Your Library Matters, August 2026

Bruce Newell, Helena

The 1st Amendment unambiguously guarantees everyone’s right to freely speak and read. Librarians and public library boards vigorously defend this right when books are challenged. This is laudable, but libraries would more effectively support everyone’s right to read by routinely and continuously asserting readers’ rights, instead of as needs must getting bogged down defending individual challenged books. [1]

Attempts to censor library books are on the rise. During 2025, nationwide, “…ALA documented 713 attempts to censor library materials and services, 487 of which targeted books … 92% of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of challenges originated from individual parents.” (Quoted from: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data)

Libraries’ responses to book ban challenges seldom satisfy anyone. Libraries, following Ranganathan’s dictums that A) Every book has its reader and B) Every reader has their book, are reluctant to remove books from their collections. Libraries have collection development policies which direct the kinds of books that are purchased to meet their community’s needs. Most importantly, library users have an infinite variety of wants and needs. Nearly every book is of interest and use to someone. Few book challenges result in the challenged book being withdrawn from a library’s collection.

When libraries get caught up in a book challenge, their efforts are most profitably spent by focusing on defending the reader, not the book. This is a strategic choice on libraries’ part, an approach that in essence focuses on the doughnut instead of the hole. It’s important to remember that at their root, requests to withdraw a library book are usually less about the book than they are about power, “…power entirely for its own sake…” as Orwell writes in 1984. If libraries focus on the appropriateness of any particular book, instead of everyone’s indisputable right to read, they are giving short shrift to those in the community who do or might find a book useful or entertaining. The are surrendering the power to choose what we read to someone other than the reader. Admittedly, regardless of whether libraries are able to make book challenges to be about the readers’ rights instead of the book, it gets more complicated if the book’s primary audience is kids.

While all Montanans’ rights to privacy are protected in Montana’s Constitution (Article II, Declaration of Rights, multiple Sections pertain), minors’ library-related rights to confidentiality and privacy are subject to statute. For example, kids with their own library card have an right to privacy in public libraries. If however their card is shared with their parents, or in school libraries, these rights are conditional. Further, local library boards have considerable autonomy in regards to policy, and local policies may have the effect of either protecting or restricting minors’ rights. In sum, so far as minors’ rights to privacy in libraries go, there are many aspects of Montana law to consider. The State Library offers a useful fact sheet: https://ftpaspen.msl.mt.gov/OrganizationResources/1051_65.pdf

While there’s no doubt that censorship attempts threaten people’s right to read, libraries (as institutions in support of the public good) face far bigger threats — such as having to operate with not enough money to get the job done right, or persistent efforts to reduce the authority of local library boards to govern their libraries. And book challenges cost scarce library resources. When libraries stop everything to reexamine a book’s suitability, they are directing resources away from their primary job of providing every library user with content and services sufficient to their needs.

Libraries fundamentally exist not to collect books but to help readers thrive. Let’s change the censorship discussion from the defense of books to the defense of everyone’s right to read.

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[1] In 1939, in pragmatic support of this human right, the American Library Association published its Library Bill of Rights, and again in 1953, their Freedom to Read Statement. These two statements have for over ninety years guided libraries and library boards and given rise a number of other similar statements including the United Nation’s Article 19 of their Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Federation of Library Associations and Federations (IFLA) Statement on Censorship. 

This essay can be found, with others, on the Montanans for Libraries website. The writer is an increasingly retired Montana librarian.