Culture of the workplace

I've been thinking this week about a question I have about intellectual freedom: how is it applied in day-to-day decisions made by librarians, managers, and staff working with the public? Setting aside the formal challenges to materials, or cases like the NCRL in eastern Washington, how do daily decisions contribute to the goals laid out by a library?

My library system's collection development policy has this as a goal:

Promotes and defends the principles of intellectual freedom and citizens' access to information, and provides resources that represent a diversity of views and opinions in support of this freedom.

What does this mean to the people I work with? How are we trained to think about this in the context of performing job duties? Workplaces are composed of individuals with differing views, and I suppose my thought comes down to this: unless promoting and defending access to materials and the importance of intellectual freedom is emphasized in the culture of the workplace, a lot of small decisions can be made that slide under the radar, aren't necessarily noticed by anyone, but end up eroding freedom and access.

To end, another example from my work:

Melvin Burgess is a young adult author who published a controversial novel called Doing It in 2004 in which (from the School Library Journal review,) "three teenage boys enjoy talking about, thinking about, and joking about sex." My library chose to catalog this book as adult fiction, despite the fact that the author writes for and about young adults. And, further, the record for this item in my library's catalog has as subjects for this work - sex - juvenile fiction, relationships - juvenile fiction, etc. And in the end, for me, this was a terrible decision by my library, because it hinders young adult access to this title by shelving it in a different section of the library. Despite the fact that we have as our goal the defense of intellectual freedom and individual access, a poor decision was allowed that restricts access by redefining a work as adult that was intended for teenagers. In all likelihood, a single person was allowed to make this book an adult work, and it wasn't really noticed, or it was noticed by youth librarians but they didn't really have the time, momentum, or institutional clout to challenge the decision.