Idaho Librarian, vol. 54, no. 4, May, 2003
Contents

A Record Enriched:

A Case for a Library Catalog Note for Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America:

The Origins of a National Gun Culture”—

Part II

[Abstract:  Michael A. Bellesiles’s Arming America:  The Origins of a National Gun Culture, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 2000, has been at the center of a recent controversy concerning the Second Amendment, gun control, and academic integrity.  Claiming that few Americans owned firearms before the Civil War, the book was both praised and criticized by reviewers on either side of the “individual rights” versus “collective rights” issue of the Second Amendment and won the 2001 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.  Scholars who had come to different conclusions, however, criticized Bellesiles’s research, and a committee appointed by Emory University concluded that Bellesiles’s work was unprofessional and questioned his scholarly integrity.  Bellesiles resigned from Emory, Columbia rescinded the Bancroft Prize, and Knopf stopped publication of the book.  At least one library has withdrawn its copy from its collection.

 The history of Arming America, set out in “A Record Enriched—Part 1” (Idaho Librarian 54:3 [February 2003]), offers a rare glimpse into the biography of a book in which author, publisher, reviewers, award committees, the media, academics, and librarians have all played roles.  This second and last part of “A Record Enriched” will conclude the discussion of the controversy over Arming America by suggesting how librarians might respond:  placing a note in the library’s catalog record for the book informing patrons about the book’s intellectual and historical context.]

The controversy concerning Michael A. Bellesiles’s Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture is winding down.  Though dropped by his first publisher, Knopf, Bellesiles has found a new publisher in Soft Skull Press of Brooklyn, New York.[1]  According to the February 13, 2003, press release from Soft Skull, the re-publication of Arming America is not the first time the Press has guaranteed that Americans “can read books the Right doesn’t like,” and “it is imperative that we stand up to the NRA smear machine.”[2]  

HISTORIANS RESPOND

The controversy may be waning, but its after-affects will likely be felt for a long time to come.  For one thing, the historical profession has been forced to respond.  The Council of the American Historical Association decided at its May 3-4, 2003, semi-annual meeting in Washington, D.C., no longer to adjudicate accusations of professional misconduct but to begin a “campaign of public education, explaining why the historical profession cares about plagiarism, falsification of evidence, and other violations of scholarly integrity.”[3]  Not all AHA members are happy with the Council’s decision.  Carla Rahn Phillips, Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, and former Vice President of the AHA’s Professional Division, believes that professional organizations are the only venues for charges of misconduct to be examined, since universities and publishers hesitate to do so.  Other academic professional organizations, in fact, do not plan to follow suit.  The American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, and the American Political Science Association will all continue to investigate violations of professional ethics.[4]

REVIEWERS' RESPONSIBILITIES

The controversy surrounding Arming America has also had an effect on the media.  One of the most outspoken in facing the implications of the Arming America controversy for the press is Karen Sandstrom, Book Editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  She has said that she prefers “not to be part of the machine that perpetuates the deception,” and will expect her reviewers to be more skeptical from now on when reviewing nonfiction books.[5]

Likewise, academics have been prompted to emphasize the responsibility of peer reviewers in the Arming America controversy.  Gary A. Mauser, Professor at  Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, called the controversy a “monumental failure of peer review.”[6]  David J. Bordua, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has argued that reviewers’ easy acceptance of Arming America is even more serious than the book’s faults.  A professor’s doing fraudulent work is less scandalous than his peers’ accepting it.  Reviewers are “not as critical of arguments that support their prejudices.”[7]  The real scandal, therefore, is “the willing gullibility of ideological reviewers and academic historians.”[8]  

ARE LIBRARIES ABDICATING RESPONSIBILITY?

The Arming America controversy’s effect on the library profession has been noticed in library and information science literature.  In an article in Information Today.[9], Stephanie C. Ardito raised the question of a librarian’s liability for providing bad information.   Francine Fialkoff, Editor of the Library Journal since 1997, has been one of the most consistent to take seriously academic dishonesty’s implications for libraries.[10]  Quoting a university librarian speaking anonymously about what a library might do about a fraudulent book, Fialkoff said that librarians might “put something in the record.”  “American Library Association strictures against labeling notwithstanding,” she continued, “his solution might be the most appropriate for the research community, although few academic librarians seem willing to embrace it.  In fact, their response is woefully inadequate.”  Academic librarians have “abdicated their roles as evaluators in favor of one as merely collectors,” she concluded.[11]  

THE LEGACY OF BELLESILES: IN CLASSROOMS, JOURNAL ARTICLES, 

LEGAL DECISIONS, LIBRARIES

Arming America also continues to have effect in the classroom.  Course syllabi with Bellesiles’s original article or Arming America in their bibliographies can be found on the World Wide Web by a simple Google search with “bellesiles” and “syllabus” as keywords.  Carole Shammas, University of Southern California, for example, used Bellesiles’s JAH article in her “Research Seminar in Early North American History,” Spring 2001, as an example of the use of probate records in historical research,[12] and, a year later, both the article and the Arming America controversy in her “Quantitative Historical Analysis” class, Spring 2002.[13]  More recent syllabi tend to include Bellesiles’s Arming America as an example of academic dishonesty.  In a similar vein, at the Web site of Bedford/St. Martin’s,[14] a publisher of college textbooks (including The Bedford Reader, a college composition textbook heavily used in American colleges and universities), the work is used as an example of poor research methodology that can lead to plagiarism.  Even libraries are mentioning Arming America as an example of academic fraud.  Arming America is suggested as a case study of plagiarism on the “Preventing Plagiarism” page of the Library Information for Faculty Web page of Portland Community College, Portland, Oregon.[15] 

Both Bellesiles’s article and Arming America  have been cited in numerous historical magazines and peer-reviewed journals, often with approval, if not outright praise.  It may well be that the authors of those articles as well, have changed their opinions of Bellesiles's work, but the articles themselves continue to exist unchanged, and will undoubtedly be read and cited by many a student doing research on the Second Amendment and gun control.  Bellesiles's claims have appeared even in reference books.  His original article was reprinted as the first chapter of Guns in America:  A Reader [16] edited by Jan Dizard, Professor of Sociology at Amherst College and owned by 1,001 OCLC member libraries, including seven in Idaho.  Two recent encyclopedias, moreover, have uncritically cited Bellesiles.  In the Encyclopedia of Gun Control and Gun Rights (owned by 1,264 OCLC member libraries, ten in Idaho), Glenn H. Utter, a Professor of Political Science, in an article entitled “Gun Culture,” cited Bellesiles’s JAH article on the disinterest of early 19th-century Americans in guns. [17]  Likewise, in an article on “Gun Culture” in Guns in American Society:  An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law (owned by 294 OCLC libraries, one in Idaho), F. Frederick Hawley, Professor of Criminal Justice at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, North Carolina, cited Arming America as the source for his claim that “recent historians point out that most Americans, even on the frontier, did not own guns, nor were they familiar with their use and handling,”[18] the point disputed by Bellesiles’s critics, both amateur and professional.

Bellesiles's ideas have also influenced two recent legal decisions concerning the meaning of the Second Amendment.  San Francisco’s Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cited Bellesiles’s research in its decision Silveira v. Lockyer, December 5, 2002, which ruled that the Second Amendment established a collective, not an individual, right to “keep and bear arms.”[19] It later deleted the citations from its decision, in a move legal experts called very unusual.[20]  In the case, U.S. v. Emerson, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, New Orleans [21]  Bellesiles’s was cited as supporting the collective rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.  The Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which congratulated Bellesiles on winning the Bancroft Prize [22], filed an amicus curiae brief [23] in the case which cited Bellesiles’s “Gun Laws in Early America:  The Regulation of Firearms Ownership, 1607-1794,” published in the Fall 1998 issue of Law and History Review.  David Yassky, Brooklyn Law School Assistant Professor of Law and instrumental in drafting the Brady Handgun Control Law (1993), also filed an amicus curiae brief [24] that cited Bellesiles’s LHR article and his “Suicide Pact:  New Readings of the Second Amendment,” published in the Summer 1999 issue of the University of Minnesota Law School’s Constitutional Commentary.[25]

Arming America has flexed its muscles in libraries, as well.  It is included in library pathfinders on gun control at several libraries.  It was also well reviewed by librarians in library publications.  Mary Carroll of the Adult Books Editorial Staff of the American Library Association’s Booklist believed Arming America “upends the traditional notion that guns are as American as apple pie,” and Hazel Rochman, Young Adult Books Editor, added to Carroll's recommendation that the book provided “detailed historical background” for young adults researching gun control.[26]  

A May 9, 2003, search of OCLC’s WorldCat revealed that 1,875 OCLC member libraries own a copy of the first Alfred A. Knopf edition of Arming America, and 98 own a copy of the 2001 Vintage Books paperback edition.  Fourteen of those are Idaho libraries, both public and academic, including Boise Public, Moscow’s Latah County District, Nampa Public, and Twin Falls Public, and BSU, BYU Idaho, CSI, ISU, Lewis-Clark State College, NIC, U of I, and the U of I Law School.  The libraries of the Idaho State Historical Society and the Mountain Home Air Force Base own copies, as well.  Fewer than half of the OCLC member libraries, however, own copies of Joyce Lee Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms:  831 own the first edition, and 77 own the First Harvard University Press Paperback edition.  Of the Idaho member libraries, only BSU, NIC, ISU, Nampa’s Northwest Nazarene University, and the U of I Law Library, as well as the State Law Library, own copies in either edition, half those that own copies of Arming America.[27]  The libraries that own copies of Clayton Cramer’s For the Defense of Themselves and the State:  The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms are even fewer—only 359.  Only the U of I Law Library, among the Idaho member libraries, owns a copy.[28]  The holdings of both public and academic libraries, therefore, seem de facto biased against studies that support the “individual right” interpretation of the Second Amendment.  

LIBRARIES AND THEIR USERS REACT

Some have called for librarians to respond.  In an op-ed piece, Linda Gorman, Senior Fellow of the Independence Institute, Golden, Colorado, asked, “Should professional librarians be concerned with the veracity of the books on their non-fiction shelves?” and wondered whether libraries needed “warning labels” for “lies in the library”?[29]  In a History News Network debate, Jerome Sternstein, Brooklyn College Professor Emeritus of History, and Eugene Volokh, UCLA School of Law, discussed whether libraries should withdraw Arming America.  Sternstein worried about the effect of fraudulent books on scholarship.  Volokh opined that libraries need not “take a stance on whether the critics are right or the author is right” but only need “let readers know about the criticisms,” since “the library’s purpose is to inform readers.” [30] 

Public libraries have responded variously to requests from patrons to withdraw Arming America from their collections.  A request from a nonresident patron to remove the book was addressed at the February 13, 2003, Board of Trustees meeting at the Bettendorf Public Library Information Center in Bettendorf, Iowa.[31]  Library policy, however, permits consideration of such requests only from Bettendorf residents,[32]so no action was taken.  The Wichita Public Library, according to the minutes of the January 21, 2003, meeting of the Library Board of Directors, had expected a request from a non-Sedgwick County resident to withdraw its copy of Arming America,[33] but nothing more than a verbal complaint was made.[34]  The Ames Public Library, Ames, Iowa, also received a patron request to remove the book, as reported by the Director to the Board of Trustees at its January 16, 2003, meeting.[35]  The request did not meet the criteria of the Library’s collection development policy for withdrawal.[36] and withdrawal was not approved.  But the library subsequently put a note in the catalog record as well as in the book indicating that the Bancroft Prize for Arming America had been rescinded.[37]  

WHAT SHOULD ACADEMIC LIBRARIES DO?

It would seem that academic libraries have a special obligation to respond to the issues raised by Arming America.  Academic librarians, especially those with faculty status, stand with one foot in the library, among other librarians, and the other in the classroom, among teaching faculty, and universities take academic dishonesty very seriously.  According to Idaho State University’s statement on academic dishonesty in the ISU Faculty/Staff Handbook,[38] the possible punishments for a student’s academic fraud run from a warning to permanent expulsion from the University with “Expulsion for Academic Dishonesty” recorded on the student’s transcript.  How can faculty expect academic integrity from their students if they remain silent on fraudulent resources in their collections?  Moreover, according to its Mission Statement, the Eli M. Oboler Library, like other academic libraries, pledges itself to support the university’s “teaching and research” missions.[39]  It is the responsibility, therefore, not only of collection development librarians in academic libraries to get the best information, and of information literacy instruction librarians to teach students good from bad information, but also of cataloging librarians to lead them to good information, particularly today, when, according to an article in Phi Beta Kappa’s The American Scholar by historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Revolution in the Library”[40] (reprinted in the Spring, 1999 special issue of Library Trends, “Human Response to Library Technology”), [41] not only access to information but also information itself has been democratized, deceiving students that one piece of information is as good as any other and making them adequate fact-finders but poor thinkers.  Whatever academic librarians do about the bad information in their collections, they must do something, or they have no place in the academy.   

ARE CATALOG NOTES THE ANSWER?

THE LABELING ISSUE

The most serious objection to notes in catalog records for controversial books stems from the American Library Association’s Statement on Labeling,[42] an interpretation of its Library Bill of Rights.[43]  Leonard Hitchcock, at Idaho State University’s Eli M. Oboler Library, is the inspiration for this Arming America catalog note project.  In his article “Enriching the Record,” published in the September 2000 issue of The Journal of Academic Librarianship,[44] Mr. Hitchcock makes the case for library catalog notes for controversial books that set the books in their intellectual contexts.  Such notes at the ISU Library would be labeled “Oboler Note,” would be written by Oboler librarians, and would be solicited, received, edited, and maintained, according to Library guidelines, by the editor of a Library’s Book Notes page at the Library Web site, who would also receive, edit, and post suggested alterations and additions to existing Oboler Notes.  The ALA Statement objects to “prejudicial labels” and “prejudicial systems” of organization.  But what access point or organizational standard is not in some way prejudicial?  Librarians segregate, discriminate, and label—and teach others to do so.  Notes in library catalogs for controversial books, moreover, “are intended to provide an intellectual context for the books that they comment upon, and, in so doing, to give the potential reader of those books an intellectual perspective on them.  Their purpose is not to restrict access to the books they comment upon, but to inform that access.”[45]  As such, they are merely one of many “organizational schemes designed . . . to facilitate access to materials,” to which the Statement does not object.  It is a scheme, moreover, that provides a type of access that library catalogs ignore:  not only a book’s bibliographic relationship to other editions or to other books by the same author, on the same topic, or in a different language or medium, but rather a book’s intellectual relationship to other books.

Labeling bad information is not, of course, without precedent in libraries.  Medical libraries routinely label journal articles later identified by their authors or others as containing erroneous or false data.[46]  The consequences of mis- or disinformation and the value of identifying and labeling it have been noticed in both the medical[47] and library literature [48] including a number of articles in Medical Reference Services Quarterly[49] and in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association,[50] as well as in a series of articles in both the medical and library literature by Gwendolyn Snodgrass, M.L.S., and Mark Pfeifer, M.D., of the University of Louisville School of Medicine.[51]  The National Library of Medicine defines a retraction as “a letter to the editor or an editorial stating that an article previously published was based on fraudulent research” and implemented a policy in 1984 for locating and indexing retractions, thereby accepting its responsibility, since, “as the compiler of the largest biomedical database, it could be the unwitting conduit for disseminating incorrect information.”[52]  The Idaho Health Sciences Library (IHSL) at Idaho State University likewise has a policy concerning such retractions.  According to the “Eli M. Oboler Policy:  Retractions and Errata, September 23, 1994,” “fraudulent articles are critical to identify because later researchers could unknowingly use them when conducting their own research.”  Although many medical libraries identify such articles, “some do not do so, believing that marking such articles would constitute censorship.  ISU Library staff differentiates such identification from censorship because it is linking facts, rather than opinion, to the original.”  IHSL librarians therefore apply labels reading “Retracted Article” and “Retracted Chapter” to articles so identified in MEDLINE.

A moment’s reflection, furthermore, will demonstrate just how pervasive labeling is in libraries.  Librarians routinely segregate and label special displays, albeit most often in public libraries, of Pulitzer Prize-winners, New York Times Bestsellers, and Oprah’s picks.  A library catalog, moreover, is nothing more than a collection of labels arranged in a logical order.  The description in a bibliographic record labels a library resource.  The headings in the record label the bibliographic description.  The call number is the label that links the bibliographic record to the book labeled on the spine with the call number.  Users would find nothing in a library without labels.  Labeling is what librarians do.  If labeling is a “censor’s tool,” it is also a librarian’s.

The practical implementation of a policy supporting the inclusion in a library catalog’s bibliographic records of notes concerning controversies surrounding books, however, would certainly be challenging.  The project is extremely labor intensive.  The controversy over Arming America alone has taken me weeks to research, extensive use of the LiLI databases, and numerous interlibrary loan requests.[53]  (As much as I appreciate the enhanced searching capabilities of full-text databases, I am old fashioned enough to prefer print copies of periodical articles.)  The question of the comprehensiveness of such a project is also serious.  Should the Oboler Library likewise add a note in the bibliographic records for Stephen Ambrose’s plagiarized The Wild Blue and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, both of which it owns?  The project, finally, is not without its ambiguities.  There is the question, for example, of what an Oboler Note really is.  It is neither a summary nor an abstract of a book’s contents.  It is not a review of the books argument or of its value.  It is rather a summary of the book’s intellectual and historical context.

The ability of the OPACs of sophisticated integrated library systems, such as the Horizon Information Portal’s Enriched Content of Dynix (formerly epixtech, inc.), used by the Ames Public Library, to include in library catalog records hyperlinks to external resources, however, makes the inclusion in library catalog records of notes and reviews much easier.  Ames Public, for example, links users from its Arming America catalog record to the book’s table of contents, an excerpt of its introduction, a summary of the book, the (favorable) review from Publishers Weekly, and a short biography of Bellesiles, as well as the illustration of the dust jacket of the first, hardcover edition.  The URLs for these links are not in MARC 856 fields but are rather pulled by Horizon from other sites, such as Barnes and Noble’s and Amazon.com.  One could argue, of course, that including in the catalog record a photograph of a book’s cover with its blurbs and linking the record to external reviews is a violation of the ALA’s Statement on Labeling.  At least one could question the wisdom of linking to reviews from publishing trade journals designed not to inform library patrons or scholars but rather to sell books.

The MARC Bibliographic Format, however, is remarkably hospitable and would easily accommodate such a note.  (Most of the MARC record, in fact, is a series of labels.  The 00s, 100s, 600s, 700s, and 800s are all access-point labels to the bibliographic description encoded with the 200s, 300s, and 400s.  The 500s are nothing more than a series of value-added labels to a description allowing a librarian to express an opinion about the described resource’s relationship to another or about the value of the resource.)  The following 5XX Note fields of the Format could be used in catalog records to call attention to the context of the controversy surrounding Arming America, as well as to the contexts of other controversial books:

The catalog record for Arming America, therefore, could include a note concerning the controversy, citations to reviews, hyperlinks to external resources, or a combination thereof.  The repeatable MARC 510 Citation/References Note to cite an array of reviews of the book, both pro and con, chosen by librarians and not pulled automatically from Amazon.com; the 520 Summary, Etc., for the Oboler Note; and the 586 Awards Note to acknowledge both the receipt and rescission of the book’s Bancroft Prize could all be used to exploit the MARC Bibliographic Format to its potential.  

A PROPOSED CATALOG NOTE FOR ARMING AMERICA

Whatever choice is made, however, a note such as the following would alert library users to the controversy surrounding Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America:

Oboler Note:  Arming America has been at the center of controversy concerning the Second Amendment, gun control, and academic integrity.  Claiming that few Americans owned firearms before the Civil War, the book was both praised and criticized by reviewers on either side of the “individual rights” versus “collective rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment and won the 2001 Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy from Columbia University.  Scholars who had come to different conclusions, however, criticized Bellesiles’s research, and a committee appointed by Emory University concluded that Bellesiles’s work was unprofessional and questioned his scholarly integrity.  Bellesiles resigned from Emory, Columbia rescinded the Bancroft Prize, and Knopf stopped publication of the book.  The controversy over Arming America has placed Bellesiles with Stephen E. Ambrose, Joseph K. Ellis, and Doris Kearns Goodwin in discussions of academic integrity and has called into question the objectivity of scholars, publishers, reviewers, the media, and award committees, as well as the value of reviews and awards.