It's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.
This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
>The report also found that challenges are becoming more coordinated and politically driven: 92% came from pressure groups, decision-makers or government officials, compared with 72% in 2024. By contrast, 2.7% were attributed to parents and 1.4% to individual library users.
So this isn't librarians, parents or even neighbours deciding something isn't appropriate.
The article also seems to refer to libraries in general, as opposed to school libraries alone, except on a specific paragraph.
That and, have you met librarians? They aren't conspiring to censor Sarah Maas, I can tell you that.
Page 10 of the report has a chart that breaks down what type of people are responsible for an 'attempt to remove' books from a library. Librarians themselves are not listed as one of the groups:
It seems they only count it as 'censorship' or a 'challenge' if it's someone other than a librarian taking the action.
If I've understood correctly, if librarians (alone or in groups) decide that certain books should not be procured, the ALA would count this as a censorship or ban.
“But the book was on the shelf…”
“On the shelf? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find it.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the book, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on a shelf in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Kids can read whatever they and their parents want. Schools don't have to teach it.
I remember one time some libraries banned non-equity-promoting books and then backtracked and called it "deaccession" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...
Right wing and left wing people love roleplaying as freedom fighters against the forces of evil.
The linked censorship search portal [0] lets you filter by "# Count of Challenges at Public Libraries" > 0.
Whatever you want to call it, IMO public libraries shouldn't ban books, especially based on some radical PAC's opinions about what jesus would want or whatever.
Can they not hire some people to curate titles to ensure they are legit and anyone doing a bait and switch gets banned from the site altogether. It's not like they can't ID bad actors.
And the political sensibilities of those deciding which books will be available don't matter? What a convenient position. Would you still hold it if it was the John Birch Society that supplied all librarians?
All those challenged books that talk about systemic this or that, yet when it comes to libraries themselves, you want to pretend they're purely neutral, technocratic establishments. Well, almost - it's okay to want to disrupt whiteness in libraries [1] - they're not neutral then, and we can care about their political sensibilities. But when it comes to criticism from the other political direction, we use doublethink so systems and institutions again cannot be biased.
[1] Disrupting Whiteness in Libraries and Librarianship: A Reading List - https://www.library.wisc.edu/gwslibrarian/bibliographies/dis...
Sounds more like an alt-right conspiracy.
During the Third Reich the list "des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums" that startet in 1935 had 12400 banned books and 149 authors in it.
Today there is an "Index jugendgefährdender Medien", that covers not only books. That's for selling or borrowing to minors. There is ban of raw depiction of violence / war crimes if certain boundaries are left (e.g. using it solely for entertainment).
Everything else sounds false.
Even the documentary / art project "Kassler Liste" (documenta / Universität Kassel, Germany) doesn't list more books for Germany than there were banned books in Nazi Germany. https://www.kasselerliste.com/
So, sod off with your alt-right conspiracy.
Okay, I'll bite: why were they banned?
Banning books from a public library is prima facie bad, so each one would need to have a pretty compelling argument articulated for why it wasn't.
What if "why they were banned" isn't a good reason for banning information from a public library?
The flashpoint is usually sexually explicit passages or writing in popular new books. I haven’t thought enough to have an opinion whether libraries (and city vs public school library is unclear) should fight to protect literary depictions of blowjob or rimming or anal intercourse, particularly in an LGBT lens, but enough groups evidently decided they have, and here we are.
Really makes you wonder if the pressure groups behind these bans really understand the point of a library. To consume only information you like and agree with? To go read 10 different perspectives of something, but only if they are all identical to your current perspective? To minimize risk of mind expansion?
As long as it’s written, fair game? Pictures? Web content?
I don’t want the job, but it’s ripe for arguing.
If public policy allows it, public libraries should allow it. If a subset of the public doesn't like that, they can change public policy to make the content illegal.
You guys should care books from either side of your political spectrum are being banned!
IMHO it doesn't make for particularly interesting or pleasant discussion. But you're free to not care about what you don't care about, and free to provide (or not) any explanation or pretext for it.
There are things that are simply not pedagogically useful in the limited instructional period in school. There are things that are simply not appropriate during early childhood development.
People who abuse and manipulate language like this are exactly why more traditional instruction is desired in certain school districts. Postmodernism is wrong. There are actually things that are true without the miasma of an artificial (and exhausting) social construction of reality.