Academic Libraries and Intellectual Freedom Barbara M. Jones
Barbara M. Jones is Head of the Rare Book and Special
Collections Library at the University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign and author of Libraries, Access, and
Intellectual Freedom: Developing Policies for Public and
Academic Libraries (ALA: 1999). Traditional library practice
defined intellectual freedom issues very narrowly and relegated
them to public and school libraries. But then in 1987 the FBI
began visiting academic libraries. In an effort to uncover what
they suspected to be subversive gathering of information and
recruiting of operatives by foreign agents, FBI agents pressured
library staff to disclose the reading habits of “suspicious
looking foreigners” and asked to see circulation records. In the
twenty-first century academic library, the concept of
intellectual freedom has broadened to include such library
issues as fee-based services, donor restrictions on manuscript
collections, reference interviews, and purchasing “politically
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