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Ideas are dangerous, librarians just stockpile and distribute them. In terms of potential energy books are more disruptive than nukes. The keepers who wrangle their power should have proportional status.

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WillPostForFood 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library. So they should be accorded status based on that power, but there also should be accountability and transparency.

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WarOnPrivacy 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You could say they are the censors of the ideas that get into the library.

But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.

> but there also should be accountability and transparency.

There is. 'Books on the shelf' is a gold standard of transparency. They are showing their work in the fullest possible measure.

In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith. The appropriate accountability for that is letting them do their jobs.

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AnIrishDuck 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.

A thousand times this. People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work.

Librarians take their responsibility to their community seriously. This responsibility, to them, is nothing less than presenting their patrons with all of the information (books and beyond) that they are trying to access, regardless of their personal feelings about said information.

	▲	WarOnPrivacy 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> People who think that librarians are secretly censoring the flow of information are completely out of touch with how librarians work. Absolutely. My farthest r-wing years overlapped with my heaviest library patronage. Libraries were a space where my overactive, fault-finding radar was quiet. Seriously. Librarians have always been there for everyone.

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9x39 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>But I wouldn't. This context incorrectly implies librarians are working from a position of restricting knowledge. In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.

Peel District restricts books to materials post-2008 and deemed antiracist, which is an incredibly narrow slice of the historical body of human literature: https://www.peelschools.org/documents/a7b1e253-1409-475d-bba... https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/teacher-librarians-sp...

On the opposite end of the western culture war, we have the elimination of the corpus of queer texts at a Florida college: https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/education/2024/08/1...

Either way, it's a position, institutional or otherwise, of restricting knowledge that is inherently subject to the political pendulum swings.

>In modern times, librarians are working against the factions that do that.

Librarians apparently are the factions that do that. What books or why varies, but the "weeding" is the euphemism of the day to restrict with.

>In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith.

I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification than a useful model for a political process.

	▲	WarOnPrivacy 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Libraries stock what gets checked out. >>In short, librarians are extraordinary examples of good faith. >I think this is closer to hero worship or beatification than a useful model for a political process. I assert that librarians fall toward the end of the scale we use to example good faith actors. Someone has to be there.

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WillPostForFood 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Choosing what to put on limited shelf space is inherently a process of choosing what to remove and to exclude. It is zero sum.

Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen.

	▲	WarOnPrivacy 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Choosing what to put on limited shelf space is inherently a process of choosing what to remove and to exclude. It is zero sum. Titles are removed when the card catalogue shows they aren't being checked out. Those titles can be bought by the public at a steep discount. What is included are titles that are likely to be checked out, plus what individual patrons ask for. I've done the latter. For some unusual titles I had to supply the ISBN. If they were in print, they were on the shelf within a month. Excluding books is a recent phenomenon driven by book-banning agendas. > Books on the shelf is partial transparency. What was excluded, what was removed. What was requested for by patrons but not chosen. This seems to flow from wholly imagined concerns - ones that are trivially debunked. What is removed can be seen for sale and is also recorded in the card catalog. What is excluded (when book-banning efforts are successful) is also recorded. What is requested by patrons is stocked. Again, I've done it.

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8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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mingus88 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A curator promotes. A censor deletes.

Sure you could argue that with limited shelf space, a librarian is a censor by choosing what they do and do not carry, but then you have to ignore a lot about what censors and librarians actually do.

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lurk2 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You know this isn’t true.