IN DEPTH ‘‘
Dr David McMenemy, CILIP Scotland President and Reader in Information Studies in the College of Arts and Humanities at University of Glasgow..
As a profession, we should never seek to be on the side of repression or even the wrong side of history, but equally, if material is legal and a patron wishes to access it, we must consider that request in good faith.
Censorship challenges in public libraries: the past informs the present
Censorship is a direct challenge to intellectual freedom, while Information Professionals are in a position to be guardians to defend those freedoms of thought, access to information and freedom of expression. CILIP Scotland President Dr David McMenemy looks at what we can learn from the past to inform our current decisions and actions.
A PERUSAL of news sites and newspapers over the past few years would certainly con- firm Malley’s hypothesis that when it comes to censorship stories, “there is no issue in librarianship which is more likely to bring libraries on to the pages of the press” (Malley, 1990, p.1). With such stakes at play it can often seem that each professional crisis of the moment is existential and necessitates new ways of thinking and presents hitherto unseen challenges that librarians have never faced before.
However, when it comes to censorship challenges in libraries there is rarely anything we have not seen before as a profession, and it is important that we are aware of our body of knowledge and previous historical experiences in this area to provide the necessary steel to deal with modern iterations of it with confidence. Ultimately, we are not alone in these challenges, and the collective support of our current colleagues, allied with engagement with the wisdom and experience of those who came before us, are both important in cementing our strength for any challenges that may come.
Censorship and libraries Writing in 1972 in his seminal work Censorship in Britain, noted Irish barrister Paul O’Higgins
18 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
observed that there, “is a curious coyness in Britain about the whole subject of censorship… indeed, very many deny that censorship exists in the country at all” (O’Higgins, 1972, p.11). Sensing what he also believed to be a reticence in Britain to even define the concept of censorship properly, O’Higgins defines it as: “The process whereby restrictions are imposed upon the collection, dissemination and exchange of information, opinions, and ideas” (O’Higgins, 1972, p.11). This is a suitable definition for our endeavours in librarianship, focusing as it does on three of the key activities libraries exist for: collection, dissemination, and exchange. Thompson’s study of censorship in British public libraries covers the period between 1900 and 1974, but he tells us that “censorship in public libraries is as old as the public library movement itself” (Thompson, 1975, p.1). Thompson provides us with an overview of censorship in public libraries in the UK chronologically from 1900-1939, and then decade by decade until 1974. Several examples can be selected from his work to give a flavour of just how censorship in public libraries has manifested in our country. In 1910 the novel Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells, a story about an emancipated young woman dur- ing the time of the Suffragettes, was withdrawn from circulation by the Beverley Public Library. In 1913 Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was banned in
Autumn 2025
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