Volume 51, Number 1 Summer 2000 TENNESSEE LIBRARIAN Summer 2000 Volume 51 Number 1 Table of Contents Features: 36 Tennessee Reviews of Books Articles: 4 Where the Appropriate Things Are: The Rehabilitation of Internet Filters in Libraries Jud Barry 26 Goth? Gosh! Occult References in Juvenile Literature Kelly Hensley Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer2000 1 Editor Kelly Hensley, Head, Interlibrary Loan Department The Sherrod Library, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City TN 37614-0665 Phone: 423-439-6998 Fax: 423-439-4720 E-mail: [email protected] Associate Editor Mark Ellis, Head, Reference Department The Sherrod Library, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City TN 37614-0665 Phone: 423-439-6753 Fax: 423-439-4720 E-mail: [email protected] Business Manager Diane N. Baird, Librarian The Todd Library, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro TN 37132 Phone: 615-898-2539 E-mail: [email protected] Cover design by Tom Foster, Memphis Printed by Hillsboro Printing, Nashville Mailed by Advanced Mail Concepts, Nashville Tennessee Librarian (ISSN 0162-1564) is published four times a year by the Tennessee Library Association, P. O. Box 158417, Nashville TN 37215-8417. Mailed to each association member upon payment of annual dues. Subscription $10.00 annually, domestic, and $12.00 (U.S.) annually, foreign. Single issues $3.00 per copy domestic, and $4.00 (U.S.), foreign. Back issues may be obtained from the Tennessee Library Association. Periodicals postage paid at Nashville, Tennessee. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to the Tennessee Library Association, P.O. Box 158417, Nashville TN 37215-8417. Unless otherwise noted, articles in the Tennessee Librarian may be reproduced for the non- commercial purpose of educational or scientific advancement. The Tennessee Library Association disclaims responsibility for statements, whether of fact or of opinion, made by contributors. 2 Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer 2000 Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer2000 3 TL Summer 2000 51(1):4-25 Where the Appropriate Things Are: The Rehabilitation of Internet Filters in Libraries Jud Barry Internet filters have a bad reputation in the library profession. They have been all but run out of town by the American Library Association (ALA), which in posse with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has tarred and feathered the informational byproducts as “censorship in a box.” The ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee’s recent “Guidelines and Considerations for Developing a Public Library Internet Policy” finds no use of filters that is consistent with First Amendment rights or with intellectual freedom principles. Advocates of Internet filters in libraries are few. In effect, many librarians assume that the equation “filters = censorship” in all cases has been proven. The flashpoint of argument is Internet-borne pornography. Filter advocates like David Burt, president of the now-defunct Filtering Facts, oppose its presence in libraries. ALA invokes individual right to information. And so it goes: it’s bad, it’s not bad, it’s people’s right, it’s unprotected speech, etc. But it’s almost always about porn. Such is this obsessive focus that the discussion of whether filters work or not is almost entirely beside the point. To prove this, simply ask yourself what the 4 Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer 2000 discussion would be like if filters were completely effective. It would return to the present impasse. A capsule history of the library experience with filters reveals the following progression: 1) Unbounded joy at the birthing of the graphics-rich Worldwide Web, which promises to saturate the globe with the rich artistry of children’s book illustrators. 2) Concern on the part of some, but continued undiminished joy among others, when some of the illustrations turn out instead to be photographs of people in undressed poses that suggest something other than the cow jumping over the moon. 3) Consideration by some libraries of filters to provide Internet access without these photos. 4) Revelation that the filters keep out some, but not all, of the naked people pix, even as they block immediate access to valuable zoological data on jumping cows. 5) Rodeo to see who can ride the Web filtering issue the longest with a simile—is the Web like a library? An encyclopedia? A jumping cow? 6)Tug-of-war over porn as threat to the lives of children or as cherished right. Okay, that was a horse pill history, but you get the idea—the porn issue has been central. The effect of this obsessive focus has been to leave out of view issues of cardinal importance to the library profession, broad issues that address how Internet service functions in individual libraries. Now, let’s back up and try a different approach. The beginning might be a good place. Why am I here? “I,” of course, meaning any librarian. Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer2000 5 Groups of various types—communities, universities, schools, businesses— have deemed it advantageous to have people to whom to turn for help with the collection, organization, and retrieval of information from that part of the human record that the group considers to be significant to its own purpose. Librarians are those people. Their purpose is defined by the first sentence of the ALA’s Code of Ethics: “Librarians must provide the highest level of service through appropriate and usefully organized collections, fair and equitable circulation and service policies, and skillful, accurate, unbiased, and courteous responses to all requests for assistance.” Thus librarianship is defined as a profession that serves a given constituency by means of collections, policies, and responses to requests for assistance. It is usually understood that a librarian is competent to carry out these duties, in keeping with general direction given by representatives of her constituency, without undue interference from the outside. Applied to the building of a collection, this understanding gave rise to the doctrine of intellectual freedom, by which the librarian was posited to be acting on behalf of the putative rights of individuals to materials that librarians saw fit to provide, according to their own professional interpretation of appropriateness. It was generally agreed that such pressure from the outside, when done to contest the soundness of a librarian’s decision to add a book to her collection, constituted censorship. This definition of censorship was expanded to include a librarian’s decision not to purchase materials when the librarian personally 6 Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer 2000 disapproved of or disagreed with a book’s contents. In order to benefit the community being served, the librarian must put aside personal feelings and consider only a book’s potential value to the community. Nonetheless, given the availability of cover in the form of limited budgets and limited space, it was possible for librarians to hide censorious decisions behind such camouflage as “not enough money” or “not enough space.” The response to this was the development within the profession of various tests that librarians should administer on themselves or on their institutional practices in order to be sure that they were not acting as censors. These tests ranged from simple “rules of thumb” such as the one developed by Lester Asheim— selection is a positive approach to a book, whereas censorship is a negative one—to detailed policy guidelines issued by the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Along with the develoment of the theory and practice of intellectual freedom, the library profession also improved its ability to perform its duties with the promulgation of standardized approaches to the allocation of library resources. The most recent of these in the public library world is called Planning for Results: A Public Library Transformation Process, published in 1998 by ALA. This step-by-step guide is intended to help public libraries justify their existence by concentrating their efforts on “services that have a positive impact.” Both a continuation and a revision of a previous guide published in 1987, the process involves both the identification of specific needs within the Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer2000 7 community and also the selection of focused, specific “service responses” that will channel library resources into an effort to meet those needs. The guide, observing that “many libraries try to do too many things and end up doing many things inadequately instead of doing a few things well,” promises that its planning process “will help you decide what to stop doing as well as what you should start doing.” Facing the question of what to start or stop doing, librarians these days also confront the question of the impact on their profession of the Age of Information, especially as represented by direct patron access to that vast vanity press known as the Worldwide Web. In the not-too-distant past, librarians were thought of as information gatekeepers who exercised an important qualitative function by selecting materials of value to their constituency. Now, in the webbed new world, they seem to function essentially as timekeepers for unguided flounderings by their patrons in an untamed wilderness of words and pictures, many of which do not qualify as information. This drastic change in function was caused in part by the suddenness of the advent of the Worldwide Web as informational genie par excellence. Given three wishes, many libraries replied “Wow! Wow! Wow!” and, in response to these wishes, were granted a land of information that effectively obliterated all previous considerations of organization, policies, or service. 8 Tennessee Librarian 51(1) Summer 2000 What about selection and appropriateness for a particular community of patrons, for example? Those used to be defining characteristics of librarianship, but now, for the first time, librarians offer their communities a tidal wave rather than an orderly water garden. Have selection and appropriateness gotten drowned in the surf? One answer is a shrug of resignation: “You can’t select the Web.