It started with a fight about a book. But what surprised Tara Cooper, librarian at Columbus (Ohio) City Schools, wasn’t the challenge, it was the reaction she heard from some other librarians: “Maybe I just won’t buy something like that in the future.”
In “Soft Censorship: How to Recognize It and How to Combat It,” a session on June 29 at the American Library Association’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia, Cooper explored how external pressures, policy choices, and personal biases can play into self-censorship and ways that school library workers can fight for a collection that serves their students.
“Soft censorship is incredibly hard and it has many pointy edges,” Cooper says. Because there is no record and no appeals process, it’s a far more insidious process than outright book bans—and harder to fight. Self-censorship sometimes feels like self-preservation, whether protecting one’s job, emotions, or reputation. Young and new librarians are particularly susceptible to self-censorship when they feel less confident in their ability to defend a selection decision. “Make friends with an old librarian!” Cooper suggests. “They’ll help you.”
The first step in feeling safer in your book selection decisions is a well-crafted and well-documented reconsideration and collection development policy. In some states these documents have no legal standing if they’re not updated on a regular basis, which for Ohio is every three years. This meant that Cooper’s policy had to be updated and reapproved.
Cooper is largely happy with the resulting policy, which requires that anyone who challenges a book have a stake in the school district (as a teacher, administrator, parent, guardian, or student), have read the book, and cite page numbers and specific objections. “This stops 90 percent of them in their tracks,” she says. Plus, materials stay on the shelves until the challenge process is complete, so those who challenge books don’t get the immediate gratification of the book being pulled.
When crafting a reconsideration policy, Cooper recommends you consider:
- What is the purpose of your policy?
- Who can make a challenge? If at all possible, outsiders shouldn’t be permitted.
- Who can review challenges? Fight to get a librarian or teacher involved.
- What are the criteria for review?
- Is there an appeals process?
- Will the book stay on the shelves during review?
She also urges policy creators to avoid vague language without clear definitions like obscene or age-appropriate. Age-appropriateness is subjective, and it’s difficult to account for the breadth of experiences she sees in her students. “In the same day last year, I had a conversation with three sixth graders about how excited they were for the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book … and another kid who came in teary-eyed and asked me what the early signs of pregnancy are,” she says. “How in the world do you define a term like age-appropriate when you have all of that in the same place?”
When challenges come, staying calm is key. “When they come at you not attacking the book but your character, that’s the hardest,” Cooper says. But fighting back with high emotions comes at a cost to credibility. She recommends approaching interactions with the assumption that the other person is coming from a place of good intentions—even though, she notes, “my friends tell me this is incredibly naïve.”
Cooper has also had to fight her own biases to serve her students’ needs. The student body at her school is “very into politics,” and she has kept the library stocked with biographies of politicians and Supreme Court justices. “Sometimes it is difficult for me to put aside my own personal feelings and buy books that are just factual,” she says, “but I do that so they can form their opinions and I’m not just feeding them mine.… You shouldn’t be able to look at my collection and know how I vote.”
Judging age-appropriateness is an area where it’s very easy for unconscious bias to creep in. “I know at my middle school I’m not comfortable buying anything with an open-door romance scene,” Cooper says. However, whenever she makes a decision not to buy a book, she consults other librarians in her district and librarian friends to make sure “it’s not my wanting to keep them younger than they are.”
The antidote to soft censorship is courageous, intentional leadership, Cooper says. “We are the librarians. So let’s go save the world.”
