This week marks the annual Banned Books Week across the country, which celebrates free speech and rallies against censorship. The Hawaiʻi Library Association and American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii partnered to launch this year's celebration, which is themed “Censorship is so 1984. Read for your rights".

Pioneering actor, author, and activist George Takei has been named honorary chair of Banned Books Week, which will take place October 5 – 11, 2025. Takei will be joined in leading the annual event by youth honorary chair Iris Mogul.

The Prejudicial Materials Working Group (PMWG) of the RBMS Controlled Vocabularies Editorial Group (CVEG) was convened in the summer of 2020 to review, revise, and generate new terminology in the RBMS Controlled Vocabulary for Rare Materials Cataloging (RBMS CVRMC) that would be useful for indexing works that are prejudicial in nature, or that are the byproduct of prejudicial and hateful systems and ideologies. This work included review and revision of scope notes and relationships between terms.

Patty Hector lost job after being targeted by campaign urging restriction of books with race and LGBTQ+ themes

The American Library Association responds to the Department of Education's dismissal of complaints about censorship and discrimination: the "effort to terminate protections... advances the demonstrably false claim that book bans are not real."

Libraries are now reporting more aggressive, targeted, and organized First Amendment audits than in years past.

Every library — academic, public, and school (public, private, charter, independent, and international) — should have a comprehensive written policy that guides the selection, deselection or weeding, and reconsideration of library resources. The most valuable selection policy is current; it is reviewed and revised on a regular basis; and it is familiar to all members of a library’s staff. The policy should be approved by the library’s governing board or other policy-making body and disseminated widely for understanding by all stakeholders.

Democrat Rhode Island lawmakers on Wednesday promoted a suite of bills motivated by the Freedom to Read movement — an assertion of libraries’ right to hold controversial books, amid an ongoing culture clash over the written word.

Both the Indiana and Iowa State Legislatures have introduced legislation regarding criminally charging libraries and librarians over “inappropriate” material. These bills are closely related to widespread book challenges occurring at schools and public libraries across the nation, with people trying to remove books that address certain topics relating to gender, sexuality, and race from library collections. In many cases there is already a clear process for reconsidering materials in a collection, so how do legal defenses play a role in this and what do the bills change?

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) has released new data documenting book challenges throughout the United States, finding that challenges were nearly double that of 2021, reaching the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.