The week of September 24 – September 30 was Banned Books Week, which is an annual celebration of the freedom to read, underscoring the important role libraries play in resisting censorship and protecting the freedom of speech.
We left our Banned Books Week display up for an extra week. I just today helped the Public Relations committee take it down. We went with a “Bail Out a Book” theme, including books in a glass display case striped with gray paper to look like a prison, a “selfie-station” where students could take a mugshot with their favorite banned book, and our mannequin (called both Libby and Agnes) dressed in an orange jumpsuit from Mobile Metro Jail. As mentioned in an earlier post, we also had the USA mascots come to the library during Banned Books Week.
The display was very popular with students. We encouraged them to share their Banned Books selfies on social media, using the hashtags #BannedBooksWeek, #WeAreSouth, #JagsReadBannedBooks, and #MarxLibrary.
The library’s faculty and staff also participated, and we shared these photos on the library’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages, where they received a high number of likes. In fact, these posts were the second most popular since I started working at the library. The most popular was our “Libraries Transform” display, which I’ll write about in another post.
The display allowed student interaction because of the selfie-station, but students also found it to be very strange, seeing a mannequin in a prison jumpsuit and a row of black and white mugshots. This turned out to be a good thing. The circulation desk (which is located right in front of the display) fielded dozens of questions about Banned Books Week. While walking by the display or taking pictures of my colleagues, I also had a number of interactions. They typically went something like this:
Student: Are these books banned? Like, are we not allowed to read them?
Me: The books on this shelf are books that someone, somewhere tried to remove from a library or a school. But librarians believe that you should have the freedom to read whatever you want–even if someone else doesn’t like it!
Student: So we are allowed to read them?
Me: Of course! Libraries work hard to make sure that you have access to all kinds of information, even if someone else doesn’t like it!
Student: (seeing book on shelf) I love this book! I read it in high school! I can’t believe someone would try to ban it!
At that point, we’d encourage the student to take a “mugshot” with their selected banned book, and to share the picture on social media. We’d also give them a copy of our handout, Why Celebrate Banned Books Week.
I feel the display was effective in communicating the importance of resisting censorship. However, during Banned Books Week, a post appeared in the private Facebook group, #ALATT, about the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore that ran a similar campaign. Pratt Library receive serious backlash for sharing on Twitter images of (mostly black) children in front of a police lineup, in mock mugshots.
The backlash seemed to address two issues. First, the library shouldn’t have shared photos of minors in a public forum. Second, and much more significant, the library should have considered the cultural implications of having young black people taking mugshots. In other words, this is a population that is regularly discriminated against by police, and by regular people who simply assume that black children are more likely to be or become criminals.
Our library serves a different population. Our patrons are all adults, and most of them are students or faculty at the university. We have a reasonably diverse campus (although it doesn’t reflect the diversity of the surrounding areas), but because our library faculty and staff are overwhelmingly white, the mugshots we produced were also overwhelmingly white.
Looking back at our campaign, I feel startled and somewhat embarrassed for not fully reflecting on the idea. It seems like a silly, fun idea. It’s extremely popular on Pinterest, which is where we got the idea. But for many people, the threat of being arrested, thrown in jail, or worse–for a minor or even nonexistent offense–is a very real threat. Since our population does include adults, it’s likely or even certain that someone who saw the display has been arrested and booked in this manner.
This reflects my own need to hone my critical literacy and work on developing displays that are inclusive.
Library Science Officer 