Both academic and law firm libraries make and receive requests for materials that some people might find obscene. Anatomy books, illustrations in which some may consider obscene, are regularly lent to those preparing injury, workers' compensation and medical malpractice cases. After decades of emphasizing and facilitating statewide resource-sharing, this legislation would halt the efforts of libraries to use limited financial resources in a cost effective and efficient manner. In introducing this legislation, I am sure that librarians were not considered the potential lawbreakers or targets. If SB 1036 is passed, however, it can be applied to 3,000 Illinois libraries and their over 25,000 staff members.
Librarians have good reason to be concerned.
History shows that libraries in this country are constant targets of censorship pressures because they carry a wide range of materials including works that offend some people. To give you some idea of scope of the materials currently challenged, the works of Henry James, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway are considered by some obscene. Just last year, Eureka, Illinois, removed Chaucer's Canterbury Tales from a literature course in the high school because the sexual content of some of the stories was considered inappropriate, i.e., obscene. Third, and finally, Illinois libraries are forerunners in making information available to the citizens of Illinois through the newest technologies. Along with much of the rest of the nation and indeed the world, Illinois libraries are connected via the Internet, the electronic information superhighway whose boundaries are seemingly limitless.