The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden. – Ezra Pound
“One of the most important things facing libraries today is protecting children from sexually explicit material.” -Alabama Republican Party Chairman and newly elected Library Board Chair and person who votes with a home made ID John Wahl pic.twitter.com/skhLdb5jZI
— Cathy Reisenwitz (@CathyReisenwitz) September 20, 2024
“This is not actually an important concern for libraries, despite braying to the contrary by wannabe censors.” – Maggie McNeill, actual librarian with a degree and all. It is not the job of libraries to enforce parental censorship choices; that is the job of parents. Libraries exist to provide information, including information the State and, yes, even parents, might not want legal minors to have. Blaming social trends on the mere existence of certain books is the act of a totalitarian; it is the desire to make certain ideas go away. But using state violence to suppress discussion of ideas the State or some parents find troubling will not make them go away; it merely cripples the ability of those affected by the censorship to weigh and consider different viewpoints. And more often than not, suppressed topics gain a typically-unwarranted luster merely by virtue of having been suppressed: “The book THEY didn’t want you to read!” is powerful marketing, even for trash. The only way to “protect” the young from what parents consider “bad” or “wrong” ideas is to openly discuss those ideas within the belief-framework the parents wish to instill; censorship is lazy parenting by people who want to raise programmable robots instead of thinking adults.
Censors are delusional bigots with warped morality, but they aren’t always stupid; since most thinking people still recognize censorship as an evil, the censors attempt to justify it by various excuses, one of which is trying to pass off the removal of books they dislike as weeding. For those unfamiliar with the term as it applies to libraries, “weeding” is the process of making room for new books by removing outdated, obsolete, unused or decrepit ones already in the collection. It can be neither a haphazard process nor a biased one; the kind of people who want to get rid of ideas they dislike cannot be allowed to weed any library but their own personal ones. But how do we weed out dishonest weeders? As it turns out, I did my MLIS thesis project on exactly this subject. The predominant method of weeding for decades has been the CREW method, ironically developed by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in the mid-1970s; unfortunately, the method is heavily reliant on the professional judgment of librarians, making it easy for unethical actors to disguise censorship as weeding. For my project, I created a microcosm of the public library I worked in by borrowing the first book on every shelf in the library, then I weeded that collection by CREW and two other methods. What I discovered was that for every section but the Dewey 800s (literature), the results of the professional-labor-intensive CREW method were statistically indistinguishable from simply weeding any book that had not been checked out for three years. Note that our library did not include popular fiction in the 800s, but in a separate alphabetical-by-author section, and the quick method worked just fine for that section. In my analysis, I pointed out that this allowed library assistants to do most of the weeding (subject to review by professionals of course), and eliminated the possibility of biased librarians “weeding” materials they simply did not like in favor of a vox populi, vox dei approach which seems philosophically appropriate for a public institution. Obviously, my findings would not apply to academic libraries, law or medical libraries, etc; however, those are not generally in danger of being vandalized by self-appointed guardians of morality. It should also be obvious that my findings would be of no help in any of the jurisdictions where politicians have decided that their prejudices trump the judgment of actual library professionals. It might, however, provide some leverage for those wishing to challenge the decisions of a single biased librarian in an otherwise-well-run institution.
