Free Speech and Patron Privacy are Corequisites for Intellectual Freedom

The book

So you’ve probably heard about this library assistant (Sally Stern-Hamilton, aka Ann Miketa) in small-town Michigan (Luddington) who wrote a fiction book (“Library Diaries”) based upon her accounts of library patrons, and published it under her maiden surname at a vanity press. The book doesn’t sound all that original or like it’s anything [...]

Warrentless library computer searches – what affects librarian response, and what can we learn from the news?

There have been a couple of high-profile cases this summer involving US law enforcement seeking library computers as evidence, and showing up without a warrant in hand:

In Maryland, FBI agents took two computers from a Frederick County Library. The library director granted them permission, although they came without a warrant.
In Vermont, state police detectives were [...]

Tomorrow’s History & the Role of Public Libraries

I’ve been thinking about digitization and history; specifically the trusim that history is written by the victors (aka the privileged), and what that means for our current era.
With literacy and war-conquests-slash-oppression on the part of literate groups, orality became devalued as “official” history in most of the mainstream, dominant, Western societies.  Non-literate or illiterate people [...]