Susan Waldon

Librarianship, like other professions, is defined by a code of ethics, a set of shared values, and some basic ideas about what benefits people should receive from the profession’s services. While not as famous as the medical profession’s, “First do no harm.” or its Hippocratic Oath, the ALA’s Library Code of Ethics, Core Values of Librarianship, and Library Bill of Rights guide and challenge the profession in everything. They are broad enough to have come up in all my classes in some way and complex enough to require continual adjustment as we strive to meet them, especially as our field changes so much in the digital age. As a profession we value equal access, privacy/confidentiality, intellectual freedom and a balanced collection with many points of view, intellectual property rights and a balance between the rights of the creator and the user of information, literacy and lifelong learning, democracy, preservation, and professionalism, among other values.

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When I first started the MLIS program, I had reservations about some of these ideas in the extreme case, but I have come to see that working toward the values of the profession is a way of making sure that you are moving in the right direction. In the LIS 600 Foundations Class we wrote two big reflection papers. One of them I called “Librarianship as a Profession” and in the section on information issues, I touch on how very important our professional values are and show through the example of copyrights in the digital age just how complicated they have gotten. For LIS 617, Materials for Children, I chose the article “Why Social Justice in the Library” by Margo Gustina to discuss. For me the article’s main point was that we must actively break down barriers to people’s benefiting from everything the library has to offer. My takeaways were that we must listen well enough and think hard enough to truly answer a question I ask a dozen times a day, “How may I help you?” Getting the answer to that question might well involve hiring more diverse and bilingual staff. It might involve getting out of the library to ask the people who are not there. It would involve some inconvenience, but our professional values say that we should put service to the community above our personal interests.

 

In LIS 610, Collection Management, we talked a lot about having collections that represent diverse viewpoints and how to find the best resources. Our professor had us view video of various people talking about intellectual freedom and then make an audio recording of our own about it. In mine I talk about representing unpopular viewpoints in libraries with two examples, one that I have no trouble including and one with which I struggle. I think that resources about Creationism, even young earth creationism should be included in libraries, but I struggle with anti-vax literature, because we may all have health consequences if that viewpoint gains more traction. I learned in LIS 617 and LIS 618 that equal access is served by something as simple as making sure that resources with diverse characters are on display so that all children have “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” (concept by Rudine Sims Bishop) in the library. Then in LIS 640 Information Organization and Access Dr. Archer-Capuzzo had us watch a presentation by Dr. Kimberley Christen called, “We Have Never Been Neutral: Search, Discovery and the Politics of Access” which turned a couple of the values that we had been studying on their heads. Dr. Christen has made a digital platform for indigenous communities to display their own artifacts and tell their own stories that allows them to do their own tagging, because our standard subject headings are biased, and that allows them to set up differential access instead of equitable access. It is a way of giving people from whom everything has been taken, a chance to say this is who we are in our own eyes and this is what you are allowed to see. The class discussion showed that the presentation was eye-opening for everyone. I know that there was so much in it that I had never heard of or thought about, things that sat squarely in my blind spot.

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When I was in the LIS 600 Foundations class one of my African American classmates encouraged us all to read a book called Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald. I went ahead and bought the book because her discussion posts were always so incredibly relevant and thought-provoking and I knew that if she recommended the book, it would be good. The premise of the book is that just like we all have a physical blind spot where our optic nerve enters our retina, we also have mental blind spots because of the way the human mind categorizes things. The authors have come up with timed Implied Association tests that will show where hidden biases are. The tests are a demonstration that we are all biased and that we must make an intellectual effort to strive for values like equal access and against assumptions about people that may not be true. The ideas in the book inform my thinking about things like diversity, outreach, equal access and advocacy.

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Another book I read that is affecting my thinking about intellectual freedom is The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. It chronicles the movement on university campuses not to even listen to unpopular ideas because students felt endangered by them, that the ideas themselves were a violence against them. The authors came down firmly on the side of intellectual freedom and reading the book helped me commit more firmly to it, too.

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Through my coursework, my library experience and my reading I have learned that the harder we strive toward our professional ethics and values, the better able we are to help people accomplish the things that they have decided will be fulfilling in their own lives. We help them get the most out of their library in pursuit of their own dreams and goals and interests, the epitome of freedom. I have come to a rather Vulcan philosophy of librarianship: I want my patrons to have everything that the library has to offer to help them “live long and prosper”. I also want them to have everything that the library has that will help them to have joy in the journey. This ardent desire for the welfare of our patrons encoded in our ethics and values and the detailed ways we go about our work is what sets librarianship apart as a profession.

 

 

References

Banaji, Mahrarin and Greenwald, Anthony G. (2013). Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People. New York: Random House. Print.

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Bishop, Rudine Sims. (1990). “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors”. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. 6(3). Summer 1990.

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Christen, Kimberley. (2017). We Have Never Been Neutral: Search, Discovery, and the Politics of Access. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMd6-IS3cmU

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Gustina, M. (2017) Why social justice in the library? |Outreach + Inreach. Library Journal.com. June 8, 2017. Accessed 07/08/2018. https://lj.libraryjournal.com/2017/06/library-services/why-social-justice-in-the-library-outreach-inreach/#_

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Lukianoff, Greg and Haidt, Jonathan. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting a Generation Up for Failure. New York: Penguin. Print.