The Long Good Fight: Libraries at the heart of intellectual freedoms | Editorial; Library Journal, 2/17/15

Rebecca T. Miller, Library Journal; The Long Good Fight: Libraries at the heart of intellectual freedoms | Editorial:

"Librarians and libraries are essential to discourse about intellectual freedoms. Now we have more work to do in light of violent efforts to curtail such rights, perhaps most notably the January 7 attack on the offices of Paris’s weekly Charlie Hebdo. For me, these events brought our work to date into high relief but also intensified a sense of urgency about what librarians can do to defend a richer understanding of the value of freedom of inquiry and expression.

American Library Association (ALA) president Courtney Young’s statement on the attacks framed the library ethos: “Such attacks are counter to the values of access to information with diversity of views—and to the values of civic engagement, which encourages people to read and discuss these views without fear.”

Libraries, in an important sense, exist to help remove fear from our culture: fear of the other, fear of the unknown, and fear of the differences of opinion that make us human. They do not exist to remove those differences. Our libraries hold and foster access to countervailing opinions, information about worlds beyond our own, and insight into cultures we have never experienced, as well as awareness of people living right next door. They are full of words answered by words—sometimes divisive ones—that together shape our evolving way of life.

Librarians are often out front in this freedom fight, perhaps most noticeably when it comes to book challenges. I think of acts of censorship as existing on a continuum of sorts. Acts of terror sit at one extreme but are still related to nonviolent attempts to use leverage of some kind to force a limitation on what others can say or read. Libraries have a mandate to exercise the muscles that counter the censor’s impulse early and often."