At What Cost? : Missouri Librarians and the Struggle for Intellectual Freedom

ABSTRACT

Book challenges have a profound impact on communities, but what about the effect these challenges have on librarians? Our pragmatic hybrid approach based on narrative and grounded theory documents librarian perspectives and forms the basis for a broader future investigation of how intellectual freedom work impacts librarians. Interviews with five Missouri public librarians derived from a purposive sample were conducted and addressed through open and axial coding processes. The results include a code book with six major themes and 59 individual child codes, as well as a collection of compelling narratives. The negative impact intellectual freedom challenges have on public librarians is clear. Participants underscore their commitment to the ethics and norms of professional librarianship, but also emphasize the need for more timely support from national organizations and local political structures and the importance of educating governing bodies on the centrality of intellectual freedom to the mission of libraries.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual freedom
• librarians
• mental health
• information seeking
• narrative

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the five participants in this study who generously gave of their time and energies, and at times revisited recent trauma to clarify and put forward their experiences for greater visibility in the literature. I would also like to thank my colleague and fellow doctoral student, Hillary Gould, for helping me with data visualization; she came up with Figure 1, the starburst graph above. Her Excel skills are unmatched.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.