Don't read (or look at) these!

There was a post on a librarian's blog about a recent New York Times article dealing with the Brooklyn Public Library's decision to remove a Tintin book from open shelves because it was racially offensive.  The librarian blogger was equally concerned about an online companion piece in the Times that showed ten different challenges to books over the years that had gotten published online with the names of those who had challenged the books clearly presented, although their addresses were redacted (blacked out) from the online posting.  The public library is supposed to protect patron confidentiality so that last bit does tend to make one uneasy.

Anyway, the article does list ten different items that were challenged over the years, and the library's response to the challenges.  Call me curious, but I wondered how many of those books were held by us or one of the other libraries in our system.  Lo and behold, we are eight for ten!  Here's a list of the ten Brooklyn Public Library challenges, and the (condensed) reason they were challenged.

Comments

I just stumbled across this map the ALA created of all of the locations where book challenges have been reported in the past two years, including information about the books themselves. Pretty interesting stuff!
http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/dont-read-or-look-these-0
www.madisonpubliclibrary.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-32
30883
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YQJXWHI7GBSAKUAXXI4RVCO2TCQFOO2V
<urn:uuid:15bbbd1c-bc54-4afd-a7ff-7aff0d8a35b9>
2016-09-27T08:39:55Z
23.253.239.253
sha1:OZAZAXCEVF45MQYUVJZHLA5UBWZ3PTLV
<urn:uuid:701d147e-5de7-4a66-9edd-cd28f1f54eda>
http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/madreads/dont-read-or-look-these-0
length
response
<urn:uuid:9f3339c3-368e-4126-a094-04af571c3712>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-143-35-109.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-40
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf