The 2009 West Bend Community Memorial Library Controversy: Understanding the Challenge, the Reactions, and the Aftermath

Zimmer, Michael; McCleer, Adriana

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/54902 Copy

Description

Title

The 2009 West Bend Community Memorial Library Controversy: Understanding the Challenge, the Reactions, and the Aftermath

Author(s)

• Zimmer, Michael
• McCleer, Adriana

Issue Date

2014

Keyword(s)

• censorship
• intellectual freedom
• West Bend Community Memorial Library

Abstract

For most of 2009, the West Bend Community Memorial Library in West Bend, Wisconsin, was embroiled in controversy due to a series of community-based challenges against the presence of so-called “sexually explicit books” and “books for youth on homosexuality” in the library’s Young Adult section. The controversy generated considerable discussion and debate over the role of the library in providing access to information, the nature of intellectual freedom and professional authority, the influence of community and outside stakeholders, and the role of local governance in library operations. These discussions occurred in public meetings and across dinner tables, in community protests and editorial pages, on blogs and social media, and in professional and academic venues, and they reached far beyond the limits of the rural Wisconsin city, making the West Bend controversy an important and unique opportunity to explore how debates over intellectual freedom play out in the twenty-first century information ecosystem.

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ISSN

0024-2594

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/54902

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2014.0017

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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