This weekend, book lovers worldwide will come together to defend their freedom to read.

Saturday will mark the beginning of Banned Books Week, a celebration that runs from Sept. 24 until Oct. 1 each year. During the week, participants read from books that have been either removed or threatened with removal from library collections because of their content.

The American Library Association inaugurated Banned Books Week in 1982, seeking to preserve people’s free access to information and resist efforts to limit that access.

Going digital — and going abroad

Organizers of this year’s celebration are expanding its reach with what they call a “Virtual Read-Out.” For the first time, they are asking people to upload videos of themselves reading from their favorite banned or challenged works. The videos can be uploaded to and viewed on the official 2011 Banned Books Week YouTube channel.

Barbara Jones, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, remarked on how observance of Banned Books Week has spread over the years.

Jones expressed confidence that “over a hundred” American institutions, including public libraries, university libraries and bookstores, would be celebrating during the week. She also commented on the way that it has spread to countries beyond the United States.

“I’m aware of about 30 events going on overseas,” she said, mentioning planned events in Poland and Sweden. “Two years ago, it was zero.”

Jones speculated that some foreign nationals’ passion for free access to information may be inflamed by the memory of past injustice.

“People — like in Poland — who have lived under more totalitarian regimes understand what it’s like to have your freedom taken away,” she said. “I think that’s why they’re so keen to have these celebrations.”

Celebrating locally

On the ISU campus, Rita Marinko, associate professor and subject librarian at Parks Library, is assembling a Banned Books Week exhibit that will be on display throughout the coming week. The exhibit, set to be displayed on the library’s first floor, will feature copies of books that have been either banned or challenged.

Marinko thinks the exhibit will underscore how many instances of censorship there have been in the history of literature.

“This has been going on for centuries,” she said. “It’s not a new phenomenon, although the banning of books is a little less seen now than just challenges.”

Along with oft-banned older works like “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Moby Dick,” the exhibit will include some recently published books.

One of the newer titles on display in Parks will be “And Tango Makes Three,” a children’s story about two male penguins at New York’s Central Park Zoo who hatched and cared for a baby penguin. The book has been challenged and removed from collections on the grounds that it promotes homosexuality. Jones called it “the No. 1 book banned this year.”

Marinko said that, though the genres, topics and prose styles of banned and challenged books vary, they tend to share a few common traits. Among these, she said, were controversial political statements, references to sex and profane language.

She added that books thought innocuous by most library patrons sometimes get challenged.

“I think that people will be surprised at what has been challenged in the past, and reasons for that,” she said. “I’m hoping that they will think about what’s behind this and why people might be afraid of ideas.”

The future of free expression

Barbara Jones called the American Library Association’s current statistics on banned and challenged books “a snapshot,” saying that they did not fully represent the incidence or prevalence of book censorship.

To give people a fuller sense of how, when and where people try to restrict information access, the association is now revamping its censorship database. Jones said the revamped database would make it easier for people to report book bans and challenges. She also said it would offer statistics about bans that were more detailed than those now available.

“We’ll have a clearer idea of why a book is banned,” she said. “We’ll be able to do more comparative things, which we can’t do now.”

The association aims to have the revamped database online by the start of the 30th Banned Books Week, which falls next year.

The database is one of many innovations Jones views as conducive to free expression. She said the Internet, blogs and social media also nurtured it.

“Anyone can be an author. You don’t need a publishing contract,” she said. “This is all good, I think. This promotes free speech.”