Censorship

The fourth annual Banned Websites Awareness Day makes excessive filtering an intellectual freedom issue in K–12 learning.

It’s been two zigzag weeks for the National Library Board in Singapore that has been the focus of international media furor since it announced two weeks ago that all copies of the children’s books containing gay themes were not only been banned from the state’s collections, but would be pulped. The international community pushed back, and in a surprising reversal, the National Library Board changed its mind.

The Freedom to Read Foundation and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are joining forces to offer an online graduate-level course “Intellectual Freedom and Censorship” for library and information science students around the country held August 26–October 10.

The 2014 American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Las Vegas this week set the stage for Banned Books Week, scheduled for September 21-27, 2014. This year, Banned Books Week will shine light on banned and challenged comic books and graphic novels. On the show floor, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), which provides legal support and expertise to readers, authors, and librarians, debuted a new handbook offering rundowns of commonly challenged comic titles, myths about banned books, and ideas for programming around Banned Books Week.

Award-winning author Nancy Garden, best known for the classic—and sometimes controversial—novel Annie on My Mind, one of the first YA titles to depict a lesbian relationship, died of a heart attack June 23 at age 76.

“Fencing out Knowledge: Impacts of the Children’s Internet Protection Act 10 Years Later” concludes that institutions using filtering software in order to receive certain federal funds routinely block more content than required, depriving students of access to information and collaborative tools.

I was very sorry to read that Nancy Garden died on Monday. While she wrote in just about every children’s-book genre there is, it’s Annie on My Mind that made her immortal, and led to her parallel, equally admirable, career as a defender of intellectual freedom in libraries and communities across the nation. The first […]

The post Thanks for Annie, Nancy. appeared first on The Horn Book.

Something to celebrate for all who value intellectual freedom.  ALA’s OIF urges us to share!  (Sorry to be a day belated.) Today we are pleased to commemorate the 75th anniversary of ALA’s adoption of the Library Bill of Rights on June 19, 1939 at the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco. The document – which is the basis for the [...]

SLJ columnist Pat Scales addresses the privacy of kids' library records; censoring incarcerated teen reading; and the difference between "restricting" and "removing."