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Project 2025, Intellectual Freedom & Privacy
No full textAlthough Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025, as of late November 2024 he has named four people associated with the project to his administration, including Brendan Carr to head the Federal Communications Commission. Project 2025, a 900-page policy prescription written by the Heritage Foundation, calls for dismantling the federal Department of Education and “advancing education freedom” (322). The document specifically states that “parental rights” should be “co-equal to other fundamental rights—like free speech or the free exercise of religion” (343) and argues that the administration should work to pass a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights. The term “critical race theory” is used as a cudgel throughout the policy
Current Trends in Book Challenges and the Right to Read: Nine Academic and Public Librarians Share Their Candid Thoughts
No full textWhile the global pandemic has held the attention of many individuals worldwide, a different kind of pandemic seems to have taken hold in the United States. According to the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), books were challenged three times more frequently during the last four months of 2021 than during a comparable period in the previous year. The office recorded 330 various attempts to censor reading materials during that time. Increasingly, educators and librarians especially are facing challenges, threats, and harassment as they navigate this changing landscape. In fact, in the opening months of 2023 several state legislatures are considering legislation targeting books, reading, and intellectual freedom
archiving the absences: tracing censorship as a productive force of racial-capitalist empire
No full textCensorship denotes the suppression of knowledge; black boxes over text, archival absences, administrative denials and dead ends. However, through my work as a collective member and archivist for a books-to-prisons project over the last ten years, I have come to understand censorship as much a production of knowledge as its repression. It generates knowledge not only of the content being censored (e.g., that it is immoral, threatening, or abnormal), but of the incarcerated patron requesting the item, the sender, the prison system, and, perhaps most significantly, the nation-state itself. Carceral epistemology attests to the material power of discourse in manufacturing violent realities out of statist imaginations. This power relies on the abstraction of words like “rights, justice and freedom” that we so often appeal to within a juridical framework that ultimately serves racial-capitalist accumulation. Instead, I wonder how we might radically revise the scope and potentiality of our demands for the present and future. How might an archive of censorship fragment what we have come to consider reality, so that we might imagine otherwise
In Brief
No full textAlaskaSeward Community Library and MuseumOn September 15, 2022, a parent formally challenged Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder, from the children’s section of Seward Community Library and Museum. The parent claimed that the body-positive picture book—which affirms two–spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (2SLGBTQIA+) identities—“promotes the trans agenda and homosexuality.”The title was retained.Reported in: Office for Intellectual Freedom challenge report.ArizonaPrescott Valley Public LibraryAt a town council meeting on August 11, 2022, one Prescott Valley community member expressed concern for the safety of young readers. Specifically, they were worried about readers’ exposure to library materials reflecting two–spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual (2SLGBTQIA+) identities. Selecting several popular titles from Prescott Valley Public Library’s Pride Month display, the complainant read out-of-context excerpts of “sexually graphic” material before the council.Challenged titles included:Lawn Boy by Jonathan EvisonMilk Fed by Melissa BroderThis Book Is Gay by Juno DawsonThe outcome of this complaint is unknown. . .
Smokey Bear and Fire Suppression
No full textSmokey Bear is the most recognizable government mascot in America. His story has a dual nature, that of a fictional, anthropomorphic bear partly developed by the National Ad Council and of a real black bear found orphaned in New Mexico. As a spokes-bear for the National Forest Service, the life of the real bear and the cartoon mascot have been documented in official publications, reports, and archives. Because of the partnership of the National Ad Council many of the promotional materials were not distributed through the Government Printing Office and fall into a gray category of government information. In 2024 Smokey turns eighty years old and his story is retold; the story of a mascot and the more complicated story of wildfire suppression
Investigation into the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School
No full textThis paper focuses on telling the story of the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School (Chilocco School) from its establishment in Chilocco, Oklahoma in 1884 to its closure in 1980. A variety of government documents and resources were used to reconstruct this story, and it is the author’s hope that this methodology might be applicable to research conducted on other Federal Indian Boarding Schools. The Chilocco School was a non-reservation boarding school with a long timeline (1884–1980). Its history of management is well documented through executive orders, federal reports from the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs and its predecessor, the Office of Indian Affairs, from the United States Department of the Interior, and United States Congressional budgetary documents. The school’s history parallels changes in thought in the federal approach to indigenous populations, including the investigations into the abusive practices that led to its closing
Membership Committee: ALSC Member Profiles
No full textBrianne Mintz, Children’s Librarian, Springfield (NJ) Free Public LibrarySarah Clarke, Head of Children’s Services, Great Neck (NY) LibraryAshley Bressingham, Librarian II/Children’s Room Assistant Supervisor, New Rochelle (NY) Public Librar
Fostering a Love of Reading
No full textI always knew reading was something I wanted to foster in my home since I knew many of the benefits—bonding with your child, language development, empathy, and emotional awareness. After welcoming children into our family, kids’ books have flooded our home; you can find them everywhere, on a shelf in the family room, scattered in a playroom, in bedrooms, and in the car.Reading is part of our daily routine. While books are always accessible, we make sure to take time each evening to curl up with a few books before bed—something simple but consistent during the days that often become so busy
The Books of My Life
No full textWe all have books that have impacted our lives, for many different reasons. I bet you’d be able to think back now and come up with a few; here are a few of mine.Books from Childhood. I’m from a middle-class family from Wisconsin, not far from Racine, where Little Golden Books were born. So it doesn’t surprise me that my two favorite children’s books were those amazing golden-spined gems. Topping my list of reads and re-reads was Margaret Wise Brown’s Mister Dog, still in print today . .
Supercharged Saroj! Early Literacy Leader Shares Decades of Wisdom
No full textNow retired, early childhood literacy consultant and national trainer and author Saroj Nadkarni Ghoting has spent decades supporting the causes dear to librarians’ hearts. We thought spotlighting her long-time advocacy was well earned.Saroj, you have always supported and promoted diversity in your work; how did this become an important value to you?I guess you could say I was lucky! My father was from India and my mother was the daughter of orthodox Jews from Russia. So, I grew up with multiple languages and cultures in Bethesda, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC.We spoke English at home. My father taught us Marathi before we visited India when I was 12, and my mother read us the postcards in Yiddish she received every day from her mother. Our father told us stories from his childhood, from Hindu works (YAY! Oral storytellling!). My mom read us picture books every day. And we always used our public libraries