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Neill Denny

Neill Denny is editor-in-chief of The Bookseller. He will be blogging on the book business and on how the print magazine is produced each week.

A neutral space

07.05.08

A storm is brewing in libraries in two key areas that touch on the very core of what they are about, and look set to define—quite possibly for the worst—their public image for many years ahead.

Last week, we reported that the police and security forces are asking individual libraries, some in areas with a large Muslim population, for access to borrowing and internet access records.

The obvious danger for libraries is that they start to lose their cherished status as neutral spaces– where no judgements are made as to the tastes and motivations of those who use them. Additionally, librarians have a professional duty of confidentiality to borrowers and this long-standing status is now being compromised. And if libraries become arenas of surveillance their role as a community-wide hub is negated.

If informing on borrowers had any demonstrable anti-terrorist role it might be a different argument, but it seems unlikely that any subversives will either be caught or deterred by turning librarians into police narks. The official powers allowing the police access to library records under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) are obscure, and have yet to be fully tested  before a court of law. Perhaps it is time they were.

Moreover, once a power is granted for unfettered surveillance it is not long before other arms of the state start to misuse those powers: anti-terrorist laws have been used by some councils to enforce school catchment areas.

The other area of controversy concerns the vexed question of what to stock.

Following the Tower Hamlets controversy last year the MLA has drawn up draft guidelines, telling librarians to ensure that any information potentially useful to terrorists is not stocked.

This, of course, is an absurdly wide catch-all that is almost impossible for any librarian to adhere to. They are effectively being asked to become censors without quite knowing what they are being asked to censor. The librarians professional body CILIP warns that the guidelines may cause "unnecessary self-censorship." Some librarians have identified this as a "Clause 28" moment.

This draft advice from the MLA is clearly flawed. If a publication is legal, and readers wish to read it, then a library has a duty to stock it. If a publication is inflammatory, obscene or otherwise unacceptable under the strict legal definitions established over many years then it should not be in the public realm in the first place. End of story.

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By Margaret Hosking

The solution is simple....just choose a library management system that does not store borrower histories. The odd borrower who is disappointed that you can't tell them the book they borrowed last January is a small price to pay for library freedom. That's what our university library did!

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By Judy Broady Preston

CILIP welcomes the stance taken in your blog (7th May) and in your leader (Bookseller 9th May) in support of our long held position in defence of libraries as neutral spaces where users’ rights to privacy within the law and of free enquiry and access to knowledge are inviolable. Our views about access to knowledge are also reflected in our response to the MLA consultation on managing controversial material in public libraries (see http://www.cilip.org.uk/policyadvocacy). We were already aware and concerned about the worrying signs of increased police requests to libraries to report user activity they notice that might be considered suspicious in the context of both criminal activity and the general threat of terrorism, and had taken initial steps to address this within CILIP. This is not our first encounter with anti-terrorist measures: together with The British Library, SCONUL and a number of other bodies we had already needed to lobby (successfully) to secure changes to the Terrorism Act 2006 to ensure that librarians would not have been liable to surveillance and criminal prosecution for the unintentional dissemination of terrorist publications in the normal conduct of their core business. This is a major issue of principle for librarians. We will be undertaking further work in consultation with our members and other professional library organisations, including the American Library Association which has already encountered these issues in connection with the PATRIOT Act, to provide librarians with specific guidance. CILIP’s Ethical Principles require our members to show “commitment to the defence, and the advancement, of access to information, ideas and works of the imagination.” Librarians have to act within the law but CILIP does not want to see the confidence and privacy with which people use libraries undermined. Judy Broady-Preston Leader of CILIP Council

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