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.

Information literacy and online identity

Reading, thinking and learning about information literacy, Library 2.0, Web 2.0 and various social networking sites has made me think about the issue of identity, particular the multiple identities we may have online.
Jenica Rogers, in her post on online identity on her blog Attempting Elegance writes about the importance of information professionals having an online identity:

We are responsible for our own development as professionals, and as a profession, and the communities of practice I’ve found online are astonishingly rich and incredibly beneficial.
Our users are also exploring and inhabiting these spaces, building online presence and identity, and how can you serve users you do not understand?  One way to understand them is by going to where they are, and they are online.

She wisely observes that:

Parts of you the person will leak into your online identity, even if you try to stay professional.  And if you try to stay personal, the professional will leak in, too.  Why?  Because we are all whole people, not just pieces of ourselves, and we bleed across boundaries.

Ultimately, as with everything in life, this leads to you needing to make some decisions about your life:

So.  You are a person, and you are a professional. If these two things seem to be incompatible for you in your online life, you have to censor something.  So what do you censor?  Your personal life?  Or your professional one?  The choice you make here is linked to why you present yourself online, and how you want to do that.

For Kate Davis, in her post on the personal-professional divide: moving the line on her blog virtually a librarian, the issue is not about personal and profession, so much as ‘degrees of personal’ and ‘realness'.  She says:

I’ve never had a clear line between my personal and professional lives. It’s not possible to be a workaholic and stop the professional from bleeding across into the personal, at least in terms of time and space … I’ve also always had a very blurry line between personal and professional in online forums, too … I have a clear line in my mind about what gets posted to my private Twitter account, and what gets posted to my public one, but that line is not necessarily a marker between personal and professional – it’s more about degrees of personal (and, I have to say, what I’m willing to have my students read!). I am, essentially, a heart-on-my-sleeve kind of girl. It’s my approach to life. I share stuff. It makes me who I am, both as a person, and as a professional. I share through my private Twitter account the stuff I’d be likely to share with people in person, both personal stuff and professional stuff … until recently, Facebook has been a fairly open forum for me, but I decided to cut back my friends on Facebook to include only those people I actually know and hang out with IRL. … Again, though, the line in the sand with Facebook is not about personal and professional – it’s about the ‘realness’ of my connection with the people I’m linked to there.

Jenica Rogers notes in online identity that for some that realness can be confronting:

We tell our students to be thoughtful about what they put on Facebook, because it can come back to haunt them. … But when a librarian chooses to have an online identity that stretches our boundaries as a profession, or that reveals what our community thinks is “too much” about personal details, there can be fallout.  We’re control freaks.  I mean, have you ever seen a MARC record?  We like things carefully organized and slotted into labeled categories, and the blurriness of online identities can challenge those expectations and desires.

I was told, for example, by another library director, that I would never have a leadership position in an academic library if I continued blogging and sharing so much of my true thoughts about the profession and our daily work, and about my own daily life online. He seemed terribly threatened by the idea that librarians in leadership positions would speak openly about their thoughts; he seemed to feel that it would threaten the power structure, challenge the status quo, and generally leave a leader vulnerable to … something.

That was three years ago.  I’m proud to have proven that director wrong, because I think transparency and communication are the cornerstone of a strong information exchange, and I’m proud to continue contributing to that.  But I did make changes to how I approached my online identity after the conversation because it was clear that the leadership of the profession was not ready for what I wanted to share.
…
If I’d stopped to think about what I was likely to write about, and considered the way the internet is indexed and crawled, I would have realized that I was going to end up writing about and being found by librarians, that that would be a key part of my online identity, and I could have thought more closely about the implications of mixing my messages. But I didn’t, in part out of cluelessness (it was 2003?) and in part out of defiance – I wanted to be all the parts of me, all the time, all at once.  I didn’t want any of these artificial separations between personal and private.  I wanted to be on the vanguard of internet self-expression.

But, honestly, we all need those separations.  They keep us sane.  They keep us healthy.  And in our current professional world, they keep us employed.

Kathryn Greenhill, on her blog Librarians Matter, notes that it is important to First have something to say…

That’s my cardinal rule of blogging, which is what makes this 30 posts in 30 days challenge…well… a challenge. It’s similar to the Twitter365 Challenge, where sometimes I ended up with the oddest photos just to take a photo of something…
A couple of days ago, Sue wondered about blogging about professional issues and the effect on one’s career – the effect of having too much to say and it being taken the wrong way. She kicked off from a couple of posts from the insightful, wise and direct Dorothea Salo who has been concerned about her blog damaging her career as she moves to new responsibilities. Con and bookgrrrl put a different slant on the topic, looking at one’s own perception of having something to say – what made one “worthy” to have a voice in the professional area (conclusion – sensibly- there is not qualifying criteria, just do it).
Kate’s response has been closest to where I am. She has no problem with blogging about professional issues. That’s why she created her blog. She blurs her personal and professional anyhow, but wonders whether she could now start putting more of the personal into her blogging. I’m wondering the same.

So now I am wondering, what online identities have I created, knowingly or unknowingly?  How do they relate to each other?  What sort of an identity do I wish to create, project, and to or for whom?  How well do I need to know myself before I can settle these questions, and how much of this voyage of discovery will occur along the way?  How much can I afford to have in the public domain, how much is helpful for me, and for others?  I'm still thinking about this one.

I am also thinking about just how much time I have spent creating this post, and then how much more time getting it into this format, and working out how to get the links all in, and getting it to save without telling me that the 'form' was not correct, guessing at the problem and attempting to fix it, and whether it is really all worth that much effort?  Email is so much simpler, yet I hate to think of myself as an information literacy Luddite, dinosaur or dunce. 

More work to do I guess, as I am just scratching the surface of my ignorance or information illiteracy.  Let's see how I progress in the coming weeks.