More on the Chicago Defender.
Here are my old Banned Books Weeks posts: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. I skipped 2005.

It’s time for a review of Banned Books Week. This year most of my BBW information comes from Twitter. Amusingly BBW on Twitter can mean two very different things. This is the note I put on Twitter yesterday.

“Oh look an actual attempt at, well not book banning exactly. Weird old Pentagon. http://bit.ly/cqg9PL Happy [sort of] Banned Books Week.”

Pretty sketchy story. The Pentagon bought up the entire first printing of a book published by St Martin’s Press because it “contained information which could cause damage to national security.” The second edition has come out, heavily redacted. This is one of the closer “government is telling you what you can’t read” stories that I’ve seen this year. Here’s another look at the websites that are linked from ALA’s offical BBW website ala.org/bbooks, a page that is linked from the front page, but only as one of the six “slides” that revolve through the top of the page. So, Banned Books Week is sponsored by these organizations. Let’s see what their websites look like.

• American Booksellers Association has a link to this functional site from the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, much better than last year. This blog post (from August) seems to summarize what they’ve been up to. Nothing on their Twitter. They also run the website BannedBooks.org which has been updated a little for this year.
• The American Library Association – has one of the six slides linked to their BBW page. The press kit page is more interesting. The full list of books that were challenged or banned last year is hidden away in a PDF. Mostly school challenges. A few interesting public library cases. ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom is posting a lot on their Twitter and their blog.
• American Society of Journalists and Authors has a button for sale in their store, no other mention that I could find including on their Twitter and on facebook.
• Association of American Publishers has a short bloggish post talking about what some publishers are up to this week, linked from the front page. Is anyone else freaked out that the URL includes a misspelling of the word “archives”? I remember that from last year.
• the National Association of College Stores has nothing, as usual.
• It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress but no mention that I can see.

One of the interesting thigns to note about the ALA list of challenges is how many of the public library challenges seem to be centered around just a few library systems. Most of these stories are ones that hit the national news and so I’ve heard about them and you probably have also.

There are also good websites to go to to learn about censorship and the larger (to me) issue of chilling effects on people’s right to live free from fear and free from silencing. Here are a few things I’ve been reading lately

• The National Coalition Against Censorship has protested book ratings in a sensible and clear headed way.
• A Few Words About Public Libraries and MPAA Ratings (pdf)
• An interesting discussion on a unicycle forum about the public library and whether they should buy “cleaned up” versions of popular music.
• Online books about censorship, from the Online Books Page’s banned books page.
• I always find something interesting to read at Project Censored.

Join me in a rousing song celebrating free expression, won’t you?

I’ve been down with The Crud for the past few weeks. Not really sick, but not having a lot of extra energy to get involved in things outside my own library and jobs. Banned Books Week started on Saturday and runs through this week. I’ve been invited to an evening with readings from banned books tomorrow night and I think I’m staying home.

I’m not sure if I’m getting complacent, sick of this holiday, sick generally, or there really is a lot less enthusiasm this year from years previous. The ALA page is usually my starting point and it seems a little less lively than usual. Their calendar of events is Chicago based (wouldn’t it be great if they were an aggregator to BBW activity worldwide? Does such a thing exist) and indicates to me that they still haven’t learned to resize images before uploading them. The ALAOIF blog hasn’t posted yet this week though they did link to this cute video put out by ALA which I enjoyed. The main ALA BBW page doesn’t even link to the Banned Books Week page which is supposedly the “go to” page for current information — and does have a calendar of sorts — which has a broken stylesheet declaration which makes all the pages look like they were designed in 2003.

As usual, I clicked through from the ALA web page to the home pages of all the organizations who are co-sponsors of Banned Books Week. Here’s what I found.

• The American Booksellers Association mentions BBW and offers a broken link to more information about it
• The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is still offering its handbook from 2007
• The American Society for Journalists and Authors appears pretty busy opposing the Google settlement to mention BBW.
• The Association of American Publishers mentions that they are gearing up for this event, but not enough to really mention it on their website otherwise.
• National Association of College Stores has nothing, as usual
• LoC’s Center for the Book has one of the most awesome URLs ever and no mention of Banned Books Week that I can see.

Even ALA’s home page doesn’t mention Banned Books Week except on page six of their slide show where they tell us what we can buy to support it.

I wonder a little bit if this is what a post-Judith Krug ALA looks like? On a brighter note, let’s look at some Banned Books Week web pages that are useful and/or interesting

• Amnesty International puts a spin on it by looking at people who are persecuted because of the writings they produce, circulate or read.
• UPenn’s Online Books page has a nice Banned Books Online page which splits out Censored/banned books from those that are deemed unsuitable for minors (i.e. age inappropriate) and has lots of terrific links
• PBS.org has a nice little reprint of some talking points from ALA

While I’m talking about this, I’d also like to mention the data on the PBS page.

According to the ALA there have been 3,736 challenges from 2001-2008:

* 1,225 challenges due to “sexually explicit” material
* 1,008 challenges due to “offensive language”
* 720 challenges due to material deemed “unsuited to age group”
* 458 challenges due to “violence”
* 269 challenges due to “homosexuality”
* 103 challenges due to “anti-family”
* 233 challenges due to “religious viewpoints”

I think we need to look hard at this list and draw some conclusions about what sort of people believe that restricting access to books for these reasons is both a good idea or a reasonable thing to expect to be able to get away with. And then, if we want to get serious, I think we need to hit these points directly and ask people why they’re afraid of sex, or gay people (or penguins), or swearing. It’s nice to say that “free people read freely” but it’s another to be in a situation where your institutions are getting pressured by people who are intolerant and thinking that speaking truth to power is all you need to do. I’ve talked a little more about this in the MetaFilter thread about Banned Books Week, it’s always a reflective time of year for me.

Also, ALA knows that BBW means something else, right?

• Minors and Internet Interactivity (new)

• Importance of Education to Intellectual Freedom (new)
• Access to Digital Information, Services, and Networks (revised)
• Labeling and Rating Systems (revised)
• Services to People with Disabilities (new from Midwinter)

Some discussion in the comments over at LISNews.

The news article has the predictable all-over-the-place approach to the issue but it seems that this is one of those fights that has everything including outraged parents, a beleaguered library board whose members don’t have their terms renewed, assertion of First Amendment rights, threats of book burning, and a lot of homophobic-sounding nastiness. The article, though on the web, also doesn’t seem to understand the usefulness of hyperlinks to telling a story that is playing out on the web so I have added them here

• the library’s materials selection policy (pdf) which appears to have been updated just a few weeks ago
• West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries
• blog post “there’s no such thing as a ‘safe library’” from the National Coalition Against Censorship’s blog
• Wissup blog with lots of commentary about the library
• West Bend Parents for Free Speech blog (interview with Maria Hanrahan, the blog’s founder)
• City of West Bend’s website
• Information from American Libraries about the lawsuit against the city of West Bend for the books in the library being, among other things “explicitly vulgar, racial, and anti-Christian” The plaintiffs want the book Baby Be-Bop to be burned or similarly destroyed.

I really wish the library or the city had more accessible public statements about this whole ongoing mess.

• Social Software & Intellectual Freedom

Thanks to MLA for having me down to Springfield. It was a nifty conference in a nice new building.

• Intellectual Freedom 2002: Living the Chinese Curse lecture at the Library of Congress
• John Berry on Judith Krug Library Journal Editorial
• A little video on YouTube featuring Loriene Roy and Judith Krug during Banned Books Week
• Judith Krug being interviewed in 1981 by Richard Heffner.
• An old link from a CNN interview (have to scroll down) where she suggests that then-President Bush’s library card should be revoked.

Her energy, humor and tireless spirit will be sorely missed.

I’m aware that I have punted on Banned Books Week this year, but I’m okay with that. Seems like a lot of people did. Here are some of my old posts just for the record: 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2007; guess I skipped it in 2005 also.

The Banned Books Week eponymous website, owned by ABFFE looks sort of the same as last year, only with new events. I really appreciate the effort they put into a nice-looking site, but in 2008 a few pages with links to other pages and one scrollable list of events worldwide seems a little flat.

ALA has been busy launching their new website and Banned Books Week didn’t even appear on the front page the last few times I looked. Their Banned Books Week pages have a slick logo (yay!) but no page titles and they’re still using our browsers to resize images which means the pages still load like crap for people in dial-up land. I know it’s picky, but I do think it’s impotant in the same way that I think ala.org/bbooks is a nicer URL to see in my address bar than any of the ones I wind up looking at. The pages I linked to on ALA.org from my 2006 post are all gone.

Additionally there’s the fact that it’s a month and change before the US elections and I’m tired of fighting with people about Sarah Palin, tired of defending the ALA against people who don’t believe in intellectual freedom for minors (when I have my own beefs with ALA, but that is not one of them) and tired, as always, of people using holiday-type events as a time when they tell me it’s okay and even patriotic to shop for things.

I worry somewhat that not wanting to have the same fights every year makes me susceptible to self-censorship, as this post by Anirvan contemplates. I also worry that nitpicking over the differences between “banned” and “challenged” books — though I think it’s real and important — obscures the real issues which to me are the continued corporatization of everything, and the shift from content owning to content renting as a librarianship model.

As an example, I have been working with tiny libraries using Overdrive for years now and I’m sorry their product is no good by any standard other than “well it’s the best we can do for now” and this hits especially hard out here in digital divide land with libraries with five-figure budgets. I’m aware that there always has to be a balance and I go to the supermarket [or the farm stand] for my food rather than grow it myself so I really do understand why labor-saving devices and services are important and possibly worth money.

So, the threats to our intellectual freedom and our freedom to read are not just people who want to harass the librarian into handing over a computer or removing a book from the shelf. They’re also people who get us to accept licenses that bind us unfairly and give away our rights, or the people who let us show movies, but not use their names in public advertising. People who make us afraid to photocopy a book chapter. People who act like we’re possibly thieves when we watch a video at home with a few people. People who flash warnings on our computer that we don’t understand that make us and our patrons feel that we’re unsafe. People who make us buy digital content twice in two different file formats. People who want us to buy an entire 10 CD set again because one of them got scratched. People who blur the line between necessary security upgrades and enhancements we don’t need. People who make us feel that filters are actually “protecting” us from anything. People who have a vested interest in us not understanding our own technology.

So I think I understand the steps for keeping books on the shelves at my local library — have a policy, make sure everyone understands it, be civil and respectful to everyone because you’re everyone’s librarian — and even how to deal with a search warrant. What I’m not sure of is who I talk to when I’m concerned about content ownership models and legislation unfavorable to libraries and ultimately to citizens. I know a few good places to start — the EFF, the ACLU, the CDT, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse — but I can always use more. Happy Last Week Was Banned Books Week Week.

You can read more about the process of getting the bill drafted and passed by looking at the Intellectual Freedom section of the Vermont Library Association website. Minor point of pride: I designed the VLA website, enabling just this sort of information sharing and updates and it makes me happy to see it being used to announce such good news.

• Firing of library worker causes uproar – LA Times.
• Family Friendly Libraries gives award to librarian
• Child pornography is NOT free speech – blog post on the LibraryLaw blog. Please note the bizarre assertion in the comments regarding something Judith Krug may have said over 25 years ago.
• City Honors Worker Fired for Reporting Child Porn
• Was Probationary Tulare County Staffer Fired for Reporting Child Porn?
  – from Library Journal
• Library bloggers’ coverage makes the news – note back and forth in the comments with differing versions of what realy happened

I really wish ALA had come out and made some sort of a statement on this, but I’m not sure what it would have said. For what it’s worth, I have not seen anyone leap to the defense of the library administrator/firing except in a “we don’t have all the facts” sort of way.

To me, the way this differs from the standard USA PATRIOT Act computer seizures and reporting is that in this case the assertio was that a crime was being committed. So, while going on fishing expeditions and seizing computers because you think someone might be doing something illegal is something that a library has the right to object to, saying “this patron is breaking the law in the library” is a different story altogether. I think even talking about child pornography issues online is difficult and complicated — an amusing side note is seeing which comments forms on the web people can’t type the word “porn” into — and intellectual freedom issues are tricky in a different way. I’m sorry this library assistant didn’t get better guidance and I’m sorry this is being tried in the media in sensationalist ways.

The importance of intellectual freedom is a cornerstone of modern librarianship in the US, and yet for many people is only understood as an abstract idea. This workshop will cover the foundations of intellectual freedom in American librarianship and provide concrete examples of how the concept applies to today’s library environment.

We will look at the Library Bill of Rights, the Freedom to Read Statement, and state library privacy laws as well as legislation which abridges the freedoms of library workers and library users. We will discuss the thorny issues that arise when intellectual freedom principles conflict with local practices and cultures and ways to unpack and address those issues. Social software and its implications for intellectual freedom in libraries will be another facet we will address. Participants will gain an understanding of ALA’s work laying down the foundation for intellectual freedom and leave with concrete examples of IF in action in today’s libraries.

The First Circuit rejected the parents’ indoctrination claims. It held that there is no First Amendment free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations. It also held that public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, especially when the school does not require that the student agree with or affirm those ideas, or even participate in discussions about them.

You can read the full opinion here and some backstory on the controversy that sparked these claims here and here. Keep in mind that this book challenge happened in Massachusetts, a state where same sex marriages are legal and where a “1993 state law directed school systems to teach about different kinds of families and the harm of prejudice.”

• The Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor Michigan has made a Flickr photoset of their staff reading banned books. Here’s how they announced it on their website.
• Amnesty International has a page outlining people who got in serious trouble for their writings. This isn’t taking Harry Potter off the shelves, this is getting jailed or killed for speaking out.
• Google Book Search is doing its part. I know a lot of people have weird feelings about Google moving towards something that looks more like an OPAC but I think we should be more concerned that everything they put on the web, pretty much outranks everything everyone else puts on the web.
• The ACLU of Texas has issued a report discussing the status of challenged books in Texas schools (link goes to 2006 report, new one due out real soon now) in the last year. It’s interesting reading. As a result of challenges sixteen books were removed from school shelves entirely including Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and a book on how to draw manga.

Feel free to include other projects in the comments here, this is just a few links I enjoyed and thought merited further attention.