On Twitter today I learned that Vancouver Public Library is making a change to its internet use policy. You can read the document yourself, but here’s the addition: Users must not use any workstation or the public wireless network to display explicit sexual images. Staff will advise users of inappropriate conduct as required and will…
It is Freedom to Read Week, so it’s time to celebrate making diverse opinions and information available to our communities. Hooray. In our library system I’m a children’s and youth librarian, so I tend to focus more on challenges to YA and kids’ books in the library sphere. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell, one…
advocacy / civil liberties / events / people / politics
On November 30 Vancouver Rape Relief is hosting a Montreal Massacre Memorial program. One of the speakers they’re hosting is Janice Raymond, and she is a controversial figure, due to her past statements about transgender people (including a 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire, which has been called a justification for anti-transsexual prejudice). This event is…
On November 8 and 9 Media Democracy Days were happening at Vancouver Public Library (& The Cinematheque), and I headed into the city to see what was happening. One of the events was a keynote by Elizabeth Denham and showing of the movie Terms & Conditions May Apply, which I blogged about for the Info…
As a followup to the Disappearing Palestine ads on TransLink issue, David Waddell and I wrote an article for the BCLA Browser entitled Intellectual Freedom Takes the Bus: What do pro-Palestine ads on TransLink have to do with BC librarians? (PDF). In the article we expand a bit on my blog post and talk about…
The headline to this post is a touch inaccurate. You see, according to an Ottawa Citizen story, it’s only: The Canadian Forces is requiring physically and mentally wounded soldiers to sign a form acknowledging they won’t criticize senior officers or discourage others in uniform with their comments on social media sites such as Facebook and…
The ALA’s Banned Books Week is starting today (September 22-28, 2013) so it seems appropriate there’s been an increase in articles about books and censorship in the States. A few notable recent examples include: the North Carolina challenge of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, the challenge of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in Alabama, the…
We know from the documents leaked by Edward Snowden that the NSA has been collecting huge amounts of data on people. We also know that they’ve been introducing backdoors and other security holes into cryptographic standards that underly all sorts of software. (Over on the BCLA Information Policy Committee blog I wrote a post about…
On TransLink buses (and one station) this week you might see an ad featuring four maps with progressively dwindling amounts of green on them. There are no exhortations. There isn’t a lot of context. But these are undoubtedly an intellectual freedom issue we should be aware of, because these ads are being challenged as the…
The Entre Ciel et Terre conference — translated from French as "Between Heaven and Earth" — faced criticism from Quebec’s Minister for the Status of Women Agnès Maltais. Maltais asked the Canadian government to bar some invited guests from entering the country, calling the speakers "radical Islamists" who don’t respect equality between men and women.…
A federal district judge in Indiana has ruled that school administrators may prohibit "I ♥ Boobies" breast-cancer awareness bracelets as lewd or vulgar student speech. Judge Joseph S. Van Bokkelen of Hammond, Ind., considered and rejected the reasoning of the full federal appeals court in Philadelphia, which ruled earlier this month that the bracelets could…
There seems to be something of a coming trend for libraries to block access to PayDay loan company websites … These all do seem to be at the behest of the local political masters, rather than (thank God) the Library staff themselves. Sorry – maybe I missed this particular lesson, but when was it deemed…
Although we’ve recently seen this issue arise when a book was challenged and retained at the Indianapolis public library and last year in the King County Library System near Seattle, the Tribune article was sparked by a controversy in the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove. The town’s library is currently running a film series that…
… suggesting that scenes of rape are pornography erases the distinction between sexual assault and consensual sex in a way that’s all too common in our larger culture. And it plays into the idea that depiction of a bad act is always an endorsement of it, a belief that tends to circumscribe what’s possible and…
The BCLA recently sent a letter to Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration expressing concern about the failure to include direct references to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedom’s express prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation, and to Canada’s legalization of same-sex marriage, from Canada’s new citizenship guide, Discover Canada: The Rights and…
intellectual freedom committee - bcla 
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