So many choice quotes in this article – unfortunately, you can't make this stuff up: “The row even spread to this year's Fourth of July parade, which included a float featuring a washing machine and a sign that read “keep our library clean.”“Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, who, with […]
I think it's fair to say that the majority of the battles around Freedom of Expression are taking place in schools these days. “The Diary of Anne Frank” is one of my favourite books of all-time and a book I probably first read when I was 12 or 13. So in a world where all […]
It's February which means Freedom to Read Week is coming at the end of the month. Every year, I try to do a few posts during that week to celebrate and draw attention to this important subject. For the past year, I've been bookmarking various stories I've come across that I thought had potential for […]
I missed the end of Banned Books Week but meant to post this story – not just because it does a pretty good job of capturing the importance of Freedom to Read as a core principle in libraries – but also because it contains perhaps the greatest opening paragraph in a newspaper story of all-time:“So […]
Banned Book Week which is held during the last week of September is the US equivalent of Canada's Freedom to Read Week which is held during the last week of February.Here's a post on MetaFilter about Banned Book Week including a really cool Google maps mash-up of book challenges across the US since 2007.
My classmate, Lauralee, who has a history of drawing great stick figure art recently outdid herself with the FTRW poster she made for her library. Very cool! (I'm embarrassed to say I just realised that I don't even know if RPL had any FTRW events. I did suggest it to a person who works in […]
I started the week talking about a discussion the librarians at RPL were having about the issue of patrons viewing pornography on the public access computers. Although this is an important philosophical discussion, I'm happy to report that (at least as far as I know), patrons' viewing isn't being monitored or censored and no policy […]
Reddit recently had a question posted asking their community to submit the most offensive joke(s) they knew. There's some pretty disturbing material here and if you doubt the power of the written word to affect people just as much as the visuals of pornography or the sound of foul language, look no further than this […]
A great documentary I'd highly recommend…
Here's an article about FTRW that appeared in Xtra.ca (“Where Queers Conspire”). They asked various Canadian literary types and free speech proponents to give their thoughts on some common and/or recently challenged books. From the article's introduction:Canada is a censorious country. Our nanny state bans most hate speech (not the religious-based homophobic kind), stops erotica […]
