Censorship

It is relevant to the research process to understand something about censorship in libraries and how the debate has changed in the electronic age. The American Library Association (ALA) maintains a vigorous program to defend libraries' rights to provide access to materials representing all points of view. A Library Bill of Rights was first adopted by ALA in 1939; the present ALA policy statement, dating from 1948, serves as a librarian's interpretational guide to the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Most recently, ALA has extended its position on censorship to include information accessed over the Internet. "Freedom of expression is an unalienable human right and the foundation of self-government. Freedom of expression encompasses the freedom of speech and the corollary right to receive information." These rights, as outlined in ALA's guidelines, extend to adults and to children. Libraries and librarians exist to facilitate the exercise of these rights by selecting, providing access to, and preserving information, regardless of the technology.

Information retrieved from the Internet has not gone through an evaluation by librarians. When libraries begin to offer broad Internet access, they open the door to access to all sorts of information that would otherwise never appear on a library's shelves. However, for most librarians the idea of censorship is abhorrent. In lieu of censorship, libraries have taken a few precautions in providing broad Internet access to users. Among the most common precautions are having Internet access computers in a public area of the library and assisting users in finding appropriate resources to meet their information needs.

Some information you access via the Web may be objectionable to you. It is left to each user to determine what is appropriate for viewing. To learn more about censorship and the Internet, and more general censorship issues, the following resources are available:

American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom
American Library Association Code of Ethics
American Library Association Library Bill of Rights
Access to Electronic Information, Services, and Networks: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights