This book is a companion volume to the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Manual, ninth edition. The manual provides helpful resources and current official ALA documents on intellectual freedom, and this volume provides essays about the history and development of those official documents.
In the past, earlier versions of these essays were included in the Intellectual Freedom Manual itself. In the ninth edition, the inclusion of new documents and resources in the manual made it impractical to include the historical information in the main volume. The essays remain important, however. By tracing the creation and revision of official documents on intellectual freedom, the essays provide a record of intellectual freedom concerns that librarians have faced over the last century and the American Library Association’s response to those concerns. Together, the Intellectual Freedom Manual, ninth edition, and this supplement provide a look at intellectual freedom that is both historical and current, and both theoretical and practical.
In addition to a broad overview of ALA’s stance on intellectual freedom, this volume provides information about the history of all the current ALA documents that are contained in the Intellectual Freedom Manual, ninth edition, including:
• Four core intellectual freedom documents of the American Library Association
• Twenty-one interpretations of the ALA Library Bill of Rights
• One interpretation of the Code of Ethics of the American Library Association
• Three ALA resolutions and policies on intellectual freedom topics
• Three sets of guidelines for writing library policy developed by the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee
• Guidelines for responding to challenges
Part I presents a historical overview of the American Library Association’s concerns and activities regarding intellectual freedom from 1924 to the present, updated by Barbara M. Jones, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom.
Part II presents an essay on the history of each of the four core intellectual freedom documents of the American Library Association:
• Library Bill of Rights
• Code of Ethics of the American Library Association
• The Freedom to Read
• Libraries: An American Value
Part III: In addition to the four core documents named above, the American Library Association has developed related interpretations, policy statements, and guidelines regarding intellectual freedom. Current versions of these are printed in the Intellectual Freedom Manual, ninth edition, and also are available on the ALA website. Part III presents an essay about the history of each of these items. The essays are arranged in alphabetical order by title of the document.
Subject Index: The subject index makes it easy to identify essays about the history of ALA documents related to a particular intellectual freedom issue such as access, censorship, or privacy.
• Library administrators
• Library workers and volunteers
• Members of library governing bodies
• Library and information science faculty members and students
• Scholars of librarianship, intellectual and academic freedom, history, and civil liberties
• Members of the American Library Association Executive Board, ALA Council, and ALA committees
We gratefully acknowledge the editors of previous editions of the Intellectual Freedom Manual for their careful recording of the history of these documents.
TRINA MAGI
Editor