Opportunity is not as rampant in the US as we’d like to believe and yeah, that’s just the way it is but these obstacles are what makes a book banned in a community. Not the availabilty but the realistic opportunity for all people to obtain it. The decision to remove a book from any environment should weigh this consequence. I can tell you that those books would never have been available to me as a student and it wouldn’t be just my loss but our loss as a society in limiting the ability to read, learn, and understand others.

At first blush, if someone tells you they’re starting an “underground library,” and you assume it’s a solution to a problem, then you have to deduce the problem. The easiest assumption is banned books – which, as has been said repeatedly on this blog, is not really a problem in los Estados Unidos.

But what if banned books are not the problem being addressed by the underground libraries? Can you think of any other way of looking at the issue?

I can…if one instead assumes that the problem is heavy-handed radical conservative political influence in education, then setting up an “underground library” may be an effective means of bringing attention to – and protesting – the issue. And it’s a hard form of protest to counter – there are no pointless marches, no ineffective boycotts, no sit-ins or “occupations.” There’s no one for overenthusiastic police officers to beat up or arrest. There’s no need for “free speech zones” (conveniently located where the media isn’t paying any mind)

Looked at in this way, these “underground libraries” are a rather subversive way of calling out radical conservatives and reinforcing the narrative that they are censorial, behind the times, and most importantly, the villains of the piece. (After all, in a nation that purportedly values free speech and expression as much as we do, censors (real or imagined) are natural heels, are they not?

The case around Dean Marney is an outlier. The practice of filtering the entire internet and then slowly unfiltering it on the basis of patron requests stinks of paternalism and wasteful personnel practices. You can’t simultaneously claim that libraries shouldn’t trump community standards and then say that the library knows better when it comes to unfiltering internet sites. That’s the cognitive dissonance of your whole position.

If Dean thinks it is the best use of his staff to spend time evaluating websites in regards to that absurd policy, that’s a waste of taxpayer money. That staff could be out of the back areas and on a service desk or in a classroom. Perhaps they could teach a class on internet responsibility instead of trying to enforce it on other people.

“The outdated tenets about using technology to manage the Internet, promoted by the Freedom To Read Foundation (FTRF) and American Library Association (ALA) Office of Intellectual Freedom, express dogma and fundamentalism and deserve challenge.

….

“Filtering offers a technological solution for a technological problem. If your filter is inadequate, find a better one.”

As it turns out, Dean Marney challenged that ALA OIF dogma, and the OIF backed down and admitted filters work and blocking breast cancer is no longer a valid excuse for not filtering.

By the way, @ISmellWonderful, what soap/shampoo do you use?

Unless you think I’m “trolling” you.

Unless, of course, you’re testing the efficacy of an internet filter…