Library Board of Trustees Agenda and Packet 2022 05 12

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Efforts to ban books jumped an 'unprecedented' four -fold in 2021, ALA report says April 4, 20229:01 AM ET MIRANDA MAZARIEGOS MEGHAN COLLINS SULLIVAN LAW :.,.,. JONATH EVISO LM= LA Johnson/NPR Book banning is not new in the U.S. alone the practice goes back to Puritan times, when Thomas Morton's book New English Caanan and others opposing this way of life were tossed from Massachusetts. But the American Library Association said Monday that this year there have been more challenges to books than they have seen since they started tracking it in 2000. The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021. It's a significant jump: Last year the group noted 156 challenges — and in 2019, there were 377. Although the 2020 number was impacted by the pandemic, which forced schools and libraries to shut down, the ALA said they don't usually get more than 500 book challenges in any given year. And sometimes, those challenges contain more than one book title. The number of individual books challenged in 2021 totaled 1,597. In a press release, ALA President Patricia Wong said: "We support individual parents' choices concerning their child's reading and believe that parents should not have those choices dictated by others. Young people need to have access to a variety of books from which they can learn about different perspectives." Sponsor Message As part of the report, the ALA keeps a list of the top 10 banned books — pulled together from a variety of sources, including news stories and voluntary reports sent to the Office of Intellectual Freedom that they say is not "exhaustive." In fact, they say around 90% of book challenges remain unreported and receive no media attention. Additionally, the ALA cannot track what they call "silent censorship, " when individuals take it upon themselves to make sure that books cannot be found in libraries hiding them in drawers, tossing them out, or simply taking them off the shelves. This often leads to books being listed in library catalogues but never able to be found when looking for them. This year, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe tops the ALA's 10 most challenged books list. The book, originally published in 2019 is set to be reissued in May. The ALA said that the memoir, done in comic form and recounting Kobabe's path to gender -identity as nonbinary and queer, has been "banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to have sexually explicit images." Many of the