Truth, justice, transparency, and the OPAC
Perhaps this is a dangerous topic. Nevertheless . . .
I am naive. I’ll admit it.
In a very long career, I can count the number book challenges I’ve had on one hand. And my OPAC has been online for as long as I can remember.
So I was surprised to receive a couple of emails recently requesting advice. (I find myself a kind of Dear Abbey for TLs these days, something the secret yenta in me adores, but that is another story completely.)
Anyway, the emails express librarians’ concerns about the transparency of their OPACS (that’s online public access catalogs, for our nonlibrarian friends).
Our online catalogs are open for public browsing and searching, a beautiful convenience, a lovely transparency.
They are also open to public scrutiny. And they provide easy fodder for those looking to challenge collections and limit what our students can read.
This led one library coordinator to write:
Can an individual who does not have a student in a specific building (or perhaps no students in the school system at all) still challenge a book’s selection or omission from that building’s collection? Does it matter if that individual is a community member or not?
We have the challenge policies, and we have a selection policy, so we can
follow that procedures set up if this situation is brought up by parents
or students or other members of the school community. I am not sure if we
need to, or should, do so for any other public person.
Of course, I told her to write to those who know the most, the folks at ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom and also to write to some of my smartest colleagues for whom this is an area of expertise.
But I wonder how prevalent these OPAC search challenges are.
Do many our colleagues in the trenches now fear the lovely transparency the Web now makes possible for library users? That would be a shame.
I know about the security features our new tools provide, but I wonder what impact this new transparency will pose for other areas of our 2.0 work and how we might prepare ourselves for the potential for negative backlash.
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