THE VIEWPOINT: NEUTRALITY: 36

NEUTRALITY – WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Librarians and other information workers are strictly committed to neutrality and an unbiased stance regarding collection, access and service.

Neutrality results in the most balanced collection and the most balanced access to information achievable. From: The IFLA Code of Ethics for Librarians and other Information Workers (August 2012).

But what is neutrality – and is it something we want to be strictly committed to?

Let’s start with a definition of neutrality. This one is from the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. The state of not supporting or helping either side in a conflict, disagreement, etc.; impartiality.

2. Absence of decided views, expression, or strong feeling.

Now let’s try and describe a public library. This is my take:

Public libraries use community resources to give their communities access to information in all its forms, to help meet their education and personal development needs, and their needs for recreation and leisure. Libraries are for all – they are places where everyone is not merely allowed, but welcomed.

Do you agree with the prior paragraph? Much of it is far from ‘neutral’ – rather it is avowedly biased toward freedom of access to information and freedom of expression. It presumes that values of equality and equal worth are not only universally understood, but universally held.

In fact, neither of those things are true, and conundrums quickly arise if we try to hold that librarians should be neutral decision makers. Take for example the proposal that libraries are for all.

Are all in the community welcome in the library, or only those who agree that all in the community are welcome?

Behind much of the debate over neutrality is the concept of privilege – because those who are in a position of privilege in society don’t always recognise they are, and therefore don’t always recognise what an uneven playing field many in our communities are negotiating. Green MP Golriz Ghahraman: ‘Nobody asks me, for example, when I came out as straight.’ Privilege – or the lack of it – creates inequities when we rely on the belief that all in our communities enjoy ‘universal’ rights.

Over the last few years, the concept of neutrality has been explored by many in our profession, for example:

‘I support the idea of libraries serving the whole community, and providing a neutral and trusted community space where ideas can be heard, discussed, and debated. Free speech is free speech, even if we don’t agree with that speech. That concept is pretty foundational to libraries.’ From: ‘Ugly Beliefs, Free-speech, and Libraries,’ David Lee King Blog, August 2017. ‘Shouldn’t libraries be place for all voices in the community? No. Libraries are not neutral microphones placed in a town square open to all comers. They are platforms of learning that acknowledge the full range of the views in a community, but with the community develop and support a learning narrative that pushes against racism and bigotry.’ From: ‘On Racism, Ignorance and Librarianship,’ R. David Lankes blog, August 2017.

If you are intrigued by these ideas, a good article to read for an overview of the considerations around library neutrality is John Wenzler’s ‘Neutrality and Its Discontents’ (portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 19 no. 1, January 2019, p55-78).

Given our diversity, personal and collective biases are more likely to occur than not and what constitutes the expression of ‘neutrality’ could be different in different places, including libraries. We should be debating neutrality in New Zealand libraries – and let’s try doing that with an ‘Absence of decided views, expression, or strong feeling’!