Blatant Berry: The Irreplaceable Krug
We need a candidate who can lead the Office of Intellectual Freedom in our brave new world.
John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large, jberry@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 04/16/2009
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(For Judith Krug's obituary, see the news story that ran earlier this week.)
Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) since it was founded in 1967, died on April 11. A giant among librarians, she was ALA’s best-known and strongest leader. Her service to the profession’s primary core value, intellectual freedom, made IF ALA’s most important cause. Under Krug’s assertive guidance, ALA became one of the nation’s leading organizations in protecting the rights of Americans to free expression, freedom of inquiry, and privacy in their pursuit of information. ALA’s work on intellectual freedom—including that of the sibling Freedom To Read Foundation (FTRF), also headed by Krug since its founding—captured national attention and gave ALA and librarianship major prestige.
Krug made us proud to be librarians. As we honor her, we must remember that our work in intellectual freedom is never finished.
Krug’s position in ALA was so strong that she easily convinced the association to spend huge amounts on intellectual freedom, even in rare battles ALA couldn’t win in the courts. ALA can always dish up lip service to its values, but when it comes to spending money—especially endowment money guarded by trustees as if it were their own—it has often backed off. Until Krug, ALA had never paid such a high price for principles so crucial to the profession or for such difficult challenges.
It cost ALA millions, and in battles over the censorship of new media, the victories were often only moral ones. Because of Krug, ALA fought many cases of Internet censorship and even achieved a partial victory in the June 2003 Supreme Court case regarding the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The law’s proponents wanted total filtering on library computers tied to receipt of federal E-Rate funds; while the court found CIPA constitutional, two justices said libraries should turn off the filter if an adult requested it. Krug fought that battle with her usual vigor, despite critics who said it was too expensive for a case we couldn’t win, to defend a debatable principle like open access for children. The legal triumph was small, but the victory for the principle was enormous.
We cannot “replace” Judith Krug. She was unique. We won’t find another equally tough, forceful battler for our cause. So we will miss her, knowing there is no obvious replacement waiting. She was “untouchable,” and only her death could vacate the crucial position she created and nourished for more than four decades.
No position at ALA is more important than that of heading the OIF. A search should pursue not a candidate whose credentials, qualities, and presence replicate those of Krug but rather someone who can take the apparatus she founded and built further into the brave new world we now confront.
The new chief of OIF and FTRF must be a consolidator, a diplomat, and a lobbyist of high skill. This IF leader must not only defend ALA’s IF apparatus but manage its continued evolution in an environment of easy technological access to information, where censorship is often practiced not by removal of information but by its online manipulation. Beyond that, innovations like Google Book Search pose new challenges. The new leader must possess the legal, political, and moral fiber to outmaneuver the opponents of free inquiry and individual privacy in the courts, the marketplace, and the civic community.
Just as important, the new leader of OIF must face the longstanding gap between our principles and our practice. This gap comes in part from transposing policies born in the print age, such as providing open access to all library materials for juveniles, and the difficulty of allowing unrestricted use of public access computer terminals.
We must find a new leader who can defend freedom of expression from more subtle yet more powerful forces than ever before. We will only honor Judith Krug if we find someone wise enough to do that exalted work in ways that fit these times, just as Krug’s work so perfectly fit our recent past.
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