no picture bc I’m at home rn, but I recently started working at the Library in my small town. we’ve been trying to remove the outdated or poorly circulated books and replace them with more recent ones and ones that will circulate better. in the process of doing this my boss found an anti-vax book from 2008 that we got as a donation in the early 2010s (we know bc it says in the computer) and the last time it had been checked out was like 2 months ago and it has some the best circulation of any of our books. even worse, we dont just get a book and put it straight on the shelf. donations are sorted through by volunteers, offered to the library if the volunteers think they’d be good, and then have to be accepted by the director. the previous director added the book to the system personally. a librarian did this. thankfully my boss, the new director, decided it was 1) too old to keep around, 2) too damaged to keep around (fucked up spine), and 3) bullshit, so she put it in the pile of books we are deleting from the system.
In a public library unfortunately it had to be a “better” argument than that. Given the two previous reasons it could be discarded. If people come looking for it you can say without a doubt that it needed to be discarded. However they could try to replace it. Then it becomes a more contentious.
I want to second this - public libraries are still often funded by municipalities, and those municipalities might have political concerns that mean for every book on ‘liberal’ topics, you have to have some Bill O’Reilly psuedo-intellectual hatemag - ethically, this follows Ranganathan’s principle of ‘every reader their book and every book their reader’, and practically - allows public libraries to say 'look! We don’t censor anything - we’ve got four copies of whatever slop ben shapiro wrote, so it makes sense that we’re not gonna censor ‘all boys aren’t blue’
I would say it’s likely the old director who personally allowed the book realized this.
It’s a very loving ethos of neutrality that it’s imperative public libraries work hard to walk.
its harder than that too because you can’t really be neutral, you have to be what the political majority in the area that pays your bills thinks neutral looks like. in our case, thats redneckistan. thankfully most of the ones that would cause issues dont go to the library anyway (although for literacy reasons I’d still rather they did) but if some of the homeschoolers parents decide to raise hell on Facebook it could be bad for us. they are pretty dependent on us though bc ours is the library they have available for their kids but they still could do that if they wanted.
If you ban books that you disagree with, you are a book banner.