Most Interesting Sentence: "Despite the pressure to conform, librarians in favor of social responsibility in the 1960s rebelled against the notion of professional 'neutrality'" (Samek, 9).
Neutrality is a confusing and misleading term. Can't someone be technically aggressive by maintaining neutrality? Didn't John Edwards indirectly (but deliberately) meddle in the affairs of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton by remaining neutral for so long? Was America really neutral in World War I when it was shipping arms to both the Allies and the Triple Entente? Similarly, with libraries, such supposed neutrality seems impossible to me. With limited resources at almost any library's disposal, at some point, actual choices must be made about the choice of material. Even if you choose a pro-Iranian and an anti-Iranian book, you're still not being truly neutral if you're making choices. Similarly, the choice to either house or ignore the alternative press of the day agitates the neutrality debate.
When librarians violated this supposed neutrality by attacking the library establishment, they were accused of violating the neutral principles the library supposedly stood for. I personally think that the social responsibility movement was a very positive one, because neutrality is an unattainable ideal. People come to libraries in order to learn, and in order to learn, librarians must choose materials from a wide variety of voices and sources. In the end, this sort of thing requires a librarian to make some kind of decision...and there's nothing "neutral" about that.
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