From Ulysses to romantasy, this site encourages you to explore banned books

30 years ago, when Digital Library Strategist and Metadata Architect John Mark Ockerbloom was a student at Carnegie Mellon University, he noticed what he saw as a troubling trend: more and more university administrators and faculty members were advocating for the censorship of content on message boards, websites, and other aspects of the then-nascent internet. “Our university administration decided that it had to stop some of the discussion boards on Usenet because they were worried that they would be seen as harmful to minors. I was worried that both at the university and in the country, there would be a big clamp down in censorship of the ‘net.” In particular, this effort to censor sexual content reminded him of a very different moment in time. “One of the people who was clamping down on these things was an English professor, and he was also talking about how much he liked Ulysses, James Joyce’s book. And I’m going, you realize that what you’re trying to do to the internet is what people tried to do to Ulysses?”

In response, he decided to create an off-shoot of his already-popular Online Books project, dedicated to books in the public domain that had been banned or otherwise censored in the past. In a detailed essay, he laid out many of the most significant cases of book censorship across history, from England’s prosecution of Thomas Paine over The Rights of Man to the Soviet Union’s bans on the Bible and the Qur'an. And, of course, he covered instances of censorship in United States history—including Ulysses, which was barred from sale in the U.S., largely due to its sexual content, until 1933.

“At the time I thought I was largely bringing up books as a quaint thing of the past, and that we didn’t really have to worry about banning books anymore in this country,” Ockerbloom observes. “And more recently, it’s turned out that maybe we do.”

Today, efforts to ban or censor books are again in the news, and the target is often libraries. According to the American Library Association, 4,240 unique book titles were targeted for removal from schools and libraries in 2023, a 65% increase compared to the year before, and the highest levels documented in 20 years of tracking.

In response to this new trend, Ockerbloom has expanded and relaunched his Banned Books site just in time for Banned Books Week 2024. Now, instead of a single, informational page, Ockerbloom has created a unique browsable database that explores book censorship past and present and seeks to connect readers with the books themselves. This new Banned Books database is one of many personal projects Ockerbloom pursues in his free time to connect with and serve people outside the Penn community, including scholars and students around the world.

We recently sat down with him to learn more about this project, the books he chooses to feature, and how his perspective on banned and censored books has changed over the years.

This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

The phrase “banned books” can mean a lot of different things. What makes a book “banned” to you?

People can certainly object to books. They can say, “I hate this book,” or “This book is saying hateful things, and I don't want to read it. I think my friend shouldn't read it.” That's criticism, and that might be warranted, or it might not be, but that’s not banning.

What I consider banning is when somebody is trying to use some form of coercion to say, “You can't write this book or publish this book,” or “We want to stop people from reading this book.” It’s one thing If somebody says, “Gee, this book is in my middle school library. I'm not sure it's appropriate for this age. I'll ask the librarian about it, and they'll decide what to do." But if they come in and they say, “Nobody should be reading this. I'm going to force people to stop reading it,” that’s where I think they cross the line.

What is the goal of your Banned Books site? What do you hope people take away from it?

I want to raise awareness of where censorship is happening, because I think that's something people need to be concerned about. But I also just want raise awareness about the books themselves and get people to read them. So if a book is available for free online, I'll point to the online copy. If it's not available online, I'll point to how you can get it from your library or buy it from a bookstore. I've also got links to forums where people can read more about the book, like Wikipedia, or discuss the book, like LibraryThing or Goodreads.

One of the things I really like about books, and for that matter about universities, is that they are a form of conversation at a very large scale. They reach out over time and space to different places. And one of the things that I'm trying to do with the site is encourage people to actually participate in these conversations by reading the books, by talking about the books, by understanding how the books have been received, and so on.

What are some changes you’ve made to the site for this year’s Banned Books Week?

I've turned it from one very long page with links to a database where you can look up books and learn more about the way they have been challenged. What I try to do on the site is not just give a list of books that have been challenged. I want to be able to show who objected to the book, why they objected to it, and what they were trying to do. And, when possible, I give sources for that information.

For example, I’ve added a long database entry about various ways the Bible has been censored over time, and I’ve connected that entry to an entry about the Qur'an, which has also been censored—sometimes in some of the same places, and sometimes in different places. And I suspect many readers may have different levels of comfort, say, with one versus the other.

What I’m hoping is that by looking at these books, people will get a better idea of the whole story behind them--not just the specific bits of it that bother people, but also what the author was trying to convey and how it fits into the context in which it arose. And I think that if people understand what's in the books and where they come from, hopefully that will give them a measure of respect for them, whether they like the books or not.

Has your thinking about book censorship changed over the years?

Yes, there are a few ways it has. For instance, one area of book censorship that I was completely ignorant about when I started this was the fact that prisons very heavily censor reading materials, including educational books, or books that might criticize prison conditions. It's surprising how wide the range of censorship is in a number of those places. I haven't yet put incidents of that on the site, but I'm hoping to do that going forward as well.

There’s another thing I've been thinking more about, especially as I've been at a university for a while. I’ve come to understand that when you’re creating a space, whether it’s at a university or in a large online forum like social media, that you’re going to want to have the space encourage certain kinds of discussion. And that means there’s a legitimate need to ensure you're not creating an atmosphere that's destructive to the people that you want to be in this space.

If people are threatening your students, for example, you want to shut that down right away. Likewise, there's been a lot of kerfuffle over whether or not social media sites should be censored. And you soon realize, if you deal with online discussions, that if you put no moderation at all in a discussion, things become a cesspool and people do not want to participate. So it's legitimate to say, as a as a site owner, “Okay, we're going to encourage this sort of speech and have these other sorts of speech go elsewhere.” And the important thing is you're saying go elsewhere. You're not saying you're going to outlaw this sort of thing.

I’m relatively okay with the idea of any specific site saying no, we're not going to allow this sort of thing, as long as a) you've got a lot of sites to choose from, and b) you don’t have the government leaning on a site and telling them what to do.

Are there other projects or initiatives that you’d encourage our readers to look at during Banned Books Week?

I would encourage people to check out the Penn Libraries Banned Books Collection, as well as the work of faculty and others at Penn who have written about these issues. Sigal Ben-Porath of the Graduate School of Education has written and spoken on banned books and related issues. And history professor Sophia Rosenfeld has also dealt with issues of democracy and free expression in both the past and present. She recently had an op-ed in the New York Times titled "I Teach a Class on Free Speech. My Students Can Show Us the Way Forward."

Scholars like these are outspoken in various ways, but also want to make sure that students learn lots of different points of view, and that they learn how to speak for themselves and to support the right to expression in all kinds of ways.