The Importance Of Librarianship

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If you’re reading this, it should come as no surprise that librarianship is a help field. Like many other help professions, we assist people on a regular basis, even if our particular job is more behind the scenes and allow little public facing time. Librarianship is a help profession, from helping people find materials they want to helping answer questions they have—as well as those they might not know they have—helping people is just what we do. However, if you were to ask librarians what makes us into the magical and mythical creatures that we are, most would probably agree that it’s because at the core of our proverbial wands. The core of librarianship isn’t unicorn hair, dragon heartstring, or a phoenix feather—it’s our values. The ALA …show more content…

Well, self-censorship is essentially when someone, for our purposes a librarian, decides against adding certain materials to their library’s collection because they know that the materials could in some way be considered controversial; instead of dealing with potential conflict as it arises, they decide to avoid conflict and confrontation all together. Though you might not think that you have taken part in exercising self-censorship, chances are you have more experience than you think. Both ALA and School Library Journal recognize that it is a problem and SLJ even published an article about self-censorship with results from a survey they conducted with school librarians in 2009. Majority of the librarians admitted to self-censorship because they didn’t want to deal with a book being challenged. Additionally, the responses showed that almost half of the librarians reported that they had experience dealing with a book challenge—which could explain why this is a situation they would like to avoid (Whelan, 2009). Self-censorship can lead to a plethora of problems, but the most obvious is that if collections suffer then patrons suffer. It is true that collections are supposed to mirror their communities, but materials should be windows just as much as they are

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