Anticipation

Author _ Emily J. M. Knox (knox@illinois.edu), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As we move toward a new year and a new administration in the United States, we still don’t know what to expect for libraries and other information institutions. Archivists were dismayed by the actions of the US Archivist Colleen Shogan for “whitewashing” history. According to the Wall Street Journal,

Shogan’s senior aides ordered that a proposed image of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. be cut from a planned “Step Into History” photo booth in the Discovery Center. The booth will give visitors a chance to take photos of themselves superimposed alongside historic figures. The aides also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents. (Restuccia and Ballhaus 2024)

Many information professionals fear that this kind of behavior will become more prevalent in the coming years along with more laws criminalizing librarianship across the states.

The Journal for Intellectual Freedom & Privacy will continue to focus on “practical, moral, ethical, philosophical, and theoretical issues of intellectual freedom and informational privacy within the United States and globally.” We are currently soliciting individual articles and editors for special issues. Special issue editors may propose any topic within the scope of the journal. Possible topics include:

• artificial intelligence (AI) and privacy
• school libraries and book challenges
• criminalizing Librarianship
• weaponizing library policies
• discussions of neutrality in librarianship
• privacy in academic and special libraries
• intellectual property and intellectual freedom
• intellectual freedom and AI challenges

Please contact me at knox@illinois.edu if you would like to propose a special issue.

The current issue is the second of two all-news double issues and covers November 2022 through January 2023.

Reference

Restuccia, Andrew, and Rebecca Ballhaus. 2024. “America’s Top Archivist Puts a Rosy Spin on U.S. History—Pruning the Thorny Parts.” Wall Street Journal (Online). October 29. https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/national-archives-history-colleen-shogan-f8512bc3.