{"title":"Drained-pool Politics Versus Digital Libraries in U.S. Cyberspace","authors":"Mary Guillory","doi":"10.5860/ital.v42i4.16988","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Though the capability to ban one book exists as it does in the physical world, access to digital libraries has become all-or-nothing in many instances around the nation. States, municipalities, nor school districts are united on the issue with federal law applying only on a case-by-case basis. Call it switch flipping or drained-pool politics: just don’t call it right. A refusal to share digital shelf space should not result in the eradication of digital libraries. Intellectual freedom is wrapped up in a possessive kind of love for libraries with the cost being the loss of millions of books in cyberspace. In the United States of America, the land of the free, a nation-wide balancing act is taking place that makes the horror of Fahrenheit 451 seem more like a documentary on our already eerily futuristic world.","PeriodicalId":50361,"journal":{"name":"Information Technology and Libraries","volume":"366 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Information Technology and Libraries","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5860/ital.v42i4.16988","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Though the capability to ban one book exists as it does in the physical world, access to digital libraries has become all-or-nothing in many instances around the nation. States, municipalities, nor school districts are united on the issue with federal law applying only on a case-by-case basis. Call it switch flipping or drained-pool politics: just don’t call it right. A refusal to share digital shelf space should not result in the eradication of digital libraries. Intellectual freedom is wrapped up in a possessive kind of love for libraries with the cost being the loss of millions of books in cyberspace. In the United States of America, the land of the free, a nation-wide balancing act is taking place that makes the horror of Fahrenheit 451 seem more like a documentary on our already eerily futuristic world.
期刊介绍:
Information Technology and Libraries publishes original material related to all aspects of information technology in all types of libraries. Topic areas include, but are not limited to, library automation, digital libraries, metadata, identity management, distributed systems and networks, computer security, intellectual property rights, technical standards, geographic information systems, desktop applications, information discovery tools, web-scale library services, cloud computing, digital preservation, data curation, virtualization, search-engine optimization, emerging technologies, social networking, open data, the semantic web, mobile services and applications, usability, universal access to technology, library consortia, vendor relations, and digital humanities.