Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967‐1974

Citation

Gerard, D. (2001), "Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967‐1974", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 6, pp. 311-312. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.6.311.2

The general tenor of this book will please all readers with progressive instincts. Against a colourful background of US political history in that turbulent period, the late 1960s and early 1970s (Vietnam and all that), it surveys the deeply embedded concept of “neutrality” in library book selection, and challenges it acutely. It is a subject familiar in the UK also, since the 1950s, but never so forcefully argued or chronicled in such detail as in these pages.

No doubt we can all remember the worthy ideals instilled by textbooks and library school lecturers on the subject, the aim a “balanced” book collection. What was overlooked was the unconscious operation of prejudice, the unacknowledged bias – after all, did we not live by white, middle class cultural values? Never articulated as such, but part of our shared outlook on life, what the US social commentator Dwight Macdonald called “midcult” based on middlebrow literature. Minority voices, the alternative press, women’s issues, trade union and radical publications, ethnic material, was often bypassed, considered of marginal interest when keeping the book fund in mind. The practice was not an overt act of deliberate censorship, simply lack of awareness, but potent in its support of the respectable, the status quo.

With characteristic US zeal, a “Round table program” was devised to signal concerns about established practice, under the auspices of a (typically US) Organising Committee for Social Responsibilities of Libraries. Under the umbrella of this pressure group, political radicals, black militants, women’s liberation supporters, librarians interested in forming library trade unions happily gathered to promote their cause. Pressure was put on the American Library Association, as conservative a body as our own British Library Association, to address issues like working conditions, wages, recruitment, the place of minorities and of women, unionisation. In short pulling the library profession out of the dusty chambers of safe tradition and plunging it into the world of contemporary dilemmas. Libraries, especially public libraries, are today gauges of our cultural condition, a responsibility we should recognise and comprehensively seek to discharge.

The aim of the present study is “to extend library and information studies into the realm of socio‐political analysis” and as if to reinforce this it includes multiple references to the celebrated left‐wing ideologue and founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, a source of shock‐horror to anyone brought up on the conventional library mind‐set of the mid‐twentieth century. Essentially the book traces the struggle for more latitude in recognising the many strata in modern society, and examines the background to the Library Bill of Rights, 1967 (significant year!). It is extremely detailed in its chronicle of the events and the personalities – many of the latter will be quite unknown to UK readers in the profession – a model of sociological research.

Like, the broader social experiments in, if you like, “communitarian” living (the Hippy movement, for instance) the progressive library wing seeks to controvert complacency. The danger of “neutrality” is that it perpetuates existing preconceptions and blocks any advance in practice. Libraries are still in danger of being closed circuits, and we can all profit by asking ourselves: how far is what we offer (apparently liberally) really selected information, in print or via the Internet? Selected, that is, via the lens of the predominant culture? In the final words of the author, Toni Samek, the question for the future is, “Whose culture is library culture?”