ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom is 40 years old today

Happy Birthday OIF! I will be teaching a half-day continuing education seminar at Simmons on Intellectual Freedom and I have been digging through their extensive website for primary documentation and remembering just how extensive and excellent it is. Intellectual freedom principles were one of the major things that brought me to librarianship and THE thing responsible for my sticking with it. I am proud of the work the ALA does to support intellectual freedom, though the challenges are still coming far too quickly for my tastes and I worry about ALA’s ability to keep up with IF topics in a digital world that they still don’t seem to quite understand. One of the things I do on Wikipedia is keep the Library Bill of Rights free from soapboxing and point-of-view hectoring. It’s a tougher job than you might think.

3 thoughts on “ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom is 40 years old today

  1. “I am proud of the work the ALA does to support intellectual freedom….”

    Does that include when the OIF specifically targets individuals for exclusion from legally mandated requirements? See http://www.safelibraries.org/unequalaccess.htm I suppose the ALA’s intellectual freedom is more equal than anyone else’s intellectual freedom.

    And purposefully leaving Greg of Shush’s name off an ALA ballot was a masterpiece of election fraud. At least the ALA (SRRT) had the intellectual freedom to explain why it was denying another ALA member’s intellectual freedom. You are proud of that? See http://www.shush.ws/wordpress/?p=245 and the subsequent posts.

    “One of the things I do on Wikipedia is keep the Library Bill of Rights free from soapboxing and point-of-view hecotring. It’s a tougher job than you might think.”

    Was it really “tough” for you to be the person responsible for preventing me from helping to ensure compliance with Wikipedia policy by getting a gang to permanently block me from preventing the ALA’s use of Wikipedia as a professional propaganda tool against Wikipedia’s policy? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LegitimateAndEvenCompelling#Why_my_banning_from_Wikipedia_by_former_ALA_Councilor_is_wrong

    I mean talking about censorship, you and the OIF would know. I’ll bet you’ll even remove this comment like you have a few others of my comments.

    Your comments here indicate to me that you regret the ALA does not have a larger cadre of people who patrol and correct Wikipedia and other such sites to ensure ALA propaganda trumps whatever rules to ensure accuracy are provided by the web site’s host. Truly, that is truly scary.

  2. Dan, I had nothing to do with any Wikipedia “gang behavior” except to point out that your edits to certain pages were continually breaking Wikipedia guidelines and your treatment of other editors was borderline abusive. Please feel free to follow-up over email, I do not want to have another drawn out back and forth about this issue in my comments.

  3. I’m not the issue. The OIF is, and your support for it. You have not addressed the legitimate issues I raised. The scariest is the implication that the ALA should organize to further propagandize: “I worry about ALA’s ability to keep up with IF topics in a digital world….”

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