Berkman Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon has a piece in The Nation about actions the US government is taking about Internet censorship in China and the role of certain technology companies in that censorship and the handing over of data to Chinese authorities.

What role should the United States have in encouraging free speech in other countries?

noticed on beSpacific

(Internet censorship in China is one of these topics that doesn’t really fit any of my categories well. I’m still pondering where to stick posts about it.)

Jessamyn reports on an interesting auction to support the First Amendment Project, a group focusing on protecting and promoting First Amendment rights. Bidders compete to have a name of their choice included in a forthcoming book by several well-known authors.

(Wow. I haven’t posted to this category in /months/!)

Several times, I’ve wanted to start a category for items about free speech and the First Amendment. There’s one now. It includes items about Banned Books Week and challenged library materials, too.

Addendum 3/15: There is going to be some overlap with the Reading department. I’ll try to put items emphasizing the freedom to read in this category and comments about books and reading in general in Reading.

When I was at a comic book store this weekend my awesome penpal highly recommends, I noticed a collection jar on the counter for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Defending the Comic Industry’s First Amendment Rights Since 1986. Based in Northampton, Massachusetts, the nonprofit grew out of donations collected in 1986 to defend someone accused of selling obscene comics. The amount of work their doing is increasing because of the swing toward more conservative comics.

LIS News pointed to this item discussing Banned Books Week and the USA Patriot Act. Blake highlights some nice quotes from the article. My favorite is:

“Somewhere these books have been banned from a library, but not here,” said Driftwood library director Sue Jenkins. “All of them are available to check out.”

I still have not finished my Banned Books Week reading. I thought I would have finished A Day No Pigs Would Die already, but my hectic schedule hasn’t produced much time for pleasure reading. Today, I read a passage containing graphic cruelty to a dog and a weasel. Some members of the book group I’m in who are sensitive to violence against animals should not read this book.

Banned Books Week begins today. It gives us the opportunity to reflect on our freedom to read. After I get off work today, I plan to visit my local library to check out some of the banned and challenged books on the lists I pointed to last week. I think I might have some time to read in the next few days.

Banned Books Week is one of my favorite library-related celebrations. I’ve probably said this a hundred times in this space, but one of the big reasons I became a librarian is to support intellectual freedom. Some people think it’s a appropriate to prevent others from reading materials they find objectionable. Perhaps they never think that maybe someone doesn’t like something they like to read.

I encourage people to look at the lists of banned and challenged books, like the top challenged books of 2003, the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-1999, and this list of selected controversial books (.pdf) the American Library Association hopes people will display publicly. Some people are surprised to learn something they’ve read is on one of these lists.

One year at work, I held a voluntary contest to see who had read the most banned or challenged books in the office. I gave the winner and loser prizes. Last year, I just quietly read some controversial books on my own. Maybe by next Saturday, I’ll come up with a plan of action for this year. There’s a nice hole in my schedule that week, so maybe I’ll do some more reading.

Harry Potter has been unseated as the most challenged book this year, ending a four-year reign of J.K. Rowling’s series. Instead, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice series takes the lead in 2003, according to the American Library Association.

The press release includes the ten most challenged books of the year and some complaints associated with the books. Some of the books on the list are old “favorites,” like Bridge to Terabithia and Of Mice and Men.

I read two books in the Alice series for Banned Books Week in September and blogged my thoughts: checking the books out and my report after reading them.

I had these elaborate dreams of posting something about banned books every day during Banned Books Week. And, well, the week ends Saturday and I haven’t been able to do it. I got swamped at work last week and will still be digging out week after next, so my plans to post something during lunch didn’t work ’cause I didn’t really have a break for lunch and I’ve been too exhausted when I get home to stay up and post something and my mind has been occupied with 40,000 other things. Excuses, excuses.

One of my posts was going to be about all the great slogans fellow library students–one second-year student when I started in particular–had on buttons and t-shirts and whatnot that celebrated intellectual freedom. “There’s something in my library to offend everyone” was probably my favorite. The wearer planned to be a public librarian and I could see her being a very good one.

Another post was going to be about how when I was a sophomore in high school, one of the parents of a student in my English class called the teacher–who was a totally awesome high school English teacher–to protest some of the books we were reading for class. She thought if we read “In Cold Blood,” we’d all either turn into murderers or become really paranoid. The other book she didn’t like was “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which my Dad read to me when I was much, much younger. (I heard about this from the parent. The teacher was kind enough not to mention it in class.) I was angry at the parent because I thought her complaints held no merit. Reflecting on what I knew and what I had already experienced by the time I was a sophomore, preventing me from reading “In Cold Blood” wasn’t going to protect me from anything I hadn’t already learned about. If nothing else, it gave us a way to approach the question “Why do people do the things they do?” And objections to Huckleberry Finn? Let’s just not have that discussion tonight …

Anyway…please continue to celebrate intellectual freedom throughout the year. Free people read freely.

When I woke up this morning, I pondered why this week is still called Banned Books Week. Surely by now, someone has challenged or tried to ban a CD or movie or other non-book object in a library. Think about all the discussions of Internet filtering. I suppose I went off on this tangent while pondering how to celebrate this week as a news librarian in a specialized setting. It seems more appropriate for me to talk about journalistic freedom or newspapers that are banned, but newspapers aren’t books. Is there some particular reason why the week still focuses on books? Or is it just that no one has tried to update the week to include nonbook materails in library collections?