Conflicts of neutrality: Exploring definitions, values, and practices among Canadian academic librarians
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Library neutrality, often considered a core value of librarianship, has been facing growing opposition in recent years, but little research exists on how it is being defined and prioritized by practicing librarians. Normally more of a concern in public libraries, increased politicization of academic spaces is bringing the neutrality debate to college and university libraries . This article presents the results of a survey of Canadian academic librarians' attitudes towards library neutrality, including how they define, value and practice neutrality. It is found that Canadian academic librarians most commonly define neutrality as “not taking a side” and that ambivalent and negative conceptions of neutrality are prevalent. Neutrality is largely considered to be impossible and unethical, and seen as significantly less valuable than other library values such as access to information and social responsibility. The unfavourable conceptions and low value attached to neutrality are reflected in Canadian academic librarians' actions and practice. Many librarians are purposely contravening the principle of neutrality by acting in ways that they consider non-neutral, with social justice is a frequent impetus for non-neutral action.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it