They don’t—libraries are notoriously biased in the material they carry. Fortunately, they’re local, so those biases tend to match their constituencies, though you can find many counterexamples with a cursory search for censorship outrage.
It’s a good dimension to explore, though—for the problem hinted at in the question (some news/opinion perspectives not being available in many jurisdictions), is it a question of production, or of distribution, or something else that’s the limiting factor?
It’s also relevant when libraries keep copies of stuff, like newspapers. (If I disagreed with that as a solution, it might have less to do with the choice of newspapers, and more with ‘is this just physical media?’ At the same time, it can be hard to tell the size of a digital collection. The presence or absence isn’t clear at a glance.)
Now I’m wondering how this compares to stuff like Library Genesis.
This is an interesting question.
Oh, public. Hm. How do libraries stay neutral?
They don’t—libraries are notoriously biased in the material they carry. Fortunately, they’re local, so those biases tend to match their constituencies, though you can find many counterexamples with a cursory search for censorship outrage.
It’s a good dimension to explore, though—for the problem hinted at in the question (some news/opinion perspectives not being available in many jurisdictions), is it a question of production, or of distribution, or something else that’s the limiting factor?
It’s also relevant when libraries keep copies of stuff, like newspapers. (If I disagreed with that as a solution, it might have less to do with the choice of newspapers, and more with ‘is this just physical media?’ At the same time, it can be hard to tell the size of a digital collection. The presence or absence isn’t clear at a glance.)
Now I’m wondering how this compares to stuff like Library Genesis.