censorship

Search.usa.gov gets 7 hits for: wikileaks "public libraries" , 39 for: wikileaks "public library" , 16 for wikileaks libraries filters , and 12 for wikileaks libraries filter. Search.usa.gov does include many STATE as well as federal sites and documents, but it still pays to try individual states. Maryland.gov gets only 3 hits for the search : wikileaks, that barely mention it, but www.ca.gov gets about 8 results, and www.ny.gov gets 10.

In addition to these "official" sites, it's well worth trying Google searches limiting to edu sites; or even adding the phrase "k 12" to get public school sites. The search: wikileaks "public library" filters site:edu gets 105 actual hits (of "about 9890" ); wikileaks policy "public library" site:us displays 177 (of "about 130,000) ; wikileaks "school library" "library policies" "k 12" gets 10.

There has been too little time for many journal articles to get published on this topic. Newspaper articles may help, of course. LexisNexis Academic (available at most large academic libraries) gets 237 articles for wikileaks and libraries, when you click "NEWS", then "US Newspapers and wires". This big list is manageable if you change the title list to "Expanded List" -- to see the search words in context and hot-linked. Factiva, known as a business database, is also very good for general news. It gets 58 hits for wikileaks and libraries, limiting to "past year". It automatically gives search words in context - but not hot linked. But LexisNexis "US Legal"/"Law Reviews" is far less promising. The search: wikileaks w/40 libraries (to get the words within 40 words of each other in those LONG articles) gets only 7 hits, and most seem to be about Library of Congress.

All the news stories I found addressing the Chapel Library Project have identified it as a Federal Prison regulation. State and federal facilities do not use the same rules and regulations generally: state prisons have a plethora of different book restrictions state-to-state (more on that below) but state prisons and federal prisons media restrictions do not appear to apply to one another.

Incidentally, the new policy was recently overturned in part -- though the New York Times reports that the Bureau of Prisons has "not abandoned the idea of creating such lists.", (Banerjee, N. "Prisons to restore purged religious books" New York Times 9/27/07.)

If the facility to which you are delivering ILLs houses Federal inmates, or this prison is on contract to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, federal prison rules are likely to be an issue for you. Another RadRef member found a 2003 report submitted to the Justice Department titled Governments' Management of Private Prisons, describing the use of private prisons by both state governments and the BOP. A quote from the report:

"The most usual result, regardless of who owns the facility, is the creation of one-to-one relationship between prison operator and the state prison system. That is, the state prison system is the contractor’s sole client at the facility; the only prisoners held in the facility are those under the jurisdiction of the client state agency."

Those who are interested in the basic difference between state and federal prisons -- specifically who is sent to which -- can find more information on this Federal Bureau of Prisons web page.