Doing Nothing for Intellectual Freedom

I'm thinking the main point of this Standing Up by Sitting Down post at the Office of Intellectual Freedom Blog sums up the bulk of what I have learned about my role in defending the First Amendment.

So, the blog post details a library subpoena situation that for all intents an purposes, seems fairly mundane, some would say, boring. The library director's defense of civil liberties was to sit down and wait. For me, the point mirrors the equally opposing forces of the erosion of intellectual freedom: ease, speed and convenience.

The work we've been discussing, the material we cover and the articles we find have shown how simple it is as a society, and even individuals to casually give up privacy rights. We have to allow Facebook the right to our material if we want to use Facebook, and why wouldn't we want to do that?

We give our identifying information to those who ask at registration for so many things, without protest, because protest is futile, but worse, it takes so long.

What I like about this simple blog post about a library director "Standing Up by Sitting Down" is that it clarifies the intention with which we have to work. She could have quite easily accepted the subpoena at face value without a judge's signature and on a day-to-day basis, I'm guessing she has enough work to do to warrant her doing just that. She doesn't have time to sit around the Prosecutor's office. But she has to. Our privacy is worth that, every time, in every case.

Our defense of Intellectual Freedom will take this level of intentional commitment to work against the powerful, if slow and steady, erosion of these rights by convenient technologies. In other words, we'll spend a lot of time doing what feels like "nothing" to preserve the values of intellectual freedom. We'll be putting on the brakes for disclosing information and saying "no" or "hold on" where everyone else doesn't even bother to say "yes," but hands over what is asked of them because our technology has made it that easy.

If "nothing" serves to remind outside forces that librarians are synonymous with the concept of Intellectual Freedom then perhaps that is something. If by doing "nothing" we remind people about the sanctity and value collectively and as individuals of Intellectual Freedom and privacy, I'm quite sure that is something big, after all.

Hidden Cost of Banning Books

I was listening to Toni Morrison talk about Intellectual Freedom and her book at this podcast with Liane Hanson on NPR, intending to blog that alone when I stumbled upon this story. I found it through a comment posted on NPR's soapbox blog about Morrison's interview.

Now that I've been reading the story from Wisconsin, I have to think that some of you have seen it already and I apologize for not keeping up. For those of you, like me, who are just learning, I hope you are equally as troubled and challenged by the ideas here as me.

It seems that four library board members in West Bend, WI were dismissed for refusing to pull YA books from their shelves. The charges are accompanied with allegations that the board is trying to further a gay liberal agenda (“the overt indoctrination of the gay agenda in our community” to be exact) by including the books, "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, "Geography Club" by Brent Hartinger, and "Deal With It! A Whole New Approach to Your Body, Brain and Life as a gURL" by Esther Drill.

I was pleased to see that a member of their community created this blog in response to the situation and I smiled to myself at the site administrators own admission that the choice of the word parent was short-sighted and limiting. Instead of West Bend Parents for Free Speech, it should be West Bend Citizens for Free Speech, but that is a small detail that to his or her credit, the site admin dealt with frankly.

The article I found in Publisher's Weekly does not have as much detail as the blog post from the National Coalition Against Censorship. The tough thing for me to read on that blog is that the Christian Civil Liberties Union is actually working for the right to publicly burn these books - not just remove them.

Reading that brought me full circle back to the Toni Morrison interview when she talked about, first the flattery of being a banned author. Such press drives sales, after all, and upon learning that Song of Solomon was banned in a prison system for fear it could cause a riot, Morrison admits to feeling proud that her words could be so powerful.

She goes on, however, to address the more serious threat censorship plays in our society and in other countries. Though our authors don't have to worry about imprisonment, exile or persecution, even the act of creating "bad press" directly limits free speech.

We've covered the idea that censorship limits the ideas available in a free marketplace a lot in class, but Morrison had a point I hadn't properly mulled over yet: writers of sensitive materials are likely sensitive creatures themselves. Hearing the words "wicked" and "threat to society" will inevitably cause some writers - who are likely not imprisoned in our country - to simply put down the pen. Yes, we have those brave souls, like Chbosky, Hartinger, Salman Rushdie and Morrison herself, who carry on, but who have we lost along the way thanks to critical voices?

I am reminded, in a way of Hartinger's blog post on Self-Censorship and wondering, even if public attempts to ban books are met with staunch resistance by librarians and the public, something immeasurable could still be lost if sensitive content-producers self-censor their own work. The unquantifiable loss of the contribution of ideas hurts us all.

Intellectual Tweetdom

We've been spending a lot of time defending Social Networking and the merits of Intellectual Freedom alike, so what about posting instead on the possibilities of Social Networking, namely Twitter, as Intellectual Freedom is concerned?

Pew's Internet and American Life recently released, "Twitter and Status Updating," a brief report on how Americans are using Twitter's microblogging technology. What does Twitter have to do with Intellectual Freedom, you ask? The following quote from the Pew report hints at the overlap:

Overall, Twitter users engage with news and own technology at the same rates as other internet users, but the ways in which they use the technology -- to communicate, gather and share information -- reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction. Moreover, Twitter as an application allows for and enhances these opportunities, so it is not so surprising that users would engage in these kinds of activities and also be drawn to an online application that expands those opportunities.

It is the word untethered that I like. I've been on Twitter for only about 6 weeks now. I've been reading about it for years. (Check out this groovy piece on the unforeseen benefits of microblogging and the greater social impact of Twitter: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy as featured in the New York Times)I have to tell you that the difference between what I imagined it would be like (painful, embarrassingly personal lunch confessionals, useless schmoozing) and what it is (resourceful, meaningful to my day job, useful local contacts) has proved to me that you never really know until you try. What I have mostly learned from Twitter is the force with which our world is running on information sharing. I've also picked up something on getting out of the way of emerging technologies.

Twitter updates from the folks I follow suggest that the platform asks the wrong question. "What are you doing?" is the prompt to the 140 character limited tweets we share. About three weeks ago, Beth Kanter, someone I follow as she's a guru in nonprofit technology, suggested that Twitter asks the wrong question. It should be asking us, "What's worth sharing?"

If you aren't on Twitter, allow me to explain the relevance. What my limited experience has shown me is the power of unleashing Intellectual Freedom. To be sure, ACCESS is a giant problem, as in, not everyone has access to Twitter. Setting that large concern aside, if only for the sake of conversation, I am humbled by how efficiently this technology makes information sharing. What we do on Twitter all day is share links and comments about information sources, news and context that give our lives meaning. We pass on the really good stuff to be certain it gets out to those who may need it. I follow folks who study nonprofits (oh and this is big: I follow the newspapers for nonprofit world) and get information as it is released.

How has my short stint in the Twitterverse furthered Intellectual Freedom? I can't measure this very well. I can tell you that this incidental (or ambient according to the NYT piece above) information has informed no less than 7 independent reference interactions, 13 internal library decisions, created 9 online reference interactions, and informed countless personal relationships and professional networks for me and, mostly, the library.

What I am learning is that Twitter is allowing massive amounts of people to share their voice, their thoughts and let information have its day in the sun. What I'd like to point out is that neither Twitter, nor its initial users knew what it could or would do. The question has been changed by the sheer numbers of folks who have seen its ability to efficiently share intellectual content freely. I think this means a lot when we consider regulation of 2.0 technology in that, we may not even know what a given technology is capable of until we sit back and let it develop over time in people's hands. When we step in prematurely to legislate safety we risk losing precious tools for intellectual freedom - not just stifling the basic philosophy of intellectual freedom.

For me, the biggest core concept behind the significance of intellectual freedom in our world is that limiting access, content or thought means limiting possibility. When we step in to try and maintain some sort of safe status quo, we deny that the status quo is not necessarily safe or ideal, but rather familiar and comfortable, and more importantly, we limit the possibility for furthering human potential.

Oh, and if you still happen to be curious about those small intimacies that give a relationship meaning over time, I had chili for lunch, yum;)

ACPL and A Child's Life: The Tale of a Challenged Book

I want to be clear, the bulk of this post is copy and pasted from a co-worker, but I think the story will prove useful to our discussions. I'm not considering this post part of my weekly current events posting, but an off-topic way to allow the real storyteller access to comments and a chance to moderate (I can't give her access to our off-topic forum in Oncourse;).

The story below takes place in the past, when Lisa Upchurch was managing the Tecumseh Branch. I worked at Tecumseh for a few years after Lisa had moved on to managing ACPL's Georgetown Branch. I am witness to this story serving as a sort of lore and a spark for pre-opening conversation on Intellectual Freedom in theory and in practice. We hotly debated the merits of the situation many times over.

Let me give the mic to Lisa:

To really have an appreciation of this story, you might want to search Amazon and Google for information on the book A Child's Life by Phoebe Gloeckner.

Ms. Gloeckner is an artist, and has been trained as a medical illustrator. This book is an autobiographical treatment of the author's childhood and teen years, in graphic novel format. The protagonist/author was repeatedly and brutally sexually abused by her mother's boyfriends, one after the other. Little Phoebe was terrified and confused about how she was supposed to react to her life of abuse, and even came to court it since that was the only kind of attention she received.

It's about the most horrific childhood I can imagine, and Ms. Gloeckner uses her artistic talent and training to illustrate her experience very explicitly. There's a 2 page spread which depicts a very small, frightened girl and a very large, naked and erect man. He's about to force her. Everything is from the child's perspective, so the furniture and the man are larger than life. Honestly it's making me a little sick typing this because I'm recalling the illustration. And that's only one of them--the book is packed with this stuff. The author states very clearly in the preface that she created the book so that people would understand just exactly how horrible the life of an abused child is, and what they're condoning by looking the other way.

Ms. Gloeckner had a hard time getting the work published. Nobody wanted to touch it, until one small press recognized what an important work they had on their hands. A number of employees refused to run the presses because it was so upsetting, but enough were willing that the book did make it into print.

I read about this book someplace, I don't remember where. I called our adult bibliographer at the time, and I discussed it with her. We agreed together that our library needed to have this book in our collection, to give these children a voice. Three copies were purchased; two for the main library, and one for my branch. I used to show every new employee the book and explain just how important it was that it always be shelved in the adult collection.

So one day I got a phone call. It seems that a woman who worked for the country prosecutor got her hands on the book, and decided it was child porn. She wanted to have me arrested. She wanted to sue the library. She wanted to make a public case of it. She also called our community relations department before she called me, and so the situation ended up in the director’s lap, without ever following the official materials challenge procedure. I nonetheless produced plenty of documentation to explain that the book was not porn, but was instead a cautionary tale. The associate director backed me. In fact he said that in his opinion anyone who works with children should be forced to read it, so they'd understand just how important it is to report suspected abuse. Bless the man.

But the prosecutor was running for re-election, and he was looking for a platform. The director talked to him, and then decided that the library's collection development policy wasn't going to be it, and so the three copies were marked missing and ended up in [the director’s] office. They've never been seen since. I’ve enquired a number of times over the years, and I’ve always been told they were lost.

I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing the director. If this book had not been removed from the collection, the prosecutor would have used the library, the bibliographer and me as examples on his pyre. Perhaps the director thought that the library board would not be willing or able to protect me and the bibliographer. Perhaps he feared that the book was too hard to defend, and that the damage which would be caused by opening our collection to the scrutiny of a prosecutor on a witch hunt was not worth it. And perhaps he was right.

**Update** Here's the link for Lisa's comment below. From the Wikipedia page below you can link out to Glockner's site with the University of Michigan.

Gloeckner on Wikipedia

Gloeckner's profile on the University of Michigan faculty page. Note the last sentence of the third paragraph on the fate of A Child's Life in California.