Libraries as Battlegrounds: Defending Access to Information in a Polarized World
Monday, September 11, 2023 at 1- 2pm ET
What’s at stake when libraries and librarians become targets for censorship? As institutions whose mandates often include the furthering of democracy and prioritizing equal access, libraries are becoming critical battlegrounds between disparate forces, facing pressures to restrict collections, events, even access to our public spaces. What happens to librarianship as a profession when its practitioners are forced to choose between resisting and become targets or surrender and change mandates etc?
Tracie D. Hall, Executive Director of the American Library Association, and one of Time magazine’s 2023 “100 Most Influential People in the World,” speaks with the City Librarian of Toronto, Vickery Bowles, about the vital role libraries play as defenders of free thought, and the increasing responsibility of libraries to protect everyone’s access to information and ideas, now more than ever.
Who decides what books we can read or what opinions are the right ones? Who gets to prescribe events we can attend? And what are the implications for us all when libraries come under attack?