I've been working in libraries since the mid-90s, albeit in the UK and in the academic sector. It's less extreme where I am, but there's been a definite change in ethos in the last decade among newcomers to the profession. The assumption when I trained was that you preserved neutrality as far as possible and didn't try to privilege parti…
I've been working in libraries since the mid-90s, albeit in the UK and in the academic sector. It's less extreme where I am, but there's been a definite change in ethos in the last decade among newcomers to the profession. The assumption when I trained was that you preserved neutrality as far as possible and didn't try to privilege particular viewpoints. There were nuances of course, but that was the ideal. Increasingly now I get the impression from some of my younger colleagues that privileging particular viewpoints is just fine as long as they as they are the "right" viewpoints.
There was a controversy in the profession recently about the Library of Congress Subject Heading "Illegal immigrants". (Library of Congress Subject Headings are the industry standard for subject indexing in English speaking libraries.) After the Library of Congress was blocked from changing the term, various libraries, including my own, made a unilateral change to "Undocumented immigrants" or something similar. I was involved in some of the discussions. I remember a colleague of about my own age expressing reservations, to do with departing from the standard, and also with abandoning neutrality in our indexing practices. This provoked an impassioned speech from a younger colleague, arguing for the change largely on account of the iniquitous immigration policies of our current Conservative government. Which is a political position with which I largely agree, but I wouldn't think it appropriate to incorporate my political beliefs into my professional practice.
And every week another colleague adds pronouns to his or her email signature. I feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers...
Similar spot here. I would also say the large number of retirements during Covid has hastened the change and also diminished institutional memory over the battle fought over censoring. I'm about 15 years from retirement and yet I stand as one of the very few librarians who went through the nineties but it is jarring hearing the same arguments about safety and enabling harmful ideas coming from my colleagues rather than the religious right. Unfortunately, my colleagues are in a much better place for silently pulling contentious books from the stacks without causing any headlines about censorship. Nothing to see here, there's no censorship we're just "decolonizing the collection" or doing an "inclusion audit."
Librarians are constantly discarding books but we used to do so based on community interest and circulation statistics rather than ideological reasons. We also used to feel compelled to include books where there was a lot of controversy because we wanted to create access so people could discuss knowledgably, now that's considered platforming hate, if the books come from the "wrong" side.
I've been working in libraries since the mid-90s, albeit in the UK and in the academic sector. It's less extreme where I am, but there's been a definite change in ethos in the last decade among newcomers to the profession. The assumption when I trained was that you preserved neutrality as far as possible and didn't try to privilege particular viewpoints. There were nuances of course, but that was the ideal. Increasingly now I get the impression from some of my younger colleagues that privileging particular viewpoints is just fine as long as they as they are the "right" viewpoints.
There was a controversy in the profession recently about the Library of Congress Subject Heading "Illegal immigrants". (Library of Congress Subject Headings are the industry standard for subject indexing in English speaking libraries.) After the Library of Congress was blocked from changing the term, various libraries, including my own, made a unilateral change to "Undocumented immigrants" or something similar. I was involved in some of the discussions. I remember a colleague of about my own age expressing reservations, to do with departing from the standard, and also with abandoning neutrality in our indexing practices. This provoked an impassioned speech from a younger colleague, arguing for the change largely on account of the iniquitous immigration policies of our current Conservative government. Which is a political position with which I largely agree, but I wouldn't think it appropriate to incorporate my political beliefs into my professional practice.
And every week another colleague adds pronouns to his or her email signature. I feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers...
Similar spot here. I would also say the large number of retirements during Covid has hastened the change and also diminished institutional memory over the battle fought over censoring. I'm about 15 years from retirement and yet I stand as one of the very few librarians who went through the nineties but it is jarring hearing the same arguments about safety and enabling harmful ideas coming from my colleagues rather than the religious right. Unfortunately, my colleagues are in a much better place for silently pulling contentious books from the stacks without causing any headlines about censorship. Nothing to see here, there's no censorship we're just "decolonizing the collection" or doing an "inclusion audit."
Librarians are constantly discarding books but we used to do so based on community interest and circulation statistics rather than ideological reasons. We also used to feel compelled to include books where there was a lot of controversy because we wanted to create access so people could discuss knowledgably, now that's considered platforming hate, if the books come from the "wrong" side.