The American Library Association recently released the State of America’s Libraries Report 2016. One small part of that report includes the most challenged books of 2015. This interesting information came to our attention from The Washington Post in their article, “The books Americans want removed from libraries.”
There does seem to be some common objections to the books who made the list – sexual content, offensive language, religious viewpoints, etc. The list includes some well-known titles, like the Holy Bible and Fifty Shades of Grey. There are two titles I never thought I would see in a common group.
The Top 10 is based on 275 challenges recorded by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom last year, and the list includes a brief description of the reasons individuals gave in asking libraries to remove the books.
In July 2015, a Harris poll on attitudes about book banning and school libraries revealed that out of the 2,244 adults who participated, the percentage who felt that certain books should be banned increased by more than half since the previous survey in 2011.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
