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thecommonlibrarian-blog

Banned Books Week (as a solo school librarian)

thecommonlibrarian

I’m preparing to do Banned Books Week in my school library and I’ve come across a few (minor) hurdles I thought I’d share.

  • We don’t actually have a lot of the banned and challenged books, especially not the ones which were banned here in Ireland.
  • Popular (and more recent) publications on the list are checked out almost as soon as they’re returned. I don’t particularly want to keep these out of circulation for the week.
  • Decorating on a tight budget can look really… homemade. I’ve been able to use my mum’s colour printer (as there isn’t one in work) and laminator (same), and I’ve mostly used cheap materials such as plain brown wrapping paper and the furniture we already have in the library. I did order yellow ‘caution’ tape online a couple of weeks ago, but the delivery was delayed so it won’t be available until Tuesday. Thanks Amazon.
  • The library is situated in a shared space which serves as a study hall and assembly space some of the time. It is also unsupervised at times. This means that things are moved - and frequently - and that posters can be ripped, books can be moved, illicitly borrowed, tables might be requisitioned, and so on.

So far I’ve pulled all the banned and challenged books from the shelves, so they’re in a few piles in a corner, pretending not to be very interesting at all. I’ve covered a pillar in brown paper (in preparation for decoration), and covered several tables with brown paper too. I’ve picked out some fair use posters and printed them in my mum’s house. She’s letting me laminate some of them too. I’ve compiled a list of banned books and written some catchy factoids about each one. I’m going to display the books with red labels that say either ‘banned’ or ‘challenged’, some with the fact sheet (which is bookmark sized). I’m hoping my bright yellow ‘caution’ tape really does arrive on Tuesday. When it gets here, that will be added to the display.

It probably all sounds very clinical, but I think it’ll be fun. It’s really hard to prepare for something like this when you’re a solo librarian (and only working three hours a day) and have a whole heap of other things to get done!

Who else is doing Banned Books Week this year?