Quote:
Originally Posted by rcentros
What I see are ideologues insisting their way is the only way, despite what their bosses (the people) want.
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"Ideologues" who are doing exactly what they are supposed to do - engage in best-practice professional librarianship according to their parent association's professional standards and guidelines.
All they are doing is providing a broad range of different books to cater to a diverse community. The people defunding them because of bigotry are the book-burners. (I'm not hand-waving about the motivation here - a friend of mine was heavily involved in the effort to save the library in Arkansas.)
Really did NOT think I'd be arguing, here, against people who think that professional librarian standards are a bad thing, and that libraries following them should be suppressed and defunded just because they're unlucky enough to be located within a community of bigots who wouldn't know what a "book" was if it hit them between the eyes.
So no, I don't think the general public should get a fine-grained say in what books should be suppressed by the public library system. Library members can _request_ certain books, absolutely, and have those requests considered by the librarians against their collections policy. But public library suppression?
This is like, I don't know, defunding a public hospital because they follow gold-standard medical care. Or some other public institution with professional standards. I'm struggling to come up with examples because of how unthinkable this would be in my country. Public library funding is considered a given by virtually the entire community, and not put up for public debate constantly. Defunding a public library would be like defunding a public school, or suburban rubbish collection, or something like that.