Home November 2002 Vol 63 No 6 IFM book review

College and Research Libraries
November 2002, Vol. 63, No. 6

Book Review

Intellectual Freedom Manual, 6th ed. Comp. the Office for Intellectual Freedom. Chicago: ALA, 2002. 434p. $45, alk. paper; ALA members, $40.50 (ISBN 0838935192). LC 2001-26684.

“A must-have guide,” reads a rear cover blurb. And that is true. This latest, updated compendium of official ALA policies, guidelines, and interpretations, together with a “history” of how each was created and some fifteen essays by intellectual freedom (IF) authorities such as Judith F. Krug, Anne Levinson Penway, Bruce J. Ennis, Beverly Becker, and Don Wood on topics such as the Buckley Amendment, Internet access, confidentiality policies, opposition to Religious Right censorship attempts, and lobbying, belongs in all library systems. ALA’s Code of Ethics and a two-page Selected Bibliography, incidentally, appear as appendices.

However, even to someone embracing a nearly “purist” stance on intellectual freedom, something is wrong here. Indeed, more than one thing is wrong. For starters, there is a pervasive smugness, dogmatism, and self-righteousness, a nearly “circle-the-wagons” mentality bordering on paranoia, that views anyone who questions the worth or appropriateness of particular library materials as a benighted censor and sees the many reported “challenges” to, for instance, Of Mice and Men and the Harry Potter books, as evidence of a nonstop tidal wave of suppression. In fact, any citizen should be able to make a request for reconsideration without being tarred as a narrow-minded storm trooper. Materials selectors make mistakes. And, increasingly, local librarians do not even see or evaluate new titles supplied by distant vendors through outsourcing schemes or approval plans. Further, those myriad “challenges” actually and typically arise in fairly rural and remote locales, hardly affecting large numbers of students or library users, and in any event are usually denied, although they do represent opportunities to reexamine selection decisions and to explain free speech precepts to the challengers.

This leads to another Manual anomaly: The consistent exclusion of critical, dissident IF perspectives within librarianship itself. As an example, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council are excoriated for contesting the validity of ALA’s annual Banned Books Week. These are easy, fundamentalist targets. Nowhere, though, are the serious criticisms articulated primarily by Earl Lee and Charles Willett mentioned. Mainly in the pages of Counterpoise, Lee and Willett, both librarians deeply committed to the freedom to read, unmask Banned Books Week as a self-serving deception, demonstrating that the works more truly “banned” in the sense of being barely available in either libraries or bookstores are those emanating from small and alternative presses. In short, these are materials no one has “challenged” in libraries because libraries did not stock them in the first place. The Manual alludes to “self-censorship” once or twice but never explores this major threat to intellectual freedom in any depth. Similarly, the appended bibliography curiously fails to cite a recent scholarly study on this very issue: Toni Samek’s Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967–1974 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001).

Another overwhelming oversight is the failure to acknowledge, much less discuss, the broader IF context, especially the rapid concentration of media ownership and consequent shrinkage of available opinion and information. This rampaging process, disturbingly addressed by analysts such as Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney, Michael Parenti, Ben Bagdikian, Norman Solomon, Edward Herman, and Herbert Schiller, as well as by Project Censored and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), demands attention from librarians, whose collections and clients are directly impacted by the constriction of diversity in print, electronic, and AV formats alike.

Although the Manual devotes some space to “the librarian and intellectual freedom,” it smugly concludes after recounting details of the 1980 Layton Case—in which a Utah librarian successfully, and with ALA support, won a suit and regained her job after being dismissed for refusing to remove a novel from the Davis County Library—that “in general the library profession takes its responsibilities on this front seriously indeed.” Well, that is unalloyed fantasy. Since 1980, colleagues have been rebuked or dismissed for the following: conducting a program on Israeli censorship; writing prolabor freelance newspaper columns and scheduling a labor film series at a county library; questioning why a system closed on Easter, but not on Jewish holidays; criticizing library management at a city council meeting; supporting a black coworker who charged the administration with job discrimination; publicly opposing a new main building with inadequate space for books; asking for improved security following a sexual assault; and expressing an opinion on the merits of AACR2 to state OCLC vendors. In the last instance, the librarian was subsequently reprimanded, forced into retirement, and five books written or edited by him, plus a sixth about him, expunged from the library’s catalog and shelves. Indeed, the “library profession,” including local and national IF units, apparently did not take “its responsibilities” very seriously in these cases. And an amendment to the Library Bill of Rights that would have extended free speech rights to library staff, affording them the same protection as materials and meeting rooms, was introduced to the ALA Council in 1999 but ultimately scuttled, buried. This event, perhaps unsurprisingly, also is unreported in the Manual. (Likewise unnoted are the documented examples of censorship or omission within the library press [e.g., “Top Censored Library Stories of 1998/2000,” Unabashed Librarian, nos. 118, 119]).

Two final observations: First, the next edition would greatly benefit from an annotated directory of journals, groups, and Web sites concerning freedom of information, censorship, and media democracy. Such a list should helpfully include sources for identifying and selecting truly diverse materials (e.g., Counterpoise, MultiCultural Review, Small Press Review, Women’s Review of Books). Second, isn’t it about time for ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and Office for Intellectual Freedom to advise the Library of Congress that there really is a concept called “intellectual freedom” that deserves its own subject heading? (At present, the term appears in LCSH as an omnibus “see” reference to more specific topics such as “Academic freedom” and “Censorship.” A subject search under “Intellectual freedom” will yield neither the OIF Manual nor Samek’s book.)—Sanford Berman, Alternative Library Literature.