Editorial: Knee-Jerk Values

“Sometimes our profession has a knee-jerk reaction,” Darrell Batson, director of the Frederick Public Library (FPL), MD, and president of the Maryland Library Association, told me when I gave him a call. Batson's comment came when I asked about his decision to turn over to the FBI a couple of public access computers from the library as part of a criminal investigation being conducted by the bureau (see News, p. 14). I was surprised and found it so disconcerting, I reflected on it for the next few days. Ultimately, I concluded that it was a good thing that certain values are so fundamental to our profession that their violation triggers a professional knee-jerk reaction.

Certainly, freedom of expression, free access to information, and the freedom to seek and use the information resources in a library or on the web without fear of surveillance or interference by any authority are among those knee-jerk values.

FPL, unlike many libraries, has no policy regarding confidentiality of patron use of library computers. Batson said it was his view that no patron records were involved in giving the computers to the feds. Comfortable with his decision, Batson may believe that because the computers were part of the government's investigation of the anthrax murders, his reaction was appropriate.

I then called Judith Krug, head of the American Library Association's (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom, who told me she thought that records of individual computer use were covered by ALA's policy and Maryland's laws that require libraries to protect the confidentiality of records of library use by individuals. The computer files would, of course, reveal the identity of anyone who had used them. It turned out, days later, that the FBI decided it needed a judge's permission to search those files that Batson had turned over willingly, and it sought and received a warrant. Had the FBI come for the computers with that warrant in hand in the first place, Batson's decision would not be questioned by the profession's “knee-jerk” freedom fighters.

In contrast, consider the case of Michelle Reutty. In May 2006, local police asked her, then director of the Hasbrouck Heights Public Library, NJ, to supply library circulation records to aid in an investigation. Like Maryland, New Jersey has laws to protect the confidentiality of patron records. Reutty told police she couldn't supply the records without a subpoena. When they produced one, she provided the data.

Right away, local officials attacked, accusing Reutty of “blatant disregard” for law enforcement. Reutty resigned and found a new directorship in the state. Like Batson does now, Reutty served as president of her state library association. For insisting that due process be followed, she won the Robert Downs Award for Intellectual Freedom. I don't know whether Batson would call Reutty's defense of due process “a knee-jerk reaction,” or what she would call his quick capitulation.

We hear about ALA's “idealism” every time some librarian—or, often, a local official—decides it is expedient to cave in to pressure from local censors, cops, and clergy, or to try to avoid that pressure by sidestepping controversial acquisitions. The profession is half-heartedly thanked for setting up its “idealistic” standards while these administrators capitulate to local political “realities.”

The history of librarianship is littered with the bodies of librarians who jeopardized and frequently sacrificed their jobs and careers defending their knee-jerk tenets. The profession should be grateful to those who have risked so much. Without their responses, our fundamental values would be empty, hypocritical platitudes.

Editor-in-Chief Francine Fialkoff is on vacation