I recently put a poll up about library access as it concerns children. Today I closed the poll and tallied the results and want to discuss the results. This poll was actually just one part of a larger survey I did for my English class. I will talk about both, but will start with the poll I put on here. I will attach the full results, but only one other question besides the poll question will be discussed furthermore, at the end I will discuss my thoughts.

The results of the poll were

• yes, below 18 years old 12
• No, there should be no age restriction 9
• Yes, below 12 years old 6
• Yes, below 6 years old 2

I found these results quite enlightening. It seems as though of the people who answered my poll, (who I do not claim is necessarily representative of our country), the vast majority believe it is necessary to restrict by age. A whopping 41.38% even declared 17 year old’s should be restricted. Though a fair amount (31.03%) said there should be no restriction. These results are interesting because of the facts they imply. The ALA (American Library Association) supports the idea of no restrictions, yet these results suggest most people want restrictions despite the fact I made this poll available on the ALA Facebook page (as well as a couple other Facebook locations). But, these are not the full results of my survey. In fact this poll only represented one question from the complete survey. I will make the full results available here visa a link to the Excel worksheet below this line.

Library access survey results

I will start with the results of the question in the poll. Which happens to be question 3.

The results not including the poll

• yes, below 18 years old 3
• No, there should be no age restriction 7
• Yes, below 12 years old 7
• Yes, below 6 years old 0

This shows a slightly different picture. While more people still want restrictions than not, it is not nearly as big a difference in fact the amount of people supporting the no censorship policy rises to about 41.18%. To understand these results in context I’ll let you know these results were a combination of my college class and my Bible study group. A key to why these results differ may be that many of these voters were college students in their 20’s. Younger generation’s tend to be more liberal. So even though my Bible study class tends to be older people with religious beliefs, the question got balanced by my college class. (I did try to go for fairly balanced results).

Both results overall revealed a majority vote for restriction. This means combined the results are still overall favorable for restricting access. So we could say, using a couple of alternative terms, child protection or censorship is highly supported in America.

The other question I want to discuss was only on the written survey. It was “To what extent should parents make the library choice for the child”. I apologize if you find this wording awkward. I was basically asking how the responsibility for deciding what a child has access to should be divided.

The results were

parent library cooperation 13

total parent choice 4

total library choice 0

This is an obvious blowout. Between my college and Bible classes parent library cooperation was much preferred. A distant second was total parent choice. This supports the idea parents have inherent rights over their child, while suggesting libraries may have some rights. But nobody seems to think libraries are all knowing, perfect gods.

My personal views fall between the extremes. I believe some restrictions are necessary, but parents should be able to override these restrictions. Also once someone hits high school, restrictions should not effect them, unless the parents specifically say to continue them. So I guess what I’m saying is I believe in parent library cooperation in this matter with the parent getting final say. This helps protect vulnerable or irresponsible children, while providing a way for more mature children to gain access to materials at their level. I do want to provide an explanation of why I chose high school as the cut off for library choice restrictions. I believe by high school, a child has had plenty of time to learn and become mature. I believe that, in general,  by high school you will either be mature or not mature and only the student has control over that, not outside sources. Having full access or being restricted at the library will rarely be the tipping point saving or dooming someone during this phase of their life. Yet at the same time, they are advancing in their education and need access to resources that may have been inappropriate earlier in life, but is acceptable now that they can psychologically handle it. So not only is it useless to censor them, it is also beneficial to give them full access.