#i mean obviously - this post is painfully obnoxious & i'd apologize but i won't change

[girderednerve]

saw a tweet that made me mad, rest in pieces

the tweet says "ao3 is a fucking library. okay? that's what archive means," which feels like a sequence of words manufactured in a lab to make me, personally, go bananas

like yes i get it i know what they're saying—the content that people find objectionable on ao3 belongs there, because ao3 is an archive and/or library and these institutions are neutral repositories of information, including objectionable information. someone who may or may not work in the field responded with the ALA's library bill of rights (first adopted in 1939) & ranganathan's five laws of library science (from 1931). the first articulates a right to read and the second includes "every book its reader."

there are problems with these claims, and the problems are more interesting to me than whether or not we think ao3 is good. i feel that i ought to note here that i read a tremendous amount of fanfiction, for which i provide no particular justification. anyway the things that i care about here are 1. libraries are not archives—those are in fact two different, although related, kinds of institutions, which do different things; 2. the model of the library as a neutral marketplace of ideas is historically (&, of course, politically) limited, not obvious or universally accepted; and 3. libraries & archives both have complex ethical issues involved in their creation & collection maintenance, and there's lively debate in the field.

okay here's a potted history of american libraries are you ready? when they really started pushing free public libraries in the united states there were two main reasons that andrew carnegie & governments funded them: 1. the romantic ideal of jeffersonian democracy, which requires literacy & civic engagement; and 2. the idea that access to good books and reliable information would improve society. both of these reasons sound good, but for our purposes it's important to emphasize that this is a very limiting view of what libraries can or should do. the idea was that libraries would be socially improving, in the the narrow & weighted way of a lot of progressive era social policy: only good books, only reliable information, mediated by trained professionals, who would tend to the intellectual health of the community. librarianship & social work professionalized alongside one another. around the 30s, a different idea caught on: in response to the rise of fascism (i'm skipping a lot & rounding off a lot of edges), libraries contended that they were instead best understood as a marketplace of ideas. library bill of rights in '39! this idea held on through most of the 20th century, through desegregation: libraries are neutral, libraries have ideas that are objectionable to everyone, libraries improve communities by empowering people to seek a variety of information. there are advantages to this model, but consider its limitations: it emphasizes a certain kind of information, and it hides libraries' constant decision-making behind a veil of presumed neutrality. more recent ideas about librarianship eschew neutrality as impossible, and instead emphasize justice, access, and community-building; not sure where the field will end up, & it's also worth noting that there are plenty of conservatives & reactionaries who work in libraries. all of these missions have had libraries focusing on different areas of service, even though there have been consistent throughlines.

but what i want to get at here, with my contention that there are competing ideas even among library workers about what libraries (ought to) do, is that the idea that a library wouldn't balk at purchasing & circulating books because of content is flatly not true. two weeks ago someone contacted my library & asked us to buy the turner diaries, a white supremacist text, and our collection development librarian said no, which, if we took a strict reading of the bill of rights & laws of library science listed above, is 'censorship', or at least contrary to standards of the field. i think it is in every way good & correct that we didn't buy the turner diaries, though, & i suspect that at least a large subset of the folks who are so fond of the ao3-library defense would not disagree with this choice. we have only so much money with which to buy books; we claim for ourselves a specific role in the community, & that role is not 'distributor of white supremacist propaganda,' or, worse, 'financial contributor to white supremacist causes.' this is a cheap example, of course, but there are others; just saying "well, if you don't like this large collection of literature which contains works that you find objectionable, of course you must also hate libraries" elides both the stated missions of those collections & the active, ongoing choices made by people who maintain them.

of course the real content of this complaint is: instead of trotting out libraries as some sort of imagined pillar of intellectual freedom, while libraries are under increasingly aggressive fascist attack, we should articulate what it is that public libraries do, what we need them for, & how they work. obviously people who don't work in libraries &/or aren't making themselves miserable by going to library graduate school don't need to consider this in great depth, but i do think it's worthwhile to consider some specifics of questions about censorship, intellectual freedom, & civic institutions

#im fandomposting again 😔 #technically i'm a grad student #i mean obviously - this post is painfully obnoxious & i'd apologize but i won't change #i do for the record think ALA is mostly big stupid but no one asked me & that is for the best