A horrible, unjustifiable form of silencing. The Loon highly respects Rebecca’s courage in coming forward.
Another form of silencing. For shame, NYPL. For shame, ALA.
Yet a third form. (Nota bene: lawsuit threats are generally silly and ignorable; the real threat here is “I’ll speak with your manager!” Vendors cannot employ such tactics when library administrators refuse to be complicit with them. Some administrators do so refuse; good for them. The rest are a problem.)
And a fourth form. For shame, CLA. (As for CLA’s repeated claim that no registered attendees were ejected, the Loon notes that that is not the entire substance of the allegations. It seems clear that CLA engaged in systematic silencing. This should not be acceptable.)
A fifth form of silencing (see discussion of slide 13).
And they say librarians don’t shush people any more. Not in the Loon’s experience. Inside the workplace, we’re as shushy as we wanna be—that is, very.
The Loon would like to write more about this, but she’s busy this week and so many librarians have tried to silence her over the years (including on this blog) that she’s feeling old and tired and unwilling to take up the jousting lance one more time.
Suffice to say that she does not believe these patterns of silencing—and they are patterns; the Loon’s seen them play out the same way multiple depressing times—improve librarianship.
For shame, all of us. It’s our profession. We deserve and should demand better.
On silencing by Library Loon, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.