy Simpson, have self-organized. If you are a librarian, you can leave the American Library Association, which no longer champions the principle of library neutrality, and join the Association of Library Professionals. The time to do all this is now. 

So get started!

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1. https://hxlibraries.substack.com/p/the-yearly-charade-of-banned-books

2. https://mvlc.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/mvlc