Celebrate Your Freedom to Read: Check out a Banned Book!

Celebrate Your Freedom to Read @ Your Campus Library

Today marks the official start of Banned Books Week. This year marks the 26^th year that libraries and bookstores across the country have highlighted books that have been banned or challenged over the previous year.

The question of whether to allow censorship of ideas is a debate that can only take place in a free society. Do we allow an individual or group to restrict what is available to rest of us, or do we insist that libraries and bookstores acquire and make available materials representative of all the people in our society?

This week we encourage you to visit the library and check out a book that some may have not wanted to be available to you. We've identified dozens of these titles and we'll be restocking our display throughout the week as these are checked out.

On Thursday, Charlie Conway wrote a review of one of our latest additions to the Reference collection, Banned Books. You'll find those volumes shelved in the Zs at Z 658.U5 B36 2006 v.1-4

We get a lot of questions about individual challenges to books. In addition to our print resources, you may find these websites helpful.

• Banned Books Week - the official website from the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF)
  
• The Banned Books Week pages maintained by Marshall University Libraries provide basic information on challenges to books from 2001 through 2006
• Explore Banned Books at Google Book Search

We hope these resources help you in your studies of book challenges. Whether exploring this topic on your own or pursuing it for an assignment, there are a lot of challenges to study: the OIF recorded 8,332 challenges to books between 1990 and 2004. According to the American Library Association, "research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five that go unreported."

More Banned Books Week display photos are available at our Flickr. These shots taken by Sarah Bagby.