The underground network of conservative librarians...

You'd think librarians would be a bastion of conservatism, wouldn't you? A bunch of stern old women with their hair up in a bun going "shhhhhhhh" all the time, spending all day surrounded by books. Dull. Staid. Hence, conservative.

But boy would you be wrong. Of course, that stereotype of the librarian is laughably outdated. Library science is a serious profession devoted to cataloging and categorizing the world's knowledge to help us make sense out of it all. More to the present point, though, librarians as a profession are far from conservative. They no longer promote order, but disorder. The profession has determined that one of their primary roles is to delay, hinder, and defeat any attempt by law enforcement to look at library records for any reason. Their new motto is: "Librarians: Aiding and abetting criminals, perverts, and terrorists since 2001!"

In New Jersey recently, a librarian stone-walled police who were trying to find out who had checked out a particular book. Why? Because the little girl who was sexually threatened by the man saw that book under his arm. This case is a little unusual, because the librarian is actually being disciplined for her over-zealous defense of library records.

I'm a big believer in civil liberties. I don't want the police rummaging through my library records to determine if I have dangerous thoughts or subversive habits. I don't want Muslims subject to investigation just because they happened to check out a book on Wahabbiism. If librarians want to defend that principle, fine, I'll donate money to the cause.

But if someone uses a library computer to send a bomb threat to a nearby university, then the librarians ought to HELP, not hinder, the police. Instead, they assume, and in fact are now being professionally trained to assume, that the nasty police will snoop through everybody else's data while they're busy looking for the bomber.

Likewise, when the police come in and tell the librarian that some pervert just assaulted a little girl on the steps of the library, the reaction should be:

"In my library? I don't think so! What can I do to help, officer? You say he was carrying a library book called X? Let me look it up and find out who checked it out."

Instead, the librarian in question refused to help the police, told them to get a subpoena, then called for advice not her employer library board's lawyer but the lawyer for the state library association to help her insist that the police dot every i and cross every t before she gave up any information to help catch a pervert trolling for little girls at her library! And let's not even get into the insane rules libraries have adopted to make sure that they don't "judge" the people who use PUBLIC library computers, where children regularly visit, paid for by our tax dollars, to do nothing but view pornography. I've got nothing against porn, whatever floats your boat, but it doesn't belong in the public library.

Today, librarians are trained to "avoid creating unnecessary records" and to "avoid retaining records". The ALA has specific guidelines on how to question and challenge subpoenas and search warrants at every step of the way. I'm hardly the first to notice this. Betsy Newmark notes that the same librarians who love to bash our President refuse to condemn the real mistreatment of librarians and abuse of civil liberties by Fidel Castro. Lee Kaplan calls them "Librarians for Terror".

Fortunately, I see from Michelle Malkin's post Laura and the Unhinged Librarian that an underground network of conservative librarians seems to have sprung up in hopes of bringing back a little common sense to the process. Check out The Loneliness of a Conservative Librarian in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Its author, David Durant, blogs at Heretical Librarian.

Also check out:

• Conservator
• Bunny the LibrariCon
• Right Wing Librarian
• Corrigenda
• Librarians for Bush
• Annoyed Librarian

Balancing civil liberties and fighting crime at all levels is not an either/or proposition. It requires compromise of conflicting values. Like many professional organizations, the American Library Association has turned into a partisan interest group promoting ideological purity among its members and delving into larger societal issues beyond its core competency, intruding into partisan conflicts. A police request for a list of all those who have checked out Jock Sturges books is very different from a police request for the name of the pervert who just assaulted a little girl outside the library. If the ALA refuses to exercise some common sense and help legitimate police requests, it will lose the credibility it needs to protect all of us from abusive police requests.