The deceptive paths in the management of the public library’s collections between censorship and legitimation of the post-truth: towards the paradigm of aletic rights

Abstract

Today libraries face, among others, two interlinked challenges: on the one hand the abundance of information available especially on the Internet and, on the other, the widespread habit to consider all this information as plausible. The contemporary world (the so called post-truth society) considers truth as something that simply doesn’t exist. This assumption contrasts with the idea of a library as an influential and legitimate structure of mediation between documents and readers.
This paper aims to demonstrate that, particularly in a society where many points of view coexist, the search for truth has, at the same time, an epistemological, ethical, political and professional foundation. Truth is not to be considered an absolute certainty but, more intuitively, as ‘things are as they really are’: this is a public discussion about research, as a method and a deontological and ethic responsibility. Three complementary issues are discussed: the need to separate facts from opinions, i.e. by checking and censoring what is demonstrably false; with regard to opinions, the importance to clarify that secularism does not mean indifference to values; finally, with regard to library collections, the need to bridge the gap between abstract and normative decisions and the needs of users as they really are and not as they are imagined. The author emphasises the dramatic urgency of public libraries’ mission and the professional role of librarians themselves, who are to be considered custodians of critical knowledge and freedom of thought.