When we announced The Seattle Public Library (SPL) as the 2020 Gale/LJ Library of the Year yesterday, many librarians protested our celebrating a library that had allowed the Women’s Liberation Front, an anti-trans group, to rent a meeting room for an event in February.

We hear the anger and disappointment and take these concerns seriously. We understand why SPL’s board of trustees made the decision it did, but we wish that the library had not allowed that event to go forward. Nonetheless, Library Journal stands by the award, and we want to explain why.

The important debate about what to do when intellectual freedom and equity and inclusion collide is far from settled in the field. Today, most American libraries’ meeting room policies, like SPL’s, are consistent with the American Library Association’s (ALA) interpretation of the law. We hope libraries will find a way to meet their legal obligations and advance both core values; until then, we must grapple with the ways that policies designed to provide equality of access can reinforce, in practice, an unjust status quo.

We are convinced that SPL conducted a thoughtful, consultative process. The leadership and board held discussions with internal and external stakeholders from the LGBTQIA+ community (as well as attorneys, city officials, and others) before deciding to reaffirm its meeting room policy. And the conversation is not over: SPL’s leadership is in dialogue with LGBTQIA+ groups, including those who spoke against the policy, about how to build a better relationship with the trans community. Leaders and staff are continuing the anti-bias training they have implemented since 2017, including from LGBTQIA+ organizations.

One of SPL’s great strengths is its willingness to engage in deep reflection on the impact of its policies together with those most impacted, and to change as a result. It did so on the issue of refusing a trans patron access to a family restroom, and on disproportionate enforcement of rules of conduct on youth of color. As SPL director Marcellus Turner was quoted as saying in the Library of the Year profile, “We have made a few missteps. And in some instances they have been conduits to help us bridge or reconnect with these communities.” We hope the same will ultimately be true here too. We encourage the library to follow through on this issue as it has on its other deep work toward inclusion.

Overall, we feel the balance of SPL’s radically improved service to vulnerable communities stands as an exemplar for others to learn from. The library’s efforts to redress entrenched, systemic racist bias and anti-Blackness are groundbreaking, thorough, and effective. Few other library systems in the country are working toward racial equity at the same level. The SPL team’s collaboration with the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative; their internal Change Team; and their methodology, which takes considerations of racial justice into every operational decision, are all exemplary. They have both quantitative and qualitative results to show they’re truly moving the needle. And SPL is going above and beyond to bring these tools to the larger field and make them easily replicable across the country, where they are so needed. That work is why we chose SPL as the Library of the Year.

LJ ’s own dialogue is also ongoing. We invite those who feel we made the wrong choice to submit an opinion piece. We commit to prioritizing coverage of the ongoing debate over meeting room policies. We had planned to convene a conversation on that topic at the 2020 fall Directors Summit before COVID intervened; we will explore how to move that to a virtual environment. We have reached out to ALA’s Rainbow Roundtable for its members’ input, and welcome other queer and trans organizations and individuals to share their perspectives.