Amid an ongoing surge in censorship, the Digital Public library of America announced this week that it is set to introduce a new social media campaign that will highlight a “Banned Book of the Week.”
The effort will officially begin next week, with new posts featuring a banned book coming out every Wednesday on DPLA’s Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter) feeds. The featured books will be selected by members of the DPLA’s volunteer “Curation Corps.”
The move comes after the DPLA launched, last year, its Banned Book Club, a program that uses GPS-based “geo-targeting” to enable readers in communities across the nation to check out e-book versions of banned books via the DPLA’s Palace e-reader app. In a post this week, DPLA officials noted that the Banned Books Club recently added 17 new locations across 11 states, along with “more than 400 newly banned titles” to its collection.
“The rate of book banning is not slowing down,” the group added, in a statement: “Rather, it is accelerating, with even more books removed from library shelves across the country in the past three months than in the prior quarter.”
“At DPLA, our mission is to ensure access to knowledge for all and we believe in the power of technology to further that access,” said DPLA executive director John Bracken, in a statement, adding that the DPLA will continue to “leverage the dual powers of libraries and digital technology to ensure that every American can access the books they want to read.”
Click here for more information about the DPLA’s Banned Book Club.
