Many of the core values of librarianship are geared to support human rights. As the ALA Core Values of Librarianship note, Intellectual freedom, diversity, democracy and social responsibility are perhaps most obviously supportive of human rights.
Diversity, at the very least, is a value that helps us to recognize the variety of sources and kinds of experience, people, and expression or thought that we may encounter, and reminds us not to withhold service, but to tailor our service to the community and its needs. Democracy, or the right to be heard by our governments, and have our opinions represented in public decision making, is an explicit value of both human rights and the ALA’s core values list. One finds a good deal of overlap, if one compares the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ALA’s core values list.
But perhaps the most relevant human rights value, given what libraries have been in recent history, is Intellectual freedom, which cannot exist without freedom of expression and freedom of thought. There are certainly practical limits to a library’s contribution to such issues, but many basic functions of a library are geared to just these kinds of issues, particularly freedom of thought or intellectual freedom.
Intellectual freedom is preserved by open access to information, and the banning or burning of books has been the bane of most libraries historically. There are many examples, historically, but perhaps literary tropes are the window which show us how deeply this notion is buried in the public psyche.
A library’s support of intellectual freedom seems to be often at odds (historically) with socially conservative values, or so the long-running narrative tradition shows us, like in the case of Bertram Cates teaching evolution and finding not only community resistance but an actual full trial in Inherit the Wind (based on the real-life example of the Scopes-Monkey trial), or the more recent story of the illicit extension of library services to a Jew in Nazi Germany in the novel The Book Thief (perhaps based on the real history of ghetto book libraries; such libraries are discussed in some measure by Matthew Battles in our recent readings).
If there are inverted versions of this trope, in which it is not social conservatives as we often think of them today that oppose information access, they may be more obviously found in works written during the cold war, like Orwell’s 1984, in the which the perversion and destruction of intellectual freedom seems to be the primary method by which the state dominates all of society. Another, example, Fahrenheit 451, published only 4 years later, in 1953, being the origin of inspiration for many dystopian science fiction works. In it, fireman is a title for men that find books and burn them, because they are contraband.
Other examples of this trope might include the scene in Field of Dreams where Annie Kinsella defends the work of the fictional author Terrence Mann,¹ or if we branch out to other kinds of media, the early Assassin’s Creed video games, which tell a narrative that is deeply concerned with the rewriting of history.
But we need not look to fiction alone to tell us these truths. A school board in Biloxi, Mississippi has banned to Kill a Mockingbird just 2 years ago (or, rather, elected not to use the book for it’s 8th grade reading), and this, with the reasoning that it “makes people uncomfortable.” A few centuries back, for several decades, Europe’s religious and state leaders killed would-be translators of the Bible itself.
As librarians, there seems to be a needle to thread– one in which we must convince public and patrons, and sources of funding, to not meddle in what libraries lend out. According to studies by the ALA, parents are the largest group of people that wish to challenge books or ban them, mostly based on the notion of protecting children.²
There may be limits to what librarians can do about other human rights, or human rights which seem orthogonal to the ones libraries hold dearest. But freedom of thought is not one of these– it must be a primary focus for libraries.
1. Field of Dreams. Directed by Phil Alden. Hollywood California: Universal Studios, 1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur7pHRRKhV4
2. Banned Books Q & A. American Library Association. Accessed 24 Sept 2019. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/banned-books-qa
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