Monday, September 28, 2009

The Banned Book Library Project





I just discovered that my favorite all-time book site LibraryThing.com has a separate Banned Book Library project where they are compiling a list of books that have been banned or challenged over the years.  Clicking the link will take you to the list, where you can see not only the list, but the reasons they landed there. By using a tag system, the LT group is able to give us a better picture of why a particular book is/was considered objectionable.  Click on a particular book to bring up more details.

Quoting from the profile page:

Explanation of Tags

To make browsing easier, the tags have been structured in a way that groups sections of information together. To summarise:

Country - Refers to country work was banned in
Source - Refers to source of information regarding banning
Reason - Does what it says on the tin, why the book was banned
Time Period - Time period when the book was banned/restricted. Grouped by century - details in comments field.
Censoring Body - Specific authorities that have banned work (taken directly from source)
Banned Books - Books that have been banned
Censored Books - Books that have been censored
Challenged Books - Books that have been challenged

As an LT member, one of the things I like best is that it automatically matches my library with the banned books list, giving me a quick snapshot of which of these evil devils are in my library, allowing me to tag them in my library and find and relish them quickly. 

Just for fun, here are my matching items so far---I think I'm off to stroll through a few.








Tropic of Cancer
~
Henry Miller










Posted by Tina at 12:01 AM

2 comments:

  1. DCMetroreaderSeptember 28, 2009 at 7:50 PM

    Lots of classics on the list (but the there always is). I went to see why The Jungle was challenged. It said it was banned for "Moral" by the South African gov. I don't get this, but it was interesting to check out the challenged/banned/censored books. Thanks for the link!

    ReplyDelete
  2. BookloggedSeptember 30, 2009 at 1:30 AM

    I checked out how many in my library have been banned. Only 3. I know I've read many more than that but they're not all in LT. Cool that LT did this.

    ReplyDelete

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