Editorial- Fear of Information

"While wholesale filtering is probably unconstitutional, I think filtered machines in children's areas is not a bad idea," said Katina Strauch, a candidate for American Library Association (ALA) president. "To drive a stake in the ground on the issue and not revisit it would not serve our profession or those we serve," said Carla Hayden, her opponent.

Proponents of filtering, particularly a batch of extreme zealots who have captured the ALAOIF electronic list, were quick to use the candidates' statements to LJ ("On the Issues ," LJ 3/15/02) as proof that ALA's stand against filtering children's access to the Internet is untenable. I'm not berating the candidates for expressing their views—I just voted for one of them. Still, those views reflect the growing distance between ALA's positions and library practice.

Leigh Estabrook, director of the Library Research Center (LRC), Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delivered a troubling research report at the recent Public Library Association conference. The LRC studied the impact of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on library practice in more than 1000 libraries.

Six percent of those libraries require patrons to provide identification to use the Internet and seven percent monitor what those patrons do. Nearly 15 percent of respondents said patron privacy might be compromised. Some 12 percent will now more likely take note of what materials are being checked out. Authorities had requested information about patrons from more than eight percent, a frightening number.

These findings are responses to a fear of information emerging in America. It threatens to put new limitations on library practice and citizen access. Worse, it is dividing us as a profession and widening the already palpable gap between our principles and our practice.

The banner of ALA is the one under which we organize to take our professional stand on intellectual freedom. Until now, we have put our principles ahead of the practice, responding with policies that take a hard line against censorship in any form. I hope the new fear of information does not erode or dilute those stands. I also hope the next generation of ALA leaders will not move us back into some comfortable expediency where we go along with the filtering zealots.

The escalating fears for the safety of our children from sexual predators and everyone's safety from terrorism have created new challenges to our rights. The resultant fear of information has always been the most effective weapon of censors and those who wish to impose their morality and ideology on all of us.

We librarians know that there is a vast difference between information and the acts or events it describes. We must help society separate information and views with which we disagree from the deeds that we fear. We know you can be informed about terrorism without becoming its victim. We know you can learn about the varieties of sexual activity without practicing them. As we seek to understand the many questions confronting our society we become better informed to govern ourselves.

The censors and ideologs are right to be afraid of information. It is our weapon. When information escapes to the people, as it always does, the censor is exposed, and we are liberated from oppressive orthodoxies.

Frightening as so much of that information is and despite the circumstances in which we look for it, open access to it is the best protection against the tyrannies that constantly try to conquer us.