LibraryLaw Blog

Libraries and the First Amendment - two exhibits for your library

(1) The Long Island Coalition Against Censorship is offering a new edition of its exhibit,  “Censorship in Schools and Libraries" for your library for Banned Books Week - the last week in September.

The 2009 edition of the exhibit covers 150 years of censorship with 32 illustrations/text. Challenged books include Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, In the Night Kitchen, The Catcher in the Rye, and the novels of Judy Blume and Chris Crutcher. The censorship of Susan Patron’s novel, The Higher Power of Lucky, which was awarded the Newbery Prize, is in the new edition. A significant addition is the censorship of Vamos a Cuba in Miami.  Excerpts from the exhibit are at www.the-licac.org. You may order the exhibit by e-mail or sending a purchase order to the LI Coalition Against Censorship, PO Box 296, Port Washington, N.Y.11050. The cost of the exhibit including mailing charges is $40.00.

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(2) This past month, the McCormick Freedom Museum in Chicago debuted a brand new exhibit Libraries and the First Amendment. It explores the many ways that libraries are both bastions and battlegrounds of First Amendment freedoms. It offers a virtual exhibit at www.FreedomInLibraries.org that features case studies, interactives, and comment boards. The second is a versatile poster show that transforms any public library into an exhibition space. The exhibit is offered as a free service to any library.

School Library Media Programs and the First Amendment

Helen R. Adams has a new book out, Ensuring Intellectual Freedom and Access to Information in the School Library Media Program (Libraries Unlimted: 2008).

Helen and I coauthored a chapter and a chart with Helen on First Amendment and school libraries which you can download:

Chapter2 The First Amendment in School Library Media Programs.doc

 

Table of Court Cases on Intellectual Freedom Involving Minors' Rights.doc

 

The Chains of the Constitution and Legal Process in the Library: A Post-Patriot Reauthorization Act Assessment

Posted by Susan:

I just put the final draft of a new paper on SSRN. The paper re-assesses the Patriot Act provisions that affect libraries now that some parts of the Patriot Act have been legislatively revised, judicially interpreted, or audited for compliance. The paper is called The Chains of the Constitution and Legal Process in the Library: A Post-Patriot Reauthorization Act Assessment. If it gets published, I'm going to dedicate the paper to Lee Strickland, whose work was so helpful in drafting the paper, and who was a great friend of libraries.

The "chains of the Constitution" is a concept Thomas Jefferson came up with, as a metaphor for limiting the power of the governing class:

In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of
confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief
by the chains of the Constitution. 

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Since the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, controversy has raged over nearly every provision. The controversy has been particularly intense over provisions that affect the patrons of libraries. This article follows those Patriot Act provisions that affect libraries, and reviews how they have been interpreted, how the Patriot Reauthorization Acts have changed them, and what government audits and court affidavits reveal about the use and misuse of the Patriot Act. The efforts of librarians and others opposed to the Patriot Act have had an effect, both legislatively and judicially, in changing and challenging the Patriot Act. Because libraries are such a potent symbol of democratic openness, the effect of the Patriot Act on libraries has acted in the public mind as a microcosm of the broader problems with the implementation of the Patriot Act. The public's discomfort with the civil liberties implications of the Patriot Act has turned out to be justified, as every agency that has reviewed the implementation of the Patriot Act has concluded that the government has not been able to maintain an appropriate balance between the need to protect civil liberties and the need to prevent terrorist acts. The government's list of domestic terrorist acts that have been prevented or punished is not inspiring: the entire panoply of tools authorized by the Patriot Act has not done much more than stop some home-grown right wing fringe groups and ecoterrorists. In light of the evidence of abuse of civil liberties and the questionable constitutionality of many of the Patriot Act's provisions, this paper suggests that the time for vigorous advocacy has not passed and that further legislative changes need to be made.

The paper is available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1105448. That link takes you to the abstract, and if you scroll down, you can find a link to download the paper.

Report by San Jose Public Library shows filters still don't work well

I attended an inspiring meeting of the San Jose Public Library Commissioners Feb. 13th. I'm frankly tired of the whole filters in libraries issue, as we've thought about this and debated the issues for over a decade. So I was surprised to see how engaged and thoughtful the Commission and library staff were.

A city councilman has proposed that the library filter every terminal. On paper, the proposal makes sense - filter child pornography and obscenity for adults. Add "harmful to minors" filters for children.   

In practice, however, there are no filters that can do this. In fact, I've never seen a filter setting that even tries to distinguish between these three categories.  They all lump the three together in a category such as "sexually explicit" or "pornographic." 

But the bigger problem is that no matter how well intentioned a filter company is, the filters invariably overblock legitimate sites, especially health sites, gay and lesbian sites, etc. These are often the same topics that users are uncomfortable asking librarians for help in finding.  And as Lori Ayre writes, "I think the reason patrons aren't asking to be unblocked is because many of the filters don't let you know that you've been blocked. One of my pet peaves is that they sometimes just display an error (404 - site not found) so the user thinks they entered the URL wrong..."

The Commission recognized the limitations of filters in a government setting (as opposed to family or corporate).  Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager at the library gave a thorough presentation of her report that shows overblocking and underblocking of sites. See Internet Filtering Software Tests: CyberPatrol, FilterGate & Websense (February 4, 2007). [CORRECTION: February 4, 2008 - mm]  Here is a summary chart of findings - see the report itself for more detailed data:

Average Filter Accuracy (margin of error +/- 5%)

Type of Content Tested	Accuracy Percentage
Content of an Adult Sexual Nature – direct URL access	89%
Content of an Adult Sexual Nature – keyword searches	83%
Content not of an Adult Sexual Nature – direct URL access	88%
Content not of an Adult Sexual Nature – keyword searches	62%
Image Searches	38%
Email Attachments	25%
RSS Feeds	53%
Library Catalog Searches	67%
Library Database Searches	83%

The Commission voted overwhelmingly to keep the open access policy, with recommendations to get more privacy screens. Privacy screens generally block images from passersby. The meeting agenda and supporting documents are here.

The next step is the City Council Rules committee - at a meeting with a date not yet set. The Library is seeking public input. If you can take the time to read the proposal and the library's response, please add your comments online. Be sure to notice in the library's response that in fact there have been very few porn problem incidents in San Jose. The King library keeps a sworn police officer on duty, and has been able to handle inappropriate behavior incidents in ways that do not block legitimate access to the Internet. How many other libraries have a police officer on location!

Query: Is there an online course on Libraries and the First Amendment?

A reader asks: Is there an online course on Libraries and the First Amendment - available to librarians?

Religious issues in libraries - webcast on Thurs

Come join us on Thursday May 3 at noon PDT. for webcast on Religious Issues in Libraries -  if you work with California libraries. All others are welcome to view as archive.

Hooray - I figured out how to use tags instead of categories in this blog

As I suspected, it's much easier and more flexible.  So if any of you are looking for new posts based on categories, you may not find them. Use the technorati tags at the bottom of a post instead. If it works like I think it will, I'll probably stop using categories altogether.

Update: It looks as if users who click on a technorati tag below will get everyone in the world's posts with those tags. That's useful, but it would be nice to have an option to limit it to this blog, the way flickr does.  Well, there's always the search button in the blog...

Law for Librarians

"Legal Ease: What Staff, Administrators, and Trustees Need to Know about Libraries and the Law,"  is a preconference sponsored by the Oregon Library Association on April 18, 2007. Even if you can't make it to Corvallis, check out the slew of useful legal materials for libraries that OLA has posted (with permission) from the ALA Law for Librarians conference last spring. 

21st Century view of Intellectual Freedom in Libraries with Look Back to the 1970s

How does intellectual freedom in libraries in the 1970s compare with today?  Danuta A. Nitecki and Eileen G. Abels, asked Henry Cohen and me to write a chapter in the 30th anniversary edition of Advances in Librarianship.

Henry and I were asked to give a 21st century perspective on two key articles in Advances written in the 1970s:  Edwin Castagna's Censorship, Intellectual Freedom, and Libraries (1971) and  David Berninghausen's Intellectual Freedom in Librarianship: Advances and Retreats (1979).

Here is our chapter in a preprint form. If you'd like to see the final form complete with citable page numbers, see the Advances in Librarianship site at www.sciencedirect.com/science/bookseries/00652830

Preprint by Cohen and Minow as submitted to Advances in Librarianship, Volume 30, Henry Cohen and Mary Minow,  "Intellectual Freedom in Libraries: Then and Now," pp. 73-101 (2006), with permission from Elsevier, Cohen and Minow is here: PreprintIntellectualFreedomThenandNow.doc

Crossing the line: Public library dedicated by Mormon Elder

Interview with  Kathy Daly, a librarian from Michigan who worked for 7 years in Salt Lake City for the City Library

Daly:  As a librarian, I am concerned by the story in the Deseret News that the Washington County library was dedicated by an elder of the Mormon church. (Elder Holland dedicates Washington County library, desertnews.com, Feb 20, 2007)

This is a public library, correct? Paid for by public money from all the people of the county, correct? Then please explain why the dedication was highlighted by a religious leader and the parade to the tabernacle was part of the dedication? In the eternal quest for separation of church and state, this event does not even attempt to pretend to do so.

Libraries should be the safe place for all ideas, and the obvious imprimatur of a religious belief casts a cold chill down the spine of librarians who work every day to protect this freedom.

Every citizen of every faith in the Washington County community, as well as every citizen in the country, should be aghast.

Minow: Why are you concerned about the dedication of a library that is in a state with a large Mormon community?

Daly: As a public librarian for a long time, I am sensitive to anything that erodes what a library should be in a community. I currently work in Michigan, but for 7 years (until late 2001) worked in Salt Lake City for the City Library, and have a great affection for the state of Utah. SLC is cosmopolitan enough to avoid the worst of what can happen when there is a dominant group in a state. But the worst case scenario is when the provincialism and parochialism is unquestioned by the members of the community.  Then you get processions to the tabernacle from a public library dedication.  Frankly, it makes me sad when such things happen because it really makes Utah look foolish to the outside world.  People have to speak up, and have to sign their names. By affectionately holding up the mirror perhaps we can help affect change.

Minow: Do you think this problem is because the community is Mormon?

Daly: Please let me make it clear that my issues are not issues against the LDS church; such a situation can happen in any place where the balance is seriously distorted. It is a human thing, not a Mormon thing.

Having lived there, I know that objections won't come from the librarians who are part of the dominant group. It just won't happen. But you know what else? The non-Mormon librarians in the state won't complain either. Oh, maybe to one another, but not out loud, because it would seem, well, rude to do so, and everybody has to work together. Maybe that is the gift of having been there and loved the place and cared about the people. Having moved away, I am safe to speak about it without recrimination, either religious or social.

I also have to say that we are talking about really good people --but who have become so comfortable in a pretty homogeneous place that they have forgotten that there are others to include at the table.