Intellectual Freedom and Censorship: The Climate of Opinion in Midwestern Public Libraries

Abstract

The rights of citizens of the United States to freedom of access to ideas and information have been firmly established in theories of public library service, and the degree to which librarians are committed to supporting and defending these rights is a socially significant issue. An attempt to quantify the attitudes of more than 3,200 public librarians toward intellectual freedom, censorship, and certain antidemocratic ideas is reported in this article. Data upon which the study is based were collected as a part of the "Opinion Survey of Midwestern Public Librarians," which was conducted in 1970-71. Questionnaires containing three attitude scales were distributed to a randomly selected sample of 900 librarians in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin for the following purposes: to determine the extent to which librarians accept intellectual freedom principles contained in the Library Bill of Rights and the Freedom to Read statement, to measure the attitudes of librarians toward censorship, to correlate librarians' attitudes toward censorship with their attitudes toward authoritarianism, and to determine the relationship between librarians' attitudes toward intellectual freedom with their attitudes toward censorship.

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