7 Auditing Tools to Uncover Soft Censorship – Watch Party – Abilene Public Library

When: Wednesday, August 5^th at 10am
Where: Abilene Public Library
What: & Auditing Tools to Uncover Soft Censorship

We’ll watch the webinar and have a brief discussion.

OVERVIEW:

The heart of this session is seven auditing tools you can use in any library, regardless of size or budget, to uncover soft censorship — from a thirty-minute walkthrough of your own building to data-driven benchmarks using the Seattle Public Library’s open checkout dataset and free tools built specifically for this kind of collection analysis.

There are titles missing from library shelves right now that were never formally challenged, never voted on, never even discussed, and there is no record of their absence. It’s called soft censorship and it’s happening in libraries across the country. In most cases, nobody intended it.

We’ll look at the three mechanics through which soft censorship operates — Removal, Rejection, and Restriction — using Kayla Martin-Gant’s research as our framework. We’ll examine what the current climate is doing to library workers and how that stress quietly reshapes collections through a phenomenon researchers call anticipatory anxiety. We’ll look back at the 1950s comic book scare — because the mechanics of soft censorship are not new, and what happened to the profession then has direct lessons for now.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

This session is for collection managers, selectors, programming and staff, and library directors who need auditing tools to evaluate how soft censorship may be operating in the library.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Apply seven data-driven auditing tools to uncover soft (self-) censorship in library collections
• Identify the three operational mechanics of soft censorship
• Explain how anticipatory anxiety drives fear-based collection development decisions
• Analyze how the profession was targeted during the 1950s comic book scare to drive soft censorship in public libraries.