The activity I have chosen was the reading and analysis of a peer reviewed article. I chose a scholarly article that investigated the topic of censorship in relation to children’s resources and took into account the source’s relevance, recency, authority and purpose. The scope of the article was focused on school librarian’s attitudes towards censorship and freedom of information in both theory and practices at the workplace.

Choosing to focus my research on the topic of self censorship was effective. The main text heavily focused on self-censorship as it was the main type of censorship practiced by librarians in contrast to challenges which are mostly used by patrons. In the other studies I examined. Another effective practice I implemented was examining areas of censorship that the journal article only provided limited information on. Through this I was able to discover that challenges to resources were actually also a significant aspect of censorship that affects public and school libraries. The analysis of this article allowed me to learn more about pro-censorship advocates and their practices. I learnt that in relation to children’s resources, censorship challenges appear from important stakeholders of the library such as parents with the purpose to protect their children from potentially controversial, harmful or inappropriate content (Oltmann, Peterson & Knox, 2017, p. 279-282).

However, in retrospect, there were several aspects of censorship that were not covered in detail in the article such as the type of resources censored, resolving challenges to resources, perspectives of stakeholders that are pro-supporters of censorship like parents and teachers. During the task I made comparisons between the perspective of the article to other academic sources in order to locate differences and similarities. School libraries are a specific focus and I made comparisons to other studies that used data from both public and school libraries.  One significant aspect of censorship that I did not analyse in detail were regulations. As regulations were a mandatory form of censorship I did not investigate it in detail as librarians are unlikely to be able to change these policies. However in reflection, regulated censorship could be investigated further to understand their purpose, effectiveness and how librarians implemented these mandatory policies into practice and monitored their maintenance. McNicol believed that most school librarians were supporters of pro-censorship regulations such as internet filtering (McNicol, 2016, p.338).  Although I analysed and evaluated the data gathering methods of the main article, one improvement I could have made was analyzing the effectiveness of the structure of the questions. Another limitation of my analysis is the lack of comparisons to studies in the same country. There could have been cultural differences towards self-censorship and challenges to resources that I did not account for when analyzing the article as most of the other resources I used were American studies while the main article was limited to the United Kingdom.

Overall, my analysis of the censorship attitudes of school librarians in the United Kingdom article improved my knowledge on self censorship, censorship challenges and freedom of information.

Reference

McNicol, S. (2016). School librarians’ intellectual freedom attitudes and practices. New Library World, 117(5/6), 329-342. doi: 10.1108/NLW-01-2016-0002

Oltmann, S.M, Peterson, C, & Knox, E.J.M. (2017). Analysing challenges to library materials: an incomplete picture. Public Library Quarterly, 36(4), 274-292. doi: 10.1080/01616846.2017.1324233