Comments on: The Relationship of Librarians and Intellectual Freedom http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/ the neverending reference interview of life Fri, 17 May 2013 00:38:43 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: The “virtues” of censorship, pt. 3: searching for “safe libraries” « Catecinem http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5536 Fri, 21 Oct 2011 01:19:49 +0000 https://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5536 [...] a majority) have liberal ideologies. None of that is relevant to my thesis. As Andy Woodworth at Agnostic, Maybe articulated, book selection is a process fraught with potential dangers; it is a process that [...]

]]> By: Laura Bang! http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5430 Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:08:35 +0000 https://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5430 That really depends on the librarian *taking* a collection development class, though. I never did because it wasn’t a required course in my MLS curriculum and I’m pretty sure it was one of the irregularly offered courses, which made arranging it as an elective difficult.

In addition, even if I had taken a good collection development course like yours, I would still have to *actively* think about that all the time. It’s easier to adhere to those guidelines for the first few years, but I imagine that as time goes on, you start to lapse back into the natural filtering process that Andy talks about, because those filters really do creep up on you without you noticing.

]]> By: bringyournoise http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5424 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 21:22:31 +0000 https://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5424 What a great, thoughtful post. This ties in nicely with something I wrote about yesterday. Just got home from the annual PaLA conference, this year being held in State College. PA. Yesterday, I attended a triple session with Jamie LaRue, Director of Douglas County Libraries in Colorado. He had so many inspiring things to say; however, one thing that he talked about was making libraries essential in the ebook market. Douglas County Libraries has purchased an Adobe Content server for $10,000 so that they can purchase and OWN their own e-content. LaRue envisions public libraries acting as “publishers” for those self-published authors going directly to the ebook market. The Adobe server can accommodate some crazy number like 2.7 million titles published in epub format. LaRue made the point that it will be impossible for libraries to “filter” every title included this way in a library’s collection, and that as a result, it is a certainty that many “fringe” elements will be included, some good, some not-so-good. Since he himself has had to address over 250 book challenges during his time as Director (print, I believe, not including these self-published titles), he was wondering how this sort of forward-thinking, ebook publishing model would affect issues like library collection development, selection, “censoring”, and filtering since any library could not possibly preview every new e-title for quality, content, etc. He envisions some sort of user-based filtering that would depend on reviews of readers, etc. I highly recommend visiting his Web site, which is linked in my post. So much is changing, and there are so many things to think about!

]]> By: rudibrarian http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5423 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:56:12 +0000 https://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/the-relationship-of-librarians-and-intellectual-freedom/#comment-5423 Andy, great post. There’s a few comments I take exception to (‘If I’m a librarian, I’m a selector’ is one of them. The intellectual struggle to select and not censor is the core of selection. What makes something ‘best’? What is the point of your collection? A book on Holocaust denial can and does belong in a public library, because (1) it’s important to know all sides of an argument (2) silencing is censorship (3) Intellectual freedom: a library is not in a position to guess why someone may want to read something.

This was all covered in my collection development classes in library school; I’m curious if my class was unique?

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