Drained-pool Politics Versus Digital Libraries in U.S. Cyberspace

Abstract

Though the capability to ban one book exists as it does in the physical world, access to digital libraries has become all-or-nothing in many instances around the nation. States, municipalities, nor school districts are united on the issue with federal law applying only on a case-by-case basis. Call it switch flipping or drained-pool politics: just don’t call it right. A refusal to share digital shelf space should not result in the eradication of digital libraries. Intellectual freedom is wrapped up in a possessive kind of love for libraries with the cost being the loss of millions of books in cyberspace. In the United States of America, the land of the free, a nation-wide balancing act is taking place that makes the horror of Fahrenheit 451 seem more like a documentary on our already eerily futuristic world.