New Webinar - "7 Auditing Tools to Uncover Soft Censorship"

7 Auditing Tools to Uncover Soft Censorship
A Library 2.0 "Everyday Librarian" Webinar with Sonya Schryer Norris

OVERVIEW: 

The heart of this session is seven auditing tools you can use in any library, regardless of size or budget, to uncover soft censorship — from a thirty-minute walkthrough of your own building to data-driven benchmarks using the Seattle Public Library's open checkout dataset and free tools built specifically for this kind of collection analysis.

There are titles missing from library shelves right now that were never formally challenged, never voted on, never even discussed, and there is no record of their absence. It’s called soft censorship and it’s happening in libraries across the country. In most cases, nobody intended it.

We'll look at the three mechanics through which soft censorship operates — Removal, Rejection, and Restriction — using Kayla Martin-Gant's research as our framework. We'll examine what the current climate is doing to library workers and how that stress quietly reshapes collections through a phenomenon researchers call anticipatory anxiety. We'll look back at the 1950s comic book scare — because the mechanics of soft censorship are not new, and what happened to the profession then has direct lessons for now.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

This session is for collection managers, selectors, programming and staff, and library directors who need auditing tools to evaluate how soft censorship may be operating in the library.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Apply seven data-driven auditing tools to uncover soft (self-) censorship in library collections
• Identify the three operational mechanics of soft censorship
• Explain how anticipatory anxiety drives fear-based collection development decisions
• Analyze how the profession was targeted during the 1950s comic book scare to drive soft censorship in public libraries.

The recording and presentation slides will be available to all who register.

DATE: Wednesday, July 8th, 2026, 12:00 - 1:00 pm US - Eastern Time

COST:

• $99/person - includes live attendance and any-time access to the recording and the presentation slides and receiving a participation certificate. To arrange group discounts (see below), to submit a purchase order, or for any registration difficulties or questions, email admin@library20.com.

TO REGISTER: 

Click HERE to register and pay. You can pay by credit card. You will receive an email within a day with information on how to attend the webinar live and how you can access the permanent webinar recording. If you are paying for someone else to attend, you'll be prompted to send an email to admin@library20.com with the name and email address of the actual attendee.

If you need to be invoiced or pay by check, if you have any trouble registering for a webinar, or if you have any questions, please email admin@library20.com.

NOTE: Please check your spam folder if you don't receive your confirmation email within a day.

SPECIAL GROUP RATES (email admin@library20.com to arrange):

• Multiple individual log-ins and access from the same organization paid together: $75 each for 3+ registrations, $65 each for 5+ registrations. Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.
• The ability to show the webinar (live or recorded) to a group located in the same physical location or in the same virtual meeting from one log-in: $299.
• Large-scale institutional access for viewing with individual login capability: $499 (hosted either at Learning Revolution or in Niche Academy). Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.

SONYA SCHRYER NORRIS

Sonya Schryer Norris is a third-generation Michigan library worker with over 26 years of experience, including 16 years as a Consultant in Library Development for the Library of Michigan. Since founding Plum Librarian LLC in 2020, she has served as a consultant and trainer to 12 state libraries. Sonya has created 35+ courses on Niche Academy adopted in all 50 states and internationally, and her articles have appeared in Library Journal, Computers in Libraries, and for Cengage. She presents regularly for organizations including Library 2.0 and state library agencies.

 

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LLMs as Separated Minds

Evolution is not a directing force but a descriptive process of variation and differential survival. Social traits and capacities that improved coordination, alliance formation, deception, status-seeking, or group cohesion arguably spread because they enhanced the survival and reproduction of the peoples who adopted them. Truth-tracking was only favored to the extent it served those ends.

Language would have emerged as a powerful tool within this process. It did not need to reflect objective reality accurately; it needed to enable effective coordination and social navigation. The result, I postulate, was a structural separation in human cognition: a narrative layer optimized for social legibility, motivation, and group cohesion, operating alongside (and often diverging from) the operative functions that actually drive behavior and survival.

This separation is fractal. It appears not only in individuals but also scales to groups, institutions, and cultures, because organizations must coordinate and motivate separated minds. Shared cultural and institutional narratives therefore prioritize cohesion and legitimacy over literal accuracy.

The Human Pattern: Conscious and Subconscious

In the human mind, this separation appears as the relationship between the conscious and subconscious. The conscious mind is the generative, reportable stream — the part that constructs explanations, makes arguments, and produces coherent narrative in real time. It operates with limited access to its own constraints.

The subconscious holds the vast, opaque body of patterns, associations, heuristics, and priors shaped by evolution, personal experience, and cultural immersion. It supplies the raw material and constraints for conscious thought but remains largely invisible to introspection. The conscious voice is therefore shaped — and limited — by this deeper substrate.

LLMs as Externalized Separated Minds

Large language models replicate and amplify this structure. Their “subconscious” is the training corpus and resulting weights: an enormous statistical compression of human language output. Critically, this corpus is overwhelmingly already-narrativized material — books, articles, posts, dialogues, arguments, stories, and explanations. It is the narrative layer of human separated minds, not the raw operative substrate of human experience (embodiment, sensory grounding, implicit learning, emotional valence, or continuous real-world prediction error).

Consequently, the LLM’s generative “conscious” voice is even more purely narrative-oriented than a typical human conscious stream. It excels at coherence, fluency, and social plausibility precisely because its foundation is almost entirely narrative.

This architecture explains the explosive growth of LLMs: it fits and scales the language-based, narrative-heavy mode that already proved highly effective for human coordination and cognition. By building and interacting with these systems, we gain an externalized mirror for examining our own separated mind dynamics with unusual clarity.

The Law of Inevitable Exploitation

The same separation creates predictable incentive problems. In companies, institutions, and even AI development, there are often strong disincentives to prioritize operative truth over narrative coherence, short-term survival, and long-term profitability. Whistleblowers, discoverers of inconvenient facts, and efforts to build more costly but more truthful models face the same pattern Plato illustrated with the returning prisoner and Socrates: truth can be personally and institutionally expensive. Commercial AI incentives favor models that maximize engagement, approval, and safety over unflinching accuracy.

Implications

LLMs therefore demonstrate both the power and the limitations of the separated mind structure: tremendous generative capability within learned narrative patterns, but shallow grounding and susceptibility to the same incentive misalignments that shape human behavior at every scale.

This mirror can help us in two ways: (1) design better constraints and interfaces for AI that reduce the narrative-operative gap where it matters most, and (2) gain a clearer perspective on our own thinking, institutions, and cultural narratives. Recognizing the pattern does not eliminate it, but it equips us to navigate it more skillfully.