September: Banned Books Week (Display 3) Banned Books

For the last Banned Books display I decided to make paper chains with locks. One of our Student Library Assistants cut out several strips of black construction paper and stapled them together to form long paper chains. I drew locks onto construction paper and cut them out and then taped them onto the chains.

I also made up caution signs in Photoshop and cut them out and placed them on some of the books.

I saw several displays on Pinterest that were using the ALA's Forbidden graphic on their books. I liked how it looked so I printed out several and pasted them onto the books as well.

I made up a sign for the display using the ALA graphics for this year's Banned Books Week:

I printed out three images using quotes and pictures I found on Buzzfeeds "11 Quotes from Authors on Censorship and Banned Books" 

For the top of the bookcase I made a Banned Books sign using ALA graphics:

September: Banned Books Week (Display 2) Books Under Fire

Our second Banned Books display was inspired by several displays I have seen on pinterest using "fire." I called it "Books Under Fire."

I started by creating a resource list in Destiny of as many banned books as I could find in our OPAC. I needed as many hardback books as possible because of the decor I was putting on the books. One of our parent volunteers then took the list and pulled several books. I picked 24 hardback books and began research each one to find a summary of when it was banned or challenged and a year. I made a template in Photoshop for banned books and one for challenged books. Depending on which option fit I would paste in the summary for that book.

I printed all the banned books onto yellow paper and all the challenged books onto dark peach paper (I was trying to stick to the colors of fire). I then cut the paper down to fit each book and covered the entire right side of each cover.

For the fire I googled fire clip art and enlarged two images to use as templates. I cut the fire out of red, orange and yellow construction paper.

I made a sign for the top of the display using fire graphics.

September: Banned Books Week (Display 1) 23 Banned Books

Monday, September 22 begins Banned Books Week. Every year our library celebrates with awesome displays. This year we have three different Banned Books displays. The first display was inspired by a cool infographic found on WeldonOwen, "22 of their favorite banned books" color-coded by their reason for being banned. My original idea was to take the exact books from the infographic and then create color-coded sashes like the infographic.

However the Upper School Library did not have all the books on the list. I was able to borrow a few from the Middle School Library but I was still short quite a few books. I used the ALA's list of frequently banned or challenged books and found 23 total from our library. I researched each book and found the reason for it being banned or challenged and the year it was banned or challenged. I then created "sashes" in Photoshop with the year in one of six colors (I did not have books for all eight categories as the infographic had). The Six categories I used were: Religion, Politics, Sexism, Sexuality, Cultural Differences, and Racism.

Using the same layout as the infographic, I created a sign for the 23 books along with the six categories.