<Unless you personally happen to own your library, your personal views probably have little to do with what books are selected or not. I assume that anyone hired their has to abide by certain ethical standards of nonbias, whether these are formalized or not.

I'm turning in my book selection for this month today. My choices are all personal choices, including what series fiction we subscribe to. This is true of all the public librarians I know. Some places do actually let large wholesale outfits like Baker & Taylor purchase their collections, but this results in the kind of uniformity that provides very little variety in selection, and almost no chance for the patron to find something unusual.

School libraries support curriculum. Academic libraries support curriculum and the egos of the professors (the bigger the slice of the library budget, the more important the department). Corporate and government libraries support the areas of specialty their organizations pursue.

Suffice to say, if a librarian wanted to skew the collection, it would be easy. Those of us in systems do that now, a little, but on purpose. I have an interest in graphic novels, science, and science fiction. The librarian before me had an obvious interest in cooking with children, as we have an interesting historical, regional and national cookbook collection. There's someone on the other side of the county who is a genius at Christian fiction. The city library has a large Spanish-language collection. We all use the whole system's collection, so we all benefit from these little specialities in individual building collections. We also tap each other for reader's advisory and core collection suggestions.

It's easy to censor a collection. It's just like building a specialty, only in the negative. All one has to do is not to buy things one dislikes. Unless one makes an announcement of intent, chances are very good that only the most alert patron will notice. The effect on the public's ability to get information will be crippled either way.

The only thing that prevents this kind of behavior is the professional standards of the people who do the selecting, as no law governs the process. The standards have been formalized... by the ALA. Those standards would be the organization's agenda.

Regards--
Mary Anne