66th IFLA Council and General Conference Jerusalem,
Israel
August 13 – August 18, 1999
IFLA/FAIFE/CLM Paper Session: Access to Information: Challenges to Equitable and Universal Access
Jerusalem, Israel, Tuesday 15 August 2000
The way of the wowser:
censorship as a barrier to access to information
Alex Byrne
Alex Byrne is the immediate past Chair of the Standing Committee on University and General Research Libraries of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA - http://www.ifla.org) and immediate Past President of the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL – http://www.anu.edu.au/caul). He chairs the IFLA Committee on Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression and is the University Librarian at the University of Technology, Sydney where he can be contacted on Tel +61 2 9514 3332, Fax +61 2 9514 3331, alex.byrne@uts.edu.au. This paper was presented in a revised form at the inaugural Markets Forum at the UTS University Library on 7 September 2000 (see http://www.lib.uts.edu.au).
Abstract
A joint session of IFLA/FAIFE and CLM explores challenges to equitable and universal access to information including illiteracy, censorship, copyright and technology. This paper examines the dimensions of censorship identifying direct censorship occurs when limitations on the right to freedom of opinion, expression and exchange of information and ideas are deliberately imposed on a person, group or community. Indirect censorship occurs when those rights are limited as a consequence of an action with another primary aim. Direct censorship can be legal (de jure) or imposed outside the law (de facto).
Background
In this joint session with the Committee on Copyright and Legal Matters (CLM), we are exploring some of the arenas in which the concerns of IFLA/FAIFE and CLM impinge on each other. The Conference Program identifies a few: illiteracy, censorship, copyright, technology. But there are potentially many others as we negotiate the issues of principle and law which underpin our professional practice in libraries and information services.
But first, a little background for those who may be unaware of the role of IFLA/FAIFE within IFLA. The Committee on Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (IFLA/FAIFE) was established at the Copenhagen Council meeting in August 1997. The Committee, which has representatives from countries across the globe, is fortunate to be ably supported by the IFLA/FAIFE Office in Copenhagen which was made possible by generosity of the Danish library community. The Committee’s mandate is drawn from Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its members have produced a number of country reports which have been published on the IFLA/FAIFE website. The IFLA/FAIFE Office has developed an effective presence for IFLA in the international promotion of intellectual freedom. Its staff members have established contact with a wide range of international bodies including the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX), Unesco, Council of Europe, ALA, Article19, Index on Censorship and the Norwegian Forum for Freedom of Expression. Office and Committee members have attended and presented at a number of conferences and written many articles.
Setting the scene
The motivation of the censor can be shown from a recent personal experience. My son Ben is seventeen. He has long wanted to see the film of A Clockwork Orange, which was loosely based on Anthony Burgess’s novel. He is intrigued by the concepts of crime and punishment which it explores and, of course, by its notoriety. As you may know, it ran for some years as a midnight show at one of the George Street cinemas near here but he cannot legally see it as it is rated "R18+". He cannot see it even though I, as his parent and legal guardian, am very happy for him to see it. Nor can he see it at home on video, as the censors have not permitted its circulation on video in Australia. ‘Why is it still banned?’ you might ask. I can’t imagine as we can daily see more violent scenes on broadcast television than it includes. It was probably classified "R18+" because of the mind-games it plays and its challenge to authority and is probably still so classified because nobody has bothered to challenge the classification in recent years.
But that is not really the point. The point is that Ben cannot see what he wants to see, which is a denial of his human rights. Even if we should accept that his freedom may need to be somewhat circumscribed for his protection as a minor, as a duty of care, he cannot see what he wants to see even when the person charged with the responsibility for his care judges him capable of dealing with its contents.
That is the motivation of the censor: to control what others may see, read, think and say. It is seldom themselves, but always others who must be protected and controlled. The censor seeks to control others’ ways of thinking and understanding in order to maintain power or to impose a worldview, normally ideological or religious, on other individuals and peoples.
In Australia, we call that wowserism. The wowser is a killjoy, one who wishes to spoil the pleasure of others especially in entertainment, alcohol and sex. It includes temperance advocates and homophobes. The way of the wowser is to seek to control the lives of others: in our domain, to bar access to information which the censor finds objectionable.
Censorship may be direct or indirect. Direct censorship occurs when limitations on the right to freedom of opinion, expression and exchange of information and ideas are deliberately imposed on a person, group or community. Indirect censorship on the other hand occurs when those rights are limited as a consequence of an action with another primary aim. Direct censorship can be legal (de jure) or imposed outside the law (de facto). Indirect censorship might be called ‘collateral damage’ resulting from war, economic or other influences. Of course, the categories interact and overlap.
Legal censorship
Implemented through national, regional or local laws and regulations, legal censorship is imposed by a legally constituted government, though the government may not necessarily be democratic. That is not to say that democratic governments will not impose censorship, they can and do. However, a democratic government is more likely to do so with the consent of, or in response to pressure from, those who elect it. Undemocratic governments generally do so to promote their ideological beliefs or to protect their hold on power and other interests.
The most obvious way of effecting censorship is through a system of classification and restriction such as that used in Australia, which ranges from <G> General Exhibition, through <PG> Parental Guidance, to <R> Restricted and the cute <RC> Refused Classification. We don’t ban publications, films, websites – we only refuse them classification! Such systems can be imposed via explicit censorship legislation or, more covertly, through other legislation such as acts regulating education, telecommunications or libraries. An example of the latter kind is the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999 which imposes Internet censorship in Australia and which I, as a university librarian, must implement in my university library.
Systems of classification and restriction are usually intended to protect the vulnerable, especially children and irresponsible adults – but never the authors of the law. Incidentally, a former senior censor in Australia is now making erotic videos, in an obvious example of competency based training! In justifying the regulations, censors and their political masters generally point to community standards and the good of the community. The primary focus tends to be on the mass market media including broadcast and cable television, films and videos, videogames, the Internet but also books. Regulations emphasise pornography, obscenity, violence, unusual sex and, particularly in recent times, paedophilia.
A recent example was the aborted attempt by UK police in October 1997 to prosecute the University of Central England in Birmingham for holding and obscene publication, to wit the Jonathan Cape book on the oeuvre of the great, if confronting, British photographer Robert Mapplethorpe . A student at the University took photographs of illustrations in the book and dropped the film off for developing at a pharmacy. The shopkeeper decided the photographs were obscene, informed the police, who demanded the book from the University and laid an information with the Office of Criminal Prosecutions. The matter was subsequently dropped.
The proponents of such systems generally ignore the fact that ‘community standards’ are time and place contingent, that they change over time and from place to place. They also ignore the pluralism which is such a marked feature of modern communities, the tremendous diversity of communities which come together to form a nation. Such systems of regulation become vulnerable to pressure groups with particular agendas so that the laws are twisted to accommodate the concerns of the pressure groups.
Legal systems of censorship often extend to issues of morality and religion, including the imposition of the views of people with particular religious beliefs and concerns with blasphemy, irreligious utterance and unacceptable portrayal of their beliefs. The original fatwah imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie following the publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses, was an example of such legal censorship in that it was imposed under the sharia law which prevailed in Iran.
In other places at other times, censorship is imposed through legal means for political and ideological reasons such as the ban on counter revolutionary materials in communist countries, which survives in Cuba, and on counter Falangist materials in Franco’s Spain. In fact, in some nations and periods, libraries have had an explicit ideological role as, for instance, in the USSR:
Soviet libraries give multifaceted aid to the Communist Party and the government in solving political, economic, scientific, and cultural problems, and they facilitate the mobilization of the working masses in carrying out these solutions. Since they are generally accessible sources of knowledge and a major base for self-education, Soviet libraries actively guide reading for communist education and the raising of the cultural level of the masses. … The basic characteristics of Soviet popular libraries are the selection and promotion among a broad range of readers of literature that facilitates the mastery of Marxist-Leninist theory and political, occupational, and general educational knowledge; activity oriented toward all groups of readers; and use of the most active and effective methods for propaganda of books and guidance of reading.
Furthering such policies, Rudolf Malek, the very great Czech librarian, reported with pride on how the libraries of Communist Czechoslovakia had expunged inappropriate materials and replaced them with suitable socialist materials.
Censorship may assume a politico-religious flavour through bans on materials relating to religious or quasi-religious bodies which authorities suspect to have political aims: examples include the current actions against Falun Gong in China and against Scientology in Korea.
‘National security’ is an old favourite among censors. It can be used to limit access to information on an astonishing range of topics. Many countries have laws which are used to prevent the informed from divulging and the curious from discovering information which can be brought under the very wide umbrella of national security. For example, researchers on the tragic experience of the Gulag in the USSR are told that they may not access relevant archives for reasons of ‘national security’, because some of the prisoners were working on such projects as the White Canal or the Dead Railway which had, or might have had, military significance. The families of those who died working on those projects under horrendous conditions, as described in One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, cannot learn their fate for such bureaucratic reasons. In Malaysia, the old British colonial Prevention of Terrorism Act which is still in force, has been used over the last couple of years to limit access to information about current political matters. The draconian UK Official Secrets Act is frequently used to limit information as it was, spectacularly and eventually unsuccessfully, in trying to proscribe Peter Wright’s Spycatcher . Subversion is often the claimed danger, as in the case of Mordechai Vanunu, a former Melbournian nuclear scientist, who confirmed that Israel had nuclear weapons as had been long suspected. He was kidnapped by the Mossad in Rome and is still in jail in Israel.
Less obvious, but of increasing importance, the use of ‘commercial in confidence’ to limit access to information. Contract law is employed to evade scrutiny. This is particularly serious when matters which should be open to public scrutiny are hidden. The last decade of privatisation of public instrumentalities in many countries including Australia has seen many activities which were formerly subject to public accountability masked through commercial in confidence provisions which prevent even the Auditor-General of the jurisdiction from inquiring into the use of public, or previously public, assets – the outsourcing of information technology services by the Australian Federal Government is one of many cases.
A related area is the legal use of trade regulations to limit the export or import of information to or from particular nations. Materials in Chinese characters could not be imported into Indonesia, for example, under the rule of President Suharto. Sometimes trade regulations extend to embargoes on the trade in particular classes of goods, such as the US limitations on the trade in cryptographic systems information, and/or to particular countries, illustrated by the long standing Burton-Helms Act which imposed a wide ranging economic blockade on Cuba, impeding the export of publications among other US products.
I had thought that Australian politicians must be the world leaders in the use of defamation law to silence critics and opponents. But a visit to Russia last year showed that Russian politicians are fast learners: Moscow mayor Lyushkov has reportedly initiated over forty successful actions for defamation. Fortunately, in Australia the High Court’s decision in the Theophanos Case has guaranteed a limited right of free speech on political matters, although it still falls far short of the provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.
Many of these laws were, of course, enacted for good reasons of public policy – to protect the nation, commercial activity, personal reputation – but have been misused to limit freedom of expression and access to information.
Of as much concern are the well intentioned laws which are deliberately designed to limit freedom of expression in the interest of preventing the expression of views which vilify or demean others, incite racial hatred or stimulate extremist groups. Their intended purposes of preventing such outrages as the murder of immigrants by skinheads in Germany or the marginalisation of minorities are clearly desirable. Regrettably, this need has been demonstrated this week in the response of some to the selection of Senator Joseph Lieberman as the Democratic candidate for the US Vice Presidency. His selection sparked "a barrage of anti-Semitic comments in online chat rooms and on Internet message boards … AOL officials … said they were prepared to suspend or cancel accounts of those found to have violated the service’s rules against hate speech, vulgar language or harassment". However, the response of AOL indicates the serious danger posed by such well meant restrictions: that they will promote conformity of thought which is inimical to intellectual freedom. Amazon.com, for instance, has recently been constrained to prevent the purchase of Hitler’s Mein Kampf from addresses in Germany. France, similarly, has attempted to apply its penal code which outlaws the trivialisation or denial of the Holocaust to prevent the sale of Nazi memorabilia via the Internet to French customers. While understanding and respecting the sensitivities in France and Germany, it must be asked whether banning such materials really reduces their attraction or whether confronting and debating the very serious issues of fascism and xenophobia would be more effective.
In similar vein is the now common privacy legislation, laws and regulations which are intended to protect the personal information and private interests of individual citizens. The capacity of databanks to be ‘mined’ to construct profiles of personal buying habits and activities has caused many to be concerned and lead to very desirable legislation. But it too has its dangers as in some cases it can prevent access to data which would assist research in such fields as epidemiology. More seriously, such laws can also be misused as in Russia, again, they are used to prevent access to documentation on the Gulag – on the grounds that files relate to individual prisoners and/or guards – thus limiting study, understanding and commemoration of its horrors.
Well applied, the laws mentioned above could be used to encourage discourse while proscribing incitement to violence and seeking balanced respect for diverse opinions. Ironically, the Holocaust denier David Irving tried to use the defamation law in the UK earlier this year to prosecute a critic, the American historian Deborah Lipstadt but was unsuccessful.
Legal censorship and libraries
What do all these laws and their effect have to do with libraries?
Some stop us acquiring books, by restricting importation, such a Mein Kampf to Germany or Chinese materials to Indonesia. Others prevent us from making certain types of information available to some or all of our clients. For example, UTS and I as University Librarian could be prosecuted if we made proscribed Internet content accessible to minors – which legally includes some of our commencing students as well as some young people who come in from the street. Some stop work being published, such as the MI5 attempt to prevent the publication of Spycatcher in the UK and Australia or the newspapers and magazines formerly banned in Indonesia and those currently banned by religious courts in Iran. Their common thread is that they prevent researchers, students, authors and the general public from researching topics and locating ideas and information and librarians from assisting them.
De facto censorship
Implemented through quasi-legal, extra-legal or illegal means, de facto censorship can have effects just as serious as legal censorship. The means can include sporadic and arbitrary seizure of materials, arrest of individuals or groups, intimidation, harassment and even murder. Totally unrelated laws such tax laws may be used to intimidate and sometimes close printers and publishers. Health and safety regulations may be used to prevent assembly in halls. Vigilante groups can harass and occasionally attack those with whom they, or their masters, disagree.
Most commonplace in Western countries is community pressure exerted by lobby groups, influential individuals and political parties. In regard to libraries, their aim is generally to prevent the holding of materials they judge to be unacceptable but sometimes it is to ensure that their opinions will be featured. The 1997 events in the south of France were a particularly extreme example: Front National victories in local government elections lead to demands that public libraries dispense with so called left wing publications and replace them with those of the right. The eventual result was that none of the librarians still work in those libraries.
More frequent is the application of pressure on moral and religious grounds by segments of the population, or those who claim to be speaking for them, as in the Gerry Falwell lead ‘Moral Majority’ campaigns in the United States a decade ago. A very recent example is the response to the publication of the latest Harry Potter children’s book: in both the US and New Zealand Christian groups called for its exclusion from school and public libraries on the grounds that it was harmful to children and anti-Christian because of its depiction of magic. Children’s and teacher librarians face such pressures regularly as the files of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom testify. The spread of evangelist and fundamentalist Christian, Jewish and Islamic sects through many nations has increased the frequency of such pressures. While we must defend the open expression of their views, whatever our personal opinion of them, we must resolutely oppose their illiberal negation of respect and tolerance for the opinions and ideas of others and their desire, in too many countries, to dominate not only public discourse but the very lives of others.
Political and ideological views can also drive de facto restrictions on freedom of speech as in the constraints imposed on Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma/Myanmar by the State Law and Order Revolutionary Council (SLORC) which deposed her popularly elected government. An earlier example was the view expressed by some university librarians in the USA during the Cold War that they should not hold the subversive works of Marx and Lenin – while colleagues responded that there was a need ‘to know your enemy’.
The fatwah imposed on Salman Rushdie was imposed within the theocratic sharia laws within Iran which could be seen to be legal, as was suggested earlier. However, its extension to other places including Britain, Italy and Norway was certainly illegal, at least, and politico-religious terrorism in its effect.
Despite the national security laws mentioned earlier which are used to legally muzzle opposition to the state in many countries, some nonetheless resort to extra-legal means under the pretext of ‘national security’. Examples include the intimidation of a member of the IFLA/FAIFE Committee in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe earlier this year and the arrest of Song Yongyi in China late last year.
In like fashion, commercial pressures are applied to silence internal and external critics. A recent example was the reversal of the decision to publish a Paul Theroux article on Hong Kong in Playboy, apparently because of concerns that Playboy Corporation’s lucrative and burgeoning trade in Bunny-branded condoms and sex aids within China might be put at risk by its publication. The agreement of Amazon.com to prevent the purchase of Hitler’s Mein Kampf from addresses in Germany even though its operations are located outside German jurisdiction was doubtless encouraged by a concern that its broader business in Germany might have suffered if it had defied German authorities.
Of course, many de facto abrogations of intellectual freedom are ad hoc and eclectic, resulting from the actions of individual customs officers, police or other officials to forbid the entry, exit or availability of certain materials or and the entry or exit of some individuals. Threats, bluster and intimidation are regularly used by those in power to silence critics. It is often not necessary to use the laws of defamation, racial vilification, privacy and so on, in many cases it is enough to threaten to use them.
‘Professional’ and self censorship
Closer to home, and perhaps more serious for being closer, is the phenomenon of censorship imposed by librarians for well intentioned professional reasons. The classic example has been the banning of the Enid Blyton books, and especially the Noddy books, from school and public library shelves in Scandinavia, Australia and many other countries during the 1960s and 1970s, and to this day in some libraries. They were removed from the shelves because academics and librarians judged that the vocabularies used in them were too limited, the stories too hackneyed and repetitive. The observations that they were loved by many children, that they encouraged children to read and that no child remained fixated on them failed to stop such well meant actions. Unfortunately, the previously mentioned current response by some to the Harry Potter books is reminiscent that era – ignoring the obvious that any writing that encourages children to persist in reading books of 700 pages must have a lot going for it!
Another aspect of professional behaviour is prudence, playing safe and sometimes exceeding the law to avoid trouble. The response of some Australian universities to the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act is a case in point. Some universities have responded to this legislation by introducing wide ranging filtering of Internet access, justifying their measures by reference to the Act and by claims that the cost of receipt of pornographic images is an inappropriate charge against university funds, especially those derived from the public purse. Little concern for intellectual or academic freedom is evident in the statements about such measures. In fact, the representative of one Australian university’s information technology department said that they would permit academic staff to access proscribed sites on request but would record their names.
Such concerns lead to the pernicious practice of self censorship in which we restrict ourselves and others through fear, intimidation, self advancement, a desire to avoid giving offence or a wish to be accepted, to be ‘one of the club’. Self censorship can affect all. The author David Caute, for example, had to approach twenty-five publishers before finding one brave enough to publish his satire Fatima’s scarf, evidently because they feared another Salman Rushdie affair. During that campaign of intimidation, many booksellers refused to stock The Satanic Verses because they feared attack from Islamic elements. Librarians too can be frightened by loud and influential elements within their communities to restrict or remove titles.
Indirect censorship
Turning to indirect censorship, a variety of ways can be identified through which freedom of expression and access to information may be inhibited as a result of actions with another primary aim.
Economic factors pose a major challenge for most developing countries and many others. A marine science library I visited at Universitas Pattimura in Ambon, Eastern Indonesia, in 1991 had not bought a journal for seven years at that time – and was most unlikely to have done so from then until its destruction in the sectarian violence of 1999.
But even in relatively wealthy nations, there can be economic pressures due to underfunding. This often stems from differing priorities such as a local government emphasis on sanitation and roads over libraries or university choices between information resources and acceptable teaching spaces. It can also result from confused responsibilities, as in Israel where a dispute over responsibilities between the national Ministry of Culture and local government authorities has led to a marked decline in the resources available in public libraries.
Geographic factors play their part in many regions. Large distances, isolated villages, small populations conspire to prevent general access to information. The villages of India and the 13,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago present striking difficulties.
While it has in many ways been a boon, offering the opportunity for mass access to information and general freedom of expression, technology introduces its attendant challenges. From the need for reliable infrastructure (including reliable clean power supplies), to the provision of up to date, available technologies and the skills to use them, technological innovation can tantalise with its promises. Fearing technological push, in which we see vaunted technological ‘solutions’ seeking problems to solve, we need to ‘ride the tiger’ of new technologies. We need to maintain currency with hardware and software while still being able to read old formats. The challenges of archiving and preserving and reaccessing have been with us for many years and have included such technologies as Perkins-Elmer card readers, microcards, 16 mm films and vinyl disks – all once popular formats for which the hardware is now virtually extinct. Internet preservation presents the latest challenge. It is being addressed by such as the endeavours to establish deposit collections of digital publications in Portugal and the National Library of Australia’s attempt to "catch the rainbow" through archiving Australian content on the World Wide Web. These are the latest but will certainly not be the last preservation challenges we will need to address if we are to maintain access to valuable information for generations to come.
In developing countries, economic and geographic factors conspire with technology to create the growing ‘digital divide’ between those who can adopt and maintain the new technologies, if with some difficulty, and those who have little or no chance of embracing them. That digital divide, the growing distance between the information rich and the information poor, must be a major concern for all who seek a fair world. At its recent Okinawa meeting, the GO8 industrialised nations committed themselves to addressing the digital divide: IFLA is seizing that opportunity to attempt to improve information access globally.
The dominance of European languages, and English in particular, for international discourse assists communication for many but at the same time both limits access to information and sacrifices some of the world’s shared cultural heritage. Although the number of Internet users in languages other than English is increasing rapidly, the new users are mostly users of European languages. The latest figures show 172.3 m (51.3%) English native speakers and 163.7 m (48.7%) non English, of which 100.6 m (30.0%) are native speakers of European languages other than English. The latest projections for 2003 are 230 m English, 235 m European other than English, and 250 m Asian (ie roughly 30% each). About 80% of hosts and 80% of domains are in English but the non English proportion is growing rapidly, again principally in European languages, following the growth in non English users.
The big losers are the indigenous peoples. Many of their languages are disappearing and the capacity to communicate the richness of their thoughts, dreams and stories is disappearing. While the Internet offers a powerful means of creating virtual communities, which can unite and render more viable previously scattered minorities, many indigenous languages are not written and hence difficult to use via the Internet. Audio and visual streaming and archiving facilities may assist the preservation and, occasionally, re-emergence of disappearing languages and cultures. It has already provided a means for indigenous peoples to assert their cultures, arts and concerns.
While literacy is improving in many countries, it is still too low in too many. In discussing access to information we need to speak of literacies, including a range of skills which are important for communication. Without concerted efforts to improve literacies, worldwide free access to information and freedom of expression will be unattainable.
Many of these factors contribute to social and cultural marginalisation, which is particularly the lot of indigenous peoples throughout the world. A commitment to intellectual freedom means a commitment to hearing the voices of all.
However, powerful forces are aligned against free access to information and freedom of expression. I fear that we are losing the principle of balance between public and private interests which has been the foundation of copyright law since the Statute of Anne was promulgated 300 years ago. In discussing intellectual property, the emphasis is now on ‘property’ with powerful forces in favour of longer (if not infinite) terms of copyright restriction, and opposing fair dealing and the traditional exemptions for education, library use and so on. It is clear that these pressures are driven by purely commercial interests, such as the copyright ownership of Mickey Mouse, not a concern for intellectual freedom, or even intellect.
An especially pernicious method of circumventing the public domain has become more prevalent: licensing. But, it gets worse. In many cases, our own users will only be able to access those electronic resources while we continue to subscribe. With printed materials, we had them till they crumbled. With licenced materials only while we pay. While some suppliers have attempted to respond by agreeing to perpetual access to those portions to which we have subscribed, the reality is that it will be unlikely that perpetual access will mean anything after a few generations of hardware and software. Even if it did, there is no guarantee that the supplier will still be in business or that its successor companies could be held legally responsible ‘in perpetuity’. This argument demands a concerted approach to the archiving of electronic publications through public institutions to safeguard access to information for the future. In other words we need a legal deposit system, coupled with means of archiving and accessing the publications for ever. Making intellectual property available only under a limited license has become a way of seeking to prevent it from ever getting into the public domain through such devices as continual renewal of copyright and ensuring that only the publisher ever owns a copy.
Other factors which inhibit intellectual freedom include the concentration of commercial power and market distortions particularly in information or ‘content’ areas. News Corporation/Fox/HarperCollins media conglomerate is a prime example of market dominance with newspapers promoting television promoting films which promote books which are discussed on talk shows which promote newspapers…. While they may encourage the discussion of many topics, there is a grave danger that some topics will be deemed uninteresting or unacceptable. The canning of the Paul Theroux article mentioned above illustrates the risk.
Market distortions are another result of the over emphasis on the property aspect of intellectual property. A work becomes prized for its market value rather than its intellectual or cultural importance.
The destruction wrought through insurrection, war and invasion also destroys cultural and intellectual riches and prevents communication between peoples. The militia rampage in East Timor at this time last year tragically destroyed many lives and caused enormous suffering but also razed all the libraries and archives: Universitas Timor Timur, the Polytechnic, as well as school and public libraries. The new nation of Timor Lorosae will need to construct a new national network of libraries to assist in building the nation, reclaiming their culture (which was severely disrupted during the 25 years of Indonesian occupation) and developing the economy. Kosovo suffered similarly as has been investigated by the IFLA IFLA/FAIFE Office
Libraries have also benefited from war, invasion and looting. As long ago as 1836, in giving evidence to the Select Committee on the British Museum, Panizzi "… derided the Russians for building their library at St Petersburg from the Polish libraries they had carried off, and the French for with-holding still books taken from Italy and elsewhere by the armies of Napoleon. Better far to be without a national library, than to increase it by such means." In doing so, they have, to a degree become complicit in the dismembering of cultural heritage. Some, particularly in Germany and Russia, have begun programs to restore looted library treasures.
Arguments for censorship among librarians
As professionals, librarians take their responsibilities very seriously. We seek to meet the needs of our clients, preserve knowledge for posterity and to promote information and ideas. But balancing these responsibilities can lead to many ethical dilemmas, including:
All are issues with which we must engage but the focus should be on libraries and on the wealth and variety, the richness, of information, knowledge and wisdom that they contain or should contain and how to make it available.
We live in a time in which the rate of change is unprecedented. The nineteenth century saw tremendous innovations in technology, communications and public health that changed our lives during the twentieth century. The "Information Revolution" is accelerating the rate of change as it pushes us into the ‘Knowledge Economy’, into the emerging world economy in which the greatest asset is intellectual capital, the knowledge which gives one organisation or one nation, or a partnership of organisations or nations, an advantage over others.
One benefit of the new information and communication technologies which is particularly notable is the improved access to information to facilitate both improved governmental, commercial and professional services and more discerning citizens and clients, to promote ‘consumer power’ and the civil society. These developments have profound implications for the world’s information services: there is no book which should not be collected, no website which should not be accessed. Libraries must of course select materials for relevance and quality; they must seek to develop balanced collections in areas of interest, applying available funding to represent all relevant views as well as possible. But libraries must not colour their selection by views about the ‘acceptability’, ‘offensiveness’, political or ideological slant of the materials they collect. This will, in all nations at some times, bring the library into conflict with pressure groups and, occasionally, authorities: their actions and arguments must be resisted in order to create collections and services which can truly support learning and scholarship.
In our professional practice, librarians must exemplify intellectual freedom, articulate its value and promote it to the community. It is not for librarians to hide their resources away as dubious works might once have been hidden in the librarian’s office with the catalogue card "Sex – see Librarian". Librarians should present the resources without bias, encouraging critical inquiry and the development of an informed and vibrant civil society.
Thomas Jefferson, the great American leader who founded the Library of Congress, was a slave owner. That was not unusual 200years ago despite the publication of Les droits de l’homme which so influenced the American Revolution. Although slavery still persists as a hidden and shameful practice, it is unacceptable in international law and to most people today. Let us work to make censorship similarly unacceptable and shameful!
Notes and References
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