PurposeContemporary adult readers' advisory aims to adhere to (what I term) a pure preference satisfaction model in which librarians provide nonjudgmental book recommendations that satisfy their patrons' aesthetic tastes rather than improve upon them. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether readers' advisors really ought to treat all such tastes as essentially benign, even when doing so may conflict with core commitments to diversity and social responsibility.Design/methodology/approachThis paper utilizes a thought experiment to interrogate our intuitions regarding the practice of recommending recreational materials featuring marginalized protagonists. The author also draws on theoretical insights from feminist aesthetician A.W. Eaton's innovative work on taste in bodies to formulate argumentation addressing the ethical dilemma presented here.FindingsOur reading tastes can, in fact, be oppressive, working to maintain unjust power relations that are often thought to be the product merely of bad beliefs. On the view advanced here, oppressive tastes function as real obstacles to collective self-governance because they systematically distort our judgments of the credibility, empathic accessibility, and fundamental worth of our fellow democratic citizens. Librarians' obligation to protect and promote democracy, therefore, provides practitioners with a crucial justification for recommending diverse books to all readers, even (and perhaps especially) those who actively disprefer them.Originality/valueThe paper illustrates how contemporary work in analytic (and specifically feminist) aesthetics can furnish LIS scholars with the intellectual resources to resolve political problems in the library. The author's analysis also lays the groundwork for further consideration of alternative ideals for readers' advisory that will capitalize on the service's educative and emancipatory potential.

Librarians often object to Internet filters on the grounds that filters are prone to overblocking and underblocking. This argument implies that a significant problem with contemporary filters is that they are insufficiently fine-grained. In this article, we posit that present-day filters will always be conceptually capable of failure, regardless of how granular their content analysis becomes. This is because, we argue, objections to content are best understood as objections to problematic interactions between content and particular knowers. We import the concept of the situated knower from feminist epistemology to capture the heterogeneous, socially embedded nature of patrons, about whom we cannot make blunt generalizations for filtering purposes. A successful filter would need information about these differently situated patrons, the content they seek, and the interactions between the two. We conclude that a genuinely successful Internet filter would therefore need to be both mind reading and fortune-telling. O ne common objection to Internet filters is that they sometimes block content they should not block and fail to block content that they should block. These phenomena are known as overblocking and underblocking, respectively. The criticism that filters regularly overblock and underblock addresses both particular filtering policies and, more generally, manufacturer settings; it also presupposes that a sufficiently fine-grained filter that blocks by rote in accordance with an existing policy would be a successful filter. But is this the proper goal for an Internet filter? To put it another way: Even if existing Internet filters could be made to perfectly do what they are designed to do, would this constitute successful Internet filtering or merely successful blocking of particular (kinds of) content? In this article, we articulate a conceptual answer to this question in the context of the library. Our answer stands in contrast to more common technical or policy-oriented ones. We argue that in order to genuinely succeed, given librarians' other goals and values, an Internet filter would have to take account of the role that the information sought would play in the

Is contemporary Reader's Advisory (RA) a purely populist service? In an effort to answer that question, this paper begins with a brief account of the ideological tension between populism and elitism in the library profession. It then continues to an exploration of the views on "taste elevation" represented in seven editions of the flagship Genreflecting series, published between 1982 and 2013. On the basis of this critical interpretive work, the paper concludes that the most plausible answer to its initial question is "no." While Genreflecting portrays RA as distinctly opposed to taste elevation, the service remains fundamentally normative, and further, inescapably concerned with the improvement of individuals' tastes. This is because while advisors do not try to elevate readers' tastes in books or genres, they do seek to cultivate in patrons a preference for pleasure reading. Insofar as RA is structured to instill such a preference, and insofar as to prefer is always to prefer one thing over some alternative, RA is essentially a project devoted to taste elevation in leisure activities.

PurposeDiverse books is a fundamentally political concept that performs particular normative work in discursive space. Part I of this project demonstrated that this was the case, further claiming that descriptive conceptual analysis was therefore methodologically inadequate to the task of defining the term. The purpose of this paper – Part II of II – is to advance a universal account of diverse books using an alternative form of conceptual analysis designed to suit the needs and commitments of LIS scholarship.Design/methodology/approachThis paper proposes and deploys a new method called informational pragmatic analysis, through which one develops accounts of political concepts in terms of their legitimate aims and benefits vis-à-vis informational justice.FindingsDiverse books are those systematically devalorized literary works we must make an ameliorative effort to promote in order to advance informational justice for oppressed persons in particular. These works exist on a contextually specific spectrum of moral urgency. A critical task for the diverse books movement is therefore to determine through democratic deliberation which (types of) books are most urgently in need of promotion under varying sociopolitical conditions.Originality/valueIn addition to proposing a new analytical methodology for LIS, the paper articulates and defends a pragmatic account of diverse books that resists regressive misappropriation. This further lays the groundwork for future critical interrogations of the activities of various agents and agencies of print, both within and beyond the library.

No abstract