Information literacy and intellectual freedom

In my recent trawls of blogs I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly.  I have been amazed at the effort and intellectual thought that have gone into some posts, annoyed at the rubbish and seriously disturbed by what is disseminated purporting to be 'fact' or 'truth'.

I don’t just mean the bibble-babble minutiae of people who have to share every time they sneeze (that can be either interesting or annoying depending on the content and my mood) but rather the deliberate propagation of well known untruths and harmful and malicious statements.

And yet, for some, it really is all a matter of perception.  It made me think about the importance of giving people the ability to discern the gold from the dross, but also about the nature of intellectual freedom and the role of libraries and librarians.

As Kathryn Greenhill, in her post on libraries and vaccination both community issues, so eloquently says:

A library’s role is not to suppress ideas – not matter how dangerous or loony I may believe those ideas to be, nor how wrong I think they are.

She notes some of her personal beliefs and observes that:

[w]hen I go to work as a librarian, those beliefs come with me – however a key part of my job is providing access to ideas that are in direct conflict to what I believe is right for myself and for my society.
A library’s role is to provide access to information and connect people to that information. We seek to provide a balanced and varied collection, but not to judge the information we are providing, nor the people who are seeking it.

She makes the important point that it is not about fence-sitting but rather about:

doing something very serious and vitally important for our society and its freedom. I am protecting my own and my children’s right to think for ourselves. I am creating a society that trusts its citizens to think critically and make their own decisions with no source of information forbidden.

Kathryn clearly defines her role as separate from that of author judge or jury:

As a librarian I provide the information, but I do not author it. It is not my message, even if I work my hardest to build a structure where as many people can easily and immediately access that message and then make up their own minds … If I claim the right to stop your ideas from being heard, then I am putting my own right to be heard at risk.
I am not arguing that ideas should be heard without rebuttal, argument, critical thought or judgment. I am arguing that they should be heard and that libraries exist as a vital institution to protect the right for that to happen.

bookgrrl in her post Those schoolgirl days Of telling tales, and biting nails, are gone makes a seemingly light hearted observation about a report of a student operating an ‘illicit’ library of banned books from their locker and notes:

The brilliant thing about this is the students are wanting to read them BECAUSE they’re banned- so cool!

bookgrrl recounts her own experience of censorship at school, the brave stance her teacher took against it,  and her subsequent epiphany and gratitude:

I think since that moment I realised the importance of information and its power. So wherever you are Miss Marks, thank you for doing that.

Flexinhib's post No-filter on her blog Ruminations picks up the issue of Internet censorship.   As she says:

The plan is to block material deemed unsuitable for children, and for adults. This is wrong on so many levels. For one thing, filters are never going to be 100% effective, and for another, who is going to decide what is unsuitable for adults? I didn’t realise we were living in a dictatorship!

I join Flexinib in wondering:

what librarians and teachers could be doing to help parents understand The Internet, and to help children be safer online.

Flexinib quotes Tama Leaver from his post on stopping Internet censorship in Australia talking about his view as a parent regarding his son's future interaction with the Internet:

I want his early experiences of the internet to be ones with his parents.  We’ll help him make informed choices about what to see, and we’ll help him learn the critical skills to evaluate and understand the information out there – good and bad.  We won’t try and tell him everything he needs to know is inside this safe, filtered, contained black box or walled off Internet, because if we start down that path where would it really end?

Will Richardson, in his post it's the parents fault, not makes the seemingly revolutionary suggestion that:

If you want kids to be educated about these tools and environments, then maybe we should, um, educate them ...If we start talking about this stuff in first grade (in age appropriate ways), AND we involved parents in the process by being transparent about our intentions and our outcomes, I’m pretty sure that we could minimize the number of kids who get pulled into the principal’s office when they behave badly on their Facebook pages.

And so I think that is why I need to be involved with all of these new (to me at least) technologies, and not just stick to email.  I need to know what is going on, what I am talking about, if I am to teach, guide, facilitate, help others to navigate the Internet, to be information literate in a digital age.