Last year, the Gustavus Library participated in the #DayofFacts campaign via our blog and social media. Some of our tweets even went viral! (Well, viral for us.) On the anniversary of the event, we are reposting last year’s blog post about the day itself – and the reasons that facts continue to remain important.
On Friday, February 17, the Gustavus Library will join libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions to participate in the #DayofFacts campaign. Day of Facts is a social media event dedicated to reminding the public that facts matter, and that our institutions are still trusted sources for truth and knowledge.
On Friday, we will be on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, informing you about the facts and information you can find at our library. See what other libraries are doing by following the #DayofFacts hashtag.
It’s worth stating that by nature, libraries are not neutral spaces. Our profession’s Code of Ethics outlines the ethical principles that guide our work. Among them are the principles of intellectual freedom and resistance to censorship:
“In a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and the freedom of access to information. We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations.”
Our profession’s Core Values lists democracy, diversity, intellectual freedom, education & lifelong learning, and the public good, among others. Not to mention social responsibility:
“The broad social responsibilities of the American Library Association are defined in terms of the contribution that librarianship can make in ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society; support for efforts to help inform and educate the people of the United States on these problems and to encourage them to examine the many views on and the facts regarding each problem; and the willingness of ALA to take a position on current critical issues with the relationship to libraries and library service set forth in the position statement.”
In this contentious political climate, we do not endorse one party over another, we do not tell you who to vote for or what stance you should take on a particular issue. What we do, however, is operate from our core values and our own library’s mission to say that facts matter, that information matters, that the open and free exchange of ideas matters.
This post is part of the Library Matters/Libraries Matter blog series
-jkg
