Censorship Issues and the Internet:

A Presentation to the Telecommunities Canada'96 Conference,

August 19, 1996

by Alvin M. Schrader

ABSTRACT

Throughout history, every new technology for public communication - from the printing press in the 15th century to moving pictures, radio, and television in ours - has been subjected to various and ingenious forms of control and censorship, whether by church, state, or individual citizens and groups. Hard-won battles for free speech must be fought anew with every innovation in communication technology. This is as true of the Internet today as it was of the printing press more than 500 years ago.

As content providers dedicated to unrestricted learning and communicating in every medium, librarians have been at the centre of debates and struggles over free speech for at least a half century. Their considerable experience in responding to issues of censorship in other media should not be overlooked in efforts to fashion telecommunity policies and procedures for the Net, policies and procedures that will strike a balance between individual rights and public policy goals.

OVERVIEW

First of all, let me say that I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you this morning, and I want to thank Chris Hammond-Thrasher and Judy Mott for encouraging me, and for believing that I might have something to contribute to the growing public discourse on censorship and the Internet, and more specifically on the impact of censorship on the "Telecommunity Spirit" that is the focus of celebration at this year's Telecommunities Canada Conference. I would suggest that it is timely to examine the nature and role of freedom of expression in the community network movement because it is fundamental to the philosophy, mission, and values of this movement and, indeed, it is fundamental to every organization involved in the free flow of information and ideas in democratic countries.

My goals for this session are to provide a brief overview of some of the current issues involving free speech, and to provide an opportunity for workshop participants to ask questions, identify concerns, share ideas, and discuss strategies for telecommunity approaches to these issues.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

I want to start, however, with a brief historical perspective on censorship and identify some of the implications issuing from it for telecommunity policy considerations.

Throughout history, every new technology for public communication - from the printing press in the 15th century to moving pictures, radio, television, and video in ours - has been subjected to various and ingenious forms of control and censorship, whether by church, state, or individual citizens and groups.

It seems that the hard-won battles for free speech must be fought anew with every innovation in communications technology. This is as true of the Internet today as it was of the printing press more than 500 years ago.

I know that we have all heard the Internet missionaries wax eloquent about the unprecedented and irrepressible freedom of this new communications technology, and about its unstoppable, ubiquitous capacity for democratic liberation throughout the world.

Such optimism has been rudely shattered for me by many recent events that reveal how deeply vulnerable and fragile Internet communication is in the face of political and social resolve to control and regulate it. Indeed, single-minded politicians are now at work in many countries - democratic and otherwise - to prohibit or regulate the dissemination of speech in virtually every medium. The so-called Communications Decency Act in the United States is the most egregious example on the large scale. And here in Edmonton we have a local Internet service provider just this past week buckling under to (what I can only regard as) police pressure and intimidation to remove materials that they didn't like. No charges under the Criminal Code. No due process.

And even the book is not safe in some environments - witness the daily assaults by Canada Customs on our intellectual sovereignty as citizens.

LIBRARIANS AND THEIR EVOLUTION OF INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM POLICY

As content providers dedicated to unrestricted learning and communicating in every medium, librarians have been at the centre of debates and struggles over free speech for at least a half century, initially as print media were implicated and more recently as film and music have come under attack.

I would like to suggest that the considerable experience of this community, a community that is at once institutional and professional, in responding to issues of censorship should not be overlooked by the community network movement in its efforts to fashion telecommunity policies and procedures that will strike a balance between individual rights and public policy goals, and hence avoid or pre-empt government regulation and control.

But the history of librarians and intellectual freedom is not a linear pathway. Indeed, librarians from the late 19th century would scarcely recognize the philosophical platform of their contemporaries. It may come as a surprise to some of you to learn that the library profession has not always been a champion of freedom of expression.

In fact, until well into this century, members of the profession were exactly the opposite - not only elitist, believers in high culture - but self-proclaimed protectors of the minds and morals of society. They were censors, and proud of it - no fiction, certainly nothing for children.

It wasn't until John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath had become the target in the 1930s of widespread censorship pressures across the U.S. (on the grounds of the novel's "immorality and social views"), that the basic position of the American Library Association (ALA) in opposition to censorship finally emerged.

The Association's response was the adoption of the Library Bill of Rights in 1939, the profession's first policy statement on intellectual freedom involving library materials. And the following year (1940), ALA created the Intellectual Freedom Committee. The Library Bill of Rights was intended to apply to every type of library, public, school, academic, and special - and it has been revised several times since 1939 to expand and clarify the meaning of unrestricted access to library materials. Various interpretative statements have been added over the years, statements on such concerns as: age restrictions, labelling, restricted access, meeting room use, library programs, dealing with challenges, confidentiality of library borrower records, access to libraries by the developmentally disabled, affirming the inclusion of materials in library collections on gender and sexual orientation, economic barriers to access, and most recently, the international free flow of information.

There have been many other ALA initiatives: establishment of an Office for Intellectual Freedom within ALA headquarters (1967), creation of the Freedom to Read Foundation (1969), publication of the first edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual (1974), and the beginning of "Banned Books Week" (1982).

The Canadian library profession often looks to many of the same ALA policies and interpretations for guidance on intellectual freedom issues, even though none of these are officially endorsed by the Canadian Library Association (CLA). CLA adopted its own Statement on Intellectual Freedom in 1974, and two years later, in 1976, a Code of Ethics statement (see the brochure produced by the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Library Association of Alberta). These two short statements were all that we had until 1994, when a statement was adopted on Information and Telecommunication Access Principles, which states that all people have the right to:

  1. Literacy
  2. Universal, Equitable, and Affordable Access
  3. Communicate
  4. Public Space on the Telecommunications Networks
  5. Privacy.

The Association has come a very long way since the days when a "Committee on Undesirable Literature" was created to "consider the various types of undesirable literature which are being published or distributed in Canada." That was 1958.

Fortunately, mercifully, this Committee metamorphosed just three 3 years later, in 1961, to become the present-day Intellectual Freedom Committee. But note that it was another 13 years, 1974, before CLA officially endorsed intellectual freedom as a professional policy.

The Book and Periodical Council (of Canada) endorsed its own statement on The Freedom of Expression and the Freedom to Read in 1978, and in 1984 they initiated Freedom to Read Week across Canada, now held the last week of February every year.

Another organization involved in promoting freedom of expression in Canada is the Canadian Centre of International P.E.N. (Poets, Playrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists), established in 1926. It is now a world-wide writers' organization with a mandate to preserve freedom of expression and opinion, and in recent years, its Writers in Prison Committee has helped to secure the release of many authors around the world who have been jailed for their writings and opinions.

Also important in any consideration of intellectual freedom in Canada is the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1983, which guarantees freedom of expression - with the important proviso that it and other rights and freedoms are subject to certain limits.

It should also be remembered that, long before the Charter, we were signatories to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, of which Article 19 embodies the right of all people to freedom of expression and the freedom to receive information and ideas. Taking its name and mandate from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a human rights organization was established in 1986 as Article 19, the International Centre on Censorship, to promote freedom of expression and combat censorship worldwide.

Notwithstanding the Canadian Charter and the UN's Declaration, there are some fundamental differences in tradition and in law between Canadian and American approaches to free speech issues. Canada has a hate propaganda law, which the US does not have. Canada has a drug literature law, which the US does not have. And Canada has an obscenity law, while in the US obscenity is unprotected speech, that is, it falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. And of course we also have Canada Customs, which seems to become ever more desperate and fanatical as it becomes ever more technologically obsolete. The vast majority of materials from which Canada Customs is keeping us all safe - at our expense as taxpayers, by the way! - are published in the US - one might wonder if this is not a violation of our sacred Free Trade Agreement, but apparently this is not a pressing political question.

In addition, the Canadian Charter stipulates that all rights and freedoms are "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society". Compare the American approach, in which the First Amendment states, categorically and without qualification, that "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

But the differences go further. The whole administration of justice is different in Canada - libel, judicial bans on publication of court proceedings, contempt of court, jury selection, and selection of judges - all of these are much more restrictive and conservative in the Canadian legal tradition than in the US tradition.

KINDS OF CENSORSHIP

The banning and censoring of materials by state agencies is one of the more typical forms of censorship that comes to mind. Withdrawing materials from libraries is another. However, they are not the only kinds, and indeed, perhaps not even the most important kinds.

There are many forms of self-censorship that are almost always invisible to the reader, viewer, or listener. These forms of self-censorship are practised by authors, playwrights, screen writers, television script writers, song writers, broadcast journalists, and other artistic creators, actors and other performers, editors, producers and publishers, and book and music sellers. The extent and severity of internalized forms of self-censorship are directly correlated with the climate of intellectual freedom in a given society, and only the bravest are willing to go very far beyond the invisible boundaries where good taste becomes obscenity, pornography, immorality, blasphemy, sedition, or some other nonconforming expression. Internalized censorship is far more effective in preserving the dominant ideology in society than any state censor could ever hope to be.

An interesting case study is presented by the experience of American movie producers to avoid government censorship. In 1931, the Motion Picture Production Code was adopted and came to be enforced by The Hays Office. The Code was a response to fears of government censorship control in the US and to placate the Legion of Decency, a highly influential pressure group developed by the national Council of Catholic Women.

The original Code tried to regulate the content of movies for almost 40 years, with a resulting product that was geared strictly to uncontroversial family entertainment and that avoided many taboos and unpleasant subjects. In the process, any genuine artistic progress was destroyed in American film for at least 20 or 30 years. Examples of the Code's impact are instructive:

The Code was replaced by a movie rating system in 1968 based on suitability for children, and the rating system has experienced successive tinkerings with categories and descriptions, the most recent being the replacement of the 'X' rating with 'NC-17'. The rating system approach tried to regulate the content of audiences rather than the content of movies.

In the last few years, individual theatre chains have expanded the rating system with descriptive warning labels concerning violence, sex, nudity, and profanity - though there is no standardized approach to wording or application of these warnings. None of these strategies - codes, ratings, warnings - has every accomplished anything more than the illusion of success, because they are all attempts to impose an objective standard of measurement on what is essentially a matter of personal taste and perception.

WHY "CENSORSPROOFING" IS FUTILE

In the library world, there is no doubt that the pressure to censor materials is widely experienced by service providers, and there is widespread anxiety about it too. Many people will go to considerable lengths to avoid potentially controversial acquisitions in the first place, or to censor such materials if already acquired. Other strategies are to restrict access or to label these materials.

These are some of the practices that I have called "censorproofing", that is, trying to safeguard a collection against challenges, criticism, and controversy through such strategies as self-censorship in the selection process, weeding, re-classifications, shelf relocation, labelling, and age restrictions. Censorproofing strategies are avoidance behaviours.

What I would argue, however, is that successful self-censorship and related practices are mostly an illusion, and that challenges to materials are in the long run more or less inevitable.

The principal reason why these practices are illusory is a simple one: all of them require librarians to be prophets and clairvoyants, to be able both to predict the future about censorial targets and to read the minds of would-be censors. If a service provider is going to censorproof her or his collection, which new subjects will be avoided? Or which new materials? And what about old materials that become new targets? Which are they? Or old subjects that become new targets?

Dave Jenkinson has done some research into the reasons for complaints about high school library materials in Manitoba that shows how markedly the grounds for challenges can change over a decade: Changes in the Reasons Given for Challenges to Manitoba School Library Materials 

               1982-1984           1991-1993
               profanity*               witchcraft
               immaturity*              violence
               explicit sex             immaturity
               witchcraft               explicit sex
               violence            profanity

*tied in rank

As you can see from this picture, witchcraft and violence have become the most prominent grounds for challenges to school library materials in Manitoba in the early 1990s, in contrast to their relative unimportance among complainants in the early 1980s.

READER RESPONSE THEORY

The reasons why censorproofing is, in the long run, a fallacious and futile strategy relate to sociological phenomena that find their theoretical underpinnings in reader response theory. In this theory, a response to any text - whether narrowly viewed as print on pages or broadly understood as any symbolic representation from which we draw meaning - is seen as a confluence of the reader's personal history, the reader's reading history, and the text itself. To a certain degree, therefore, readers participate in creating the meaning of a text, based on their own reading history and their own personal filter of cultural, moral, and aesthetic values. In this dynamic, the meaning that a particular reader ascribes to a text may or may not approximate the author's original conception - or, for that matter, any other reader's conception. Reader response theory suggests that there are multiple readings for every text. The theory is captured in a familiar expression: It's in the eye of the beholder.

One anecdote that illustrates the persuasiveness of reader response theory is found in the reactions to an announcement several years ago that a local radio station was planning to "go gospel," that is, to play Christian-based religious music of various kinds that would appeal to a wide range of age groups. In a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, one writer was outraged:

"The station is going to cover everything, to everybody, starting with the so-called gospel rock, which in itself is an affront to God, and the ears of a true believer. Pushing the word "Christian" right to the edge of blasphemy, they speak of pushing "rock" with all its deadly variations, with ghetto-blasting noise, with its devilish lyrics and filthy language."
This denunciation prompted several contrary views:

Letters to the editor are not the only source of comparative evidence of how reader response theory helps to explain differences in the myriad ways in which people uniquely interpret texts. Other examples are found in those censorship surveys that ask about the grounds on which challenges have been made. A survey of Canadian public libraries that I undertook a few years back, published as Fear of Words in 1995 by the Canadian Library Association, asked public library respondents to document the actual words of the complainants as much as possible, in order to get at the reasonings and nuances behind objections. A few of the very many examples of these reports are as follows:

FEAR OF WORDS

In addition to divergent interpretations of texts, there are readers whose principal response to reading is fear of the power of words and ideas. To such individuals, the treatment of a subject by an author or artist is incidental to literal words and imputed motives. "Word fear" is characteristic of those who reject outright any distinction between description or narration and indoctrination, between portrayal and promotion, between exposure and seduction, between telling and teaching, between knowledge and action. It is characteristic of those who dismiss irony, parody, satire, sarcasm, innuendo, and even humour in favour of literalism. It is characteristic of those who see no difference between censorship and selection.

These individuals are believers in the "sponge theory", that is, the position that the mere knowledge of ideas is by definition to be already proselytized and harmed by them, that mere tolerance of an idea is already endorsement and advocacy and encouragement and glorification of it. The sponge theory is the belief that a person automatically goes out and does whatever they've last read about or viewed or listened to. Other descriptions that basically express the same notion are the copycat syndrome and "monkey see, monkey do". Personal responsibility for one's actions goes unrecognized in this view of human motivation.

Fear of words is also characteristic of those who cast wide the net of the chronological "child" and the legally circumscribed "minor", of those who eschew developmental theories and who are content - not to mention relieved - to have 18 year olds confined to the world depicted in pre-school picture books or the "Dick and Jane" pablum of my own elementary school age years - a pablum laced with arsenic, incidentally, in the stories about North American aboriginal peoples who were routinely marginalized as "savages" and "red skins", and African Americans as still other inferiors. In most of the calls for censorship, respect for wide variations in psychological maturity among children and young people are ignored in favour of a single-minded uniformity.

However, most of us recognize that individuals of the same age vary quite markedly. One 12 year old will possess considerably less emotional and psychological maturity than another. Maturity is not a simple function of biological age. To accommodate the vast diversity of needs represented by such broad age groups means that young people must individually seek out their own level of reading interest. It can not be imposed through artificial rules and recipes.

These ramifications of reader response theory - multiple readings of texts, changing forms of word fear, and variant notions of reader maturity - make the prospects for successful censorproofing by any service provider rather dim.

ORGANIZATIONAL MISSION

Finally, and above all, regardless of how unconvincing the logical arguments might appear to the dedicated censorproofing advocate, there is still another reason to abandon or reject this strategy. And that is the most important reason of all - the philosophical rationale for being a service provider to the community. For example, the basic social mission and professional responsibility of public librarians is to facilitate access to information and cultural records for every individual in the community with a view to ensuring that all voices can be heard. Any lesser goal puts the public library at risk of becoming marginal, irrelevant, ignored, and devalued.

On the other hand, given the typical public library mandate, we need to remind ourselves, that critics of freedom of expression do indeed have a good point about the power of literature and the magic of imagination: authors and artists do sometimes question and even challenge the status quo.

At the same time, should adults fear these truths, these ideas, these books? Susan Madden, literacy and young adult services librarian in Washington state and long-time advocate of young people's right to intellectual freedom, told the Intellectual Freedom Interest Group of the Library Association of Alberta that the public should not fear reading but rather the inability to read:

I was a juvenile court librarian for 7 years. During that time I saw literally thousands of kids, but I never saw one who was in lock-up because of something they had viewed or read. In fact, I would say that over 80% of them were there because they could not read...wouldst that we could devote as much time to the literacy of our patrons as we do to their protection.

ALTERNATIVES TO CENSORPROOFING

Having abandoned the quest for the powers of prophet and clairvoyant and the false sense of security that comes with the illusion of censorproofing, the good news is that the bad news is not so very bad. Even though challenges are more or less inevitable, it is possible to prepare oneself to deal effectively with most of them and to adopt alternative strategies for avoiding as many challenges as possible in the first place.

The typical strategies for minimizing challenges in the world of libraries have been widely discussed in the literature:

At the broadest level, I would suggest that the community networks develop national statements on intellectual freedom and access, and on due process for handling complaints, and that they ask all local providers to adopt and support these statements or their equivalent in spirit. They should also provide financial and advisory support for any network that is charged or under threat of legal action for upholding these principles. And they should also work to build coalitions with other national associations involved in free speech issues such as CLA, the Book and Periodical Council, and P.E.N. Local and provincial associations should also seek out their counterparts, for example, every provincial library association has an intellectual freedom committee.

RESOURCES

There are many resources available to assist in the planning and implementation of these activities, most notably the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Manual and the kits produced annually to promote "Banned Books Week" in the U.S. and "Freedom to Read Week" in Canada. For ongoing awareness of issues, there is the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom published by the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, and there are various Internet sites and intellectual freedom listservs.

There are also broader strategies for short-circuiting censorship pressures that should be considered. These strategies require varying degrees of collective action beyond the individual service provider because they are political strategies, designed to influence social and cultural attitudes and policies in the larger arenas of power. One strategy, symbolic but nonetheless powerful in raising and promoting community awareness, is to implement a national freedom of expression day or week, such as Canada has had since 1984 in "Freedom to Read Week" sponsored by the Book and Periodical Council.

Going one step further, in Canada, groups in various towns and cities across the country have taken the initiative to secure the issuance of municipal proclamations supporting "Freedom to Read Week." And in an unprecedented initiative at the provincial level in Canada, an opposition member of the Alberta Legislature, Gary Dickson, introduced a resolution that "the Legislative Assembly recognize February 27 to March 5, 1995 as Freedom to Read Week and acknowledge the negative impact that censorship has on lifelong learning." (The resolution was supported in part, although not unanimously, as is generally the case with this kind of resolution - but only after the government party had dismembered it so that the "censorship" aspect could be sidestepped.)

Community analysis, board-approved policy statements, regular staff workshops, keeping current about free speech issues, and political initiatives are among the activities that will help service providers to respond effectively challenges. Such activities take time and energy, and will not always be rewarded with success, but ideas and the freedom to express them are worth the effort.

There is a spin-off benefit to making this effort, and that is the service provider's reputation in the community. In my Canadian public library study, several respondents commented that the institution's reputation in the community discouraged people from making complaints about materials in the collection:

  • "Our staff throughout our system know that we will not remove books because of pressure from the public to do so. This probably means that a great many complaints do not get beyond a verbal complaint at the desk."
  • "Verbal complaints always outnumber written - many are not taken seriously by staff and never reach the branch head for action."
  • "Locally it is a well known fact that attempts at censorship of any kind will be met with strong resistance and public media coverage. So far no one has attempted to "bell the cat." I, personally, as a citizen and librarian, would not allow any citizen or group, legal or otherwise, to remove from the library shelf any book, magazine, video, etc. without a public stand, hue and cry against this kind of censorship. Standing for a principle, and eternal vigilance, is the price and requirement for the preservation of freedom. This type of censorship cannot be allowed in a free nation or society. Censorship in my view is a red flag to most librarians, or should be; it strikes at the very heart of what librarianship is all about".

    THE MISSION OF FACILITATING ACCESS TO MANY VOICES

    Although one can not avoid all challenges, at least one can avoid the fear of them. This is a worthy goal for any member of a library or community network whose principal mission is to facilitate access to cultural records and information, to facilitate the hearing of as many voices as possible in the community. As Mae Benne has argued:
    In reality, there is no practical way to avoid controversy, even if avoidance were a professional option. The most innocent-appearing titles have been the object of complaints, leading librarians to conclude that nothing lies outside the purview of the would-be censor. Selection must be a positive action-acquiring materials for a service program and for users - rather than a negative one - keeping out titles that might become controversial in the community.
    In the debate over censorship and intellectual freedom, what is at stake is nothing less than the political power to decide which voices will be made available to the community, which voices and interests will be privileged at the expense of others. Whoever is in a position to define a situation is in a position to control it. This is as true of library collections and descriptions of their contents as it is of the public discourse facilitated by community networks. The fundamental question is: Will power be used to let in more voices, or to shut out voices that some dislike or fear? Whose voices will be privileged, whose interests served? A classic essay in the professional literature of library and information studies by Lester Asheim states that:
    Our responsibility is the defense of access to ideas, to information, aesthetic pleasure, to recreation in its literal sense of re-creation, and to knowledge or at least to the process that leads to knowledge.
    So it really is not the one book or the one viewpoint that is at issue here, but the defense of ideas that is our concern. I still believe that the best solution to the problem of access is to add positively to the store of ideas, not negatively to reduce it.
    This sentiment was echoed in an account by Herbert Foerstel of a public controversy in Maryland over the inclusion of materials about homosexuality in public library collections. At a meeting with the protestors, he said to them: "Tell us what you want to read, rather than what you don't want others to read" (emphasis in original).

    Free speech is not a political party or political spectrum issue. It is neither conservative nor liberal, neither right nor left. In a self-governing society, free speech is the foundation of all political discourse and all political principles. A free people should never authorize the officials that it elects to censor, for this diminishes the people's capacity for self-government. To act otherwise is a failure of nerve, an abdication of the sovereignty of people over themselves and an abdication of their commitment to personal responsibility for their actions. Free speech, like its offspring democracy, is indeed a risk, even dangerous. But the alternative to risk and danger is the gradual death of the human spirit. No people can be saved from themselves. They can only save themselves from the tyranny of silence by asserting and defending the human instinct for freedom and self emergence within community.

    My question is this: Will the shrill voices opposed to free speech be the ones that are heard in the community? Or will the community also have an opportunity to hear other voices, voices that challenge, voices that express partisan or doctrinal heresy, voices that go against the tide of public opinion, voices that are repugnant, voices that seek to advance causes opposed by the majority, voices that offend the vocal minority?

    Community networks and libraries alike have the power - and the responsibility - to decide. Just remember: 

                   THE WORST
               PART OF
               CENSORSHIP
               IS
                  #@$%!*&(^%_)(%##@%$&%^$#@!!!!

    References

    Alberta Hansard, February 27, 1995, p. 204.

American Library Association.  "Banned Books Week" (kit).  Chicago, Ill.:  American Library
Association. Annual.

Asheim, Lester.  "Selection and Censorship:  A Reappraisal."  Wilson Library Bulletin
58(November, 1983): 180-184.

Benne, M.  Principles of Children's Services in Public Libraries.  Chicago, Ill:  American Library
Association, 1991.

Book and Periodical Council.  "Freedom to Read Week" (kit).  Toronto, Ont.:  Book and
Periodical Council. Annual.

Chambers, Aidan.  Introducing Books to Children.  Boston, Mass:  Horn Book, 2nd ed., 1983. 
(See, for example, chapter 15, pp. 174-193.)

Edmonton Journal, April 11, 1994, April 18, 1994.

Foerstel, Herbert.  "Conflict and Compromise Over Homosexual Literature."  Emergency
Librarian 22 (November-December, 1994): 30.

Intellectual Freedom Committee, Library Association of Alberta.  "Freedom to Read" (pamphlet). 
Calgary, Alta.:  Library Association of Alberta, 1996.

Jenkinson, Dave.  "The Changing Faces of Censorship in Manitoba's Public School Libraries."  
Emergency Librarian 22(1994): 15-21.

Madden, Susan.  "The Librarian--A Quiet Censor?"  Letter of the L.A.A. no. 73 (1990): 20-21.

Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. Intellectual Freedom Manual. 
Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association, 5th ed., 1996.

Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association.  "Intellectual Freedom and
Censorship: Q&A" (pamphlet).  Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association. (no date).

Schrader, Alvin M.  Fear of Words:  Censorship and the Public Libraries of Canada.  Ottawa,
Ont.:  Canadian Library Association, 1995.
    


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