Understanding why people attempt to remove, relocate, or restrict books in an age of ubiquitous access is one of the more puzzling aspects of contemporary challenge cases. In order to better comprehend this largely symbolic phenomenon, this study focused on the arguments that book challengers employed to justify the removal, relocation, or restriction of books in 13 challenge cases in public libraries and schools across the United States between 2007 and 2011. Three sources of discourse, which were coded for common themes, were analyzed. The first consisted of a variety of documents, obtained via state open record requests to governing bodies, which were produced in the course of challenge cases. Recordings of book challenge public hearings constituted the second source of data. The third source of discourse consisted of interviews with challengers. The study found the following common themes in challengers' worldviews: First, they saw contemporary society as being in a state of decline and were concerned with preserving the innocence of children in the midst of this decay. Second, they constructed public institutions as symbols of the community that must represent their values and aid parents in their difficult role as boundary setters. Finally, challengers demonstrated a reverence for the books as a material object and employed common sense interpretive strategies. It is hoped that this analysis will offer a starting point for comparing the discourse of challengers to the discourse of other social actors and aid librarians and other information professionals in providing effective responses to challengers to materials in their respective institutions.

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A B S T R A C TData and software are critical components of scientific work. Increased data and software sharing promises many benefits for science. Many stakeholders are building infrastructure and implementing policies to promote sharing. However, sharing remains rare in practice. Attention must be paid to researchers' ethical perspectives on sharing to fully realize the promise of sharing and promote greater circulation of data and software and better uptake of infrastructure for data and software curation. This research presents an agenda for researching these perspectives, including characterizing and accounting for researchers' perspectives; examining how these perspectives shape decisions related to data and software sharing; and understanding how and why differences in perspectives arise and are contested, negotiated, and resolved in multidisciplinary scientific collaboration. This agenda will enable stakeholders to identify and resolve differences in ethical perspectives, and develop policies, infrastructures, and education that support existing ethical perspectives, and cultivate better ethical practices.

One of the many areas of conflict between challengers and professional librarians centers on the definition of censorship. Challengers often employ a definition that maintains that banning materials is the only true form of censorship, while the codified definition of censorship within librarianship is concerned with impediments to access. Through analysis of arguments in the West Bend (WI) challenge case, this article explores three themes in challengers’ narrow definitions of censorship found in their discourse. First, challengers argue that moving books within the library is not considered to be censorship. Second, they maintain that labeling books for content is also not a form of censorship. Finally, challengers focus on “common sense” actions and the power of the majority in their arguments to impede access to controversial materials.

One of the more confusing aspects of contemporary librarianship is its support for collecting "all sides" in its institutions while, at the same time, arguing for the positive nature of reading for all. This article focuses two positions toward knowledge effects. One, the postmodernist view, is agnostic toward the effects of gaining new knowledge while the other, the traditional-modernist view, holds that the effects of new knowledge can be known and are inevitable. It is the postmodernist position that undergirds contemporary librarianship's support for intellectual freedom.