[csnover]

How close does the analogy need to be in order for you to feel comfortable that what Internet Archive are doing is not at all dangerous or unprecedented? While you may not have encountered it, some libraries do label books for content[0]:

> Some libraries block access to certain materials by placing physical or virtual barriers between the user and those materials. For example, materials are sometimes labeled for content or placed in a “locked case,” “adults only,” “restricted shelf,” or “high-demand” collection.

(emphasis mine)

Here’s another real-world example. In the physical world, book publishers often print updated editions of books with corrections, distribute errata, attach disclaimers[1], and sometimes recall books entirely[2]. (If you feel the urge to split hairs here about how one entity is a third-party publisher and the other is a third-party library, please think seriously on how this distinction is relevant to adding context.)

The concerns that the ALA have with labelling in the physical world don’t apply to what IA is doing, since IA are not creating barriers for patrons to access content, they are just adding context—as book publishers, museum curators, librarians, film distributors, documentarians, historians, and others have done for centuries.

[0] http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpret...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/business/media/publisher-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/books/naomi-wolf-outrages...

[SpicyLemonZest]

I generally trust that librarians take the attitude towards categorization and labeling that your source presents, as a neutral exercise that has to be done for practical concerns. Some people will "be predisposed to think of labeled and filtered resources as objectionable", but that's wrong, and the library has a duty to try and structure things to minimize that incorrect predisposition. That doesn't seem to be the attitude the Internet Archive is taking here - information like "this article was part of a disinformation campaign" or "this article was banned by Medium" is relevant only to the extent that it discourages people from reading it or believing what it has to say.

Some of the practices you're describing in book publishing do bother me. I have no issue with the author of a work making corrections, errata, disclaimers, etc. But when a publisher agrees to publish a book, and then reneges because they don't agree with its contents, I find that disturbing.