American libraries face a growing number of threats to intellectual freedom, said Caleb T. Winchester University Librarian Barbara M. Jones in a lecture held Wednesday.
Jones touched upon the American library community’s at-times tenuous relationship with legislation addressing constitutional issues. She also discussed the need to revise formal policy to better accommodate the Internet. She cited both the Patriot Act and the Internet as responsible for the increased censoring by both national and international libraries.
“The internet allows its users as never before to break through both legal and global barriers,” Jones said. “As it becomes the norm for libraries to carry computers with internet connections, it becomes necessary for us to examine what kinds of content we can allow, and what kinds we need to restrict.”
She went on to speak about the controversies inherent in using filters, the currently dominant form of website restriction, to limit internet content in libraries.
“To many, filters are unfair and oppressive by their very nature,” Jones said. “They categorize expression without regard to meaning or value, keeping libraries from expressing the full canon we’ve come to expect of them.”
Jones lamented the Patriot Act’s provisions allowing for government surveillance in public libraries, along with Congress’s decision to devote an entire section of the Act to library laws.
“Most people focus on the more incendiary sections of the Patriot Act and skip over the library section,” Jones said. “In fact, there are pages devoted to what you can and can’t do in libraries, what would count as ‘suspicious’ internet activity and ‘questionable’ rentals of books.”
She also stated that, in her opinion, the conflict showed no sign of abating and that such issues will be increasingly difficult to resolve as both the internet and national security gain importance in American life.
“From where I sit, this feels like an uphill battle,” Jones said.
Olin Library Head of Reference Diane Klare complimented Jones on her ability to highlight issues affecting libraries and, in effect, to imbue libraries with greater significance.
“Barbara brought to light most of the issues facing libraries post-9/11,” Klare said after the lecture. “She wasn’t afraid to talk openly about the new restrictions on academic institutions, and how difficult they are to balance with the need for intellectual freedom.”
Olin’s Head of Access Services EunJoo Lee spoke of both the changes in the library system and the changes within Olin Library in particular, stating that the lecture successfully represented the increased awareness of freedom of speech issues under Jones’s direction.
“Before Barbara, we operated under very different policies,” Lee said. “She brought a lot of confidentiality issues to light. Now it’s much harder for faculty and staff to view a given student’s information without his or her consent, which I think is a positive change.”
Lee said that a librarian’s duties—especially in a university—are often ignored, and that with proper policy reform the greater implications of a library’s duties can be brought into the proper context.
“It is much harder now to share information indiscriminately within the campus,” Lee said.
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