The American Library Association’s Unite Against Book Bans initiative has unveiled a new free resource—a collection of “book résumés.”
Created in collaboration with dozens of publishers, Unite Against Book Bans book résumés are easy-to-print documents that summarize a banned book’s significance and educational value, including a synopsis, reviews from professional journals, awards, accolades, and more. The book résumés also include information about how a title has been successfully retained in school districts in the face of demands to censor it. ALA officials said that the PDFs can be downloaded and printed for easy sharing with administrators, book review committees, and the public at local school and library board meetings.
“Unite Against Book Bans partners recognized a need for easy-to-access free resources for the many librarians, educators, and community advocates, who are working so hard to ensure that readers can always access an inclusive, diverse collection of books,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, in a statement. “The work they’re doing—defending the freedom to read—is difficult and hard, and we want to make the task of gathering the information needed to do that easier.”
The book résumé program launched on February 20 with “hundreds” of documents available, with ALA reps noting that more will follow in time for National Library Week, to be held April 7–13. Despite a number of high-profile legal victories for freedom to read advocates in recent months, ALA said that its forthcoming book ban data, set to be released during National Library Week, will show anther significant increase in the number of titles targeted for censorship.
Unite Against Book Bans was launched by the ALA in April 2022 to fight the surge in book bans, and now comprises more than 200 partner organizations and tens of thousands of individual supporters.
