It's Banned Books Week!




I love Banned Books Week! You probably already knew that, since I started celebrating early.

Given how much I love BBW, you might be surprised to find out I (mostly) agree with Kelly Jensen's article today: Please Stop “Celebrating” Banned Books Week. Here's a snippet of why:

 "Celebrating" banned books fuels the idea that it’s books we need to be protecting. It also fuels the idea that becoming part of an elite club of banned books is a badge of honor — a merit earned because of something done on author's part or a means of marketing that book.  Banned books week is about none of these ideas.  The ability to read any book you wish to off any shelf anywhere is about the freedom to thought. It's about the freedom not to have to jump through hoops to pick up the book everyone is talking about. It's about being able to decide for yourself whether or not you agree with the central premise of the book or the ideas expressed by the author of that book. It's about your right to read and think, free from other people making those decisions on your behalf.

That's  what I want to celebrate - intellectual freedom and information access, your rights to read whatever you like and to form and express your own beliefs and opinions. These are precious and worth celebrating - every day!

Banned Books Week, however, has a very important place in the ongoing struggle to secure those rights. Not everyone agrees that we, as individuals, have the right to read whatever we want, and wish to limit our access to certain books that contain ideas or imagery they consider dangerous. That's why the ALA launched Banned Books Week in 1982 - to make us aware of wide-spread censorship and how it impacts our lives. Some of the most powerful books in our national history - books that shaped America - have been banned at some point in time or other. Many still face challenges today. (Beloved made the top ten list as late as 2012.) So, the job of BBW - to make us aware of what someone doesn't wants us to read, and why, is still important. But we need to make that very, very clear!

Here are some great Banned Books Week links (besides the ones I've already listed):




Links!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm Shocked, But I Don't Know Why

Image
I've been seeing this picture a lot on Facebook, and hadn't really paid much attention to it: My only thought was, "Aww, how cute! Daddy and Kiddos Time!" Okay, that was my first thought - I also thought, "Dang, that guy is good looking..." What? I'm human. So sue me. But I eventually read the attached blog post,  I Have a Dream: That People Will View a Picture Like This and Not Think It’s a Big Deal , because so many people I respect kept posting it. Allow me to say, "Oh. My. Gosh." Seriously, people? I had no idea that people would look at this picture and end up condemning the father ! I should have, though. I work full-time, and my schedule is strange. I work days, I work nights, I work weekends; every month, I'll pull at least one 10-day stretch, with the next four days off. People start to get shocked when I mention I have kids. "Ah," they'll say, "What do you do when they're not in school?" Well
Keep reading

This Is How You Get Fleeced

Image
U.S. FCC chairman plans fast-track repeal of net neutrality   FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wants to repeal net neutrality classification and just have ISP promise sweetly to keep the Internet open. We can trust them to do that, right? I mean, sure, they've argued all along that they don't want an open Internet, and they stand to make a  lot  of money if net neutrality dies - without even doing anything! - but if they  promise to be nice... totally trustworthy and who needs government protections when Big Business comes to play? Gah. Pretty picture time: Links! Library Land How a Browser Extension Could Shake Up Academic Publishing  "When an Unpaywall user lands on the page of a research article, the software scours thousands of institutional repositories, preprint servers, and websites like PubMed Central to see if an open-access copy of the article is available. If it is, users can click a small green tab on the side of the screen to view a PDF." L
Keep reading