Well, you already know what has been going on, but the cover of the report gives a clue. The two find-it-inside headlines are "Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2024" and "Censorship by the Numbers."

 

Inside we find a one page intro from Leslie Burger, the interim executive director of ALA. She identifies three major trends from the year-- censorship, AI, and sustainability, which seems to mean how libraries help communities be sustainable. On the next page Cindy Hohl, ALA president, points out the many things that libraries do that are important to communities. 

Then Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, gets three pages to talk about the battle over the freedom to read. Censorship attempts are actually down from 2023 (821 vs. 1,247), but that's still the third-highest number ever. She notes that the numbers don't really capture the degree to which librarians and library workers are themselves weathering attacks and a general atmosphere of fear. She also notes some positive news, like the courts that are overturning bans. And as with many issues, much depends on which state you're in. 

Then we get to the data portion of the report. 

There are the top 10 most challenged books of 2024. No big surprises here. All Boys Aren't Blue leads the list, followed by Gender Queer. Bluest Eye and Perks of Being a Wallflower tie for third. Ellen Hopkins makes the list twice, and John Green's Looking for Alaska is still there. Old classics like Huck Finn are nowhere to be seen.

Next the things you probably only suspected.

Where do the challenges to books come from? Turns out only about 16% come from actual parents. 10% come from elected officials/government. 36% come from school boards or administration. Only 26% are listed as from "pressure groups" like your local Moms for Liberty chapter, but who do you imagine is leaning on board members and elected officials to get in there and ban some Naughty Books. So we've got 72% of book challenges coming from someone other than actual parents. Librarians, teachers, and staff account for 1%.

That 72% represents a major trend. in 2020 only 25% of challenges came from pressure groups (or the people that pressure groups were pressuring). In 2021 that soared to 65%., coinciding with the launch of Moms for Liberty (and right wing crankiness about Trump's defeat, and the invention of critical race theory as an issue). The 72% is a dip from 2023, so I suppose we can hope that's the start of a trends.

While school libraries have gotten most of the attention, in 2024 the public libraries led in the amount of challenges: 55% of 2024 book challenges were in public libraries, with school libraries accounting for 38%. 

What was actually challenged? 76% of the challenges were for books and graphic novels. 6% objected to displays. 6% skipped the complaint and went to vandalism and theft of materials. 3% threatened access to the library by threatening to cut funding, close the library, or blow it up (because bomb threats are still a thing in 2024).

The remainder of the report gets back to the main business of libraries (which is not actually fending off folks suffering culture panic). mantal health. Read to Recovery. NASA workshops. Finding ways to provide access, and just generally being a place where persons can connect with a larger world of knowledge and information with a local center for community. They are figuring out how to cope with AI, and meeting civic responsibilities with broadband and infrastructure, even as they brace for funding hits from the regime of Dear Leader.

I don't know when the report was actually written, but of course the slashing of library funding has already begun, which sucks. I've been a library guy my whole life. When we moved here, we had a library much more easily accessed than when we lived in the boonies. My mom would take us weekly, carrying a picnic basket with which we carted our selections back and forth. Getting to a book store was a rare treat in those days, but the library was always there, and I could sample all sorts of stuff and read my way through huge series. Between the public library and my school library, I had access to a whole world of stuff, and I took advantage. 

When I grew up (ish), I discovered the research section of the library and the miracle of newspapers on microfilm. I spent thirty years reading page after page, scouring the paper for details about our local band and constantly wandering down side trips; eventually a book came out of that. It became enough of a Thing for me that when I decided my honors students needed to do research from primary (ish) sources, the answer was local history, because I already knew what was there. For years, the public library was part of my curriculum. I volunteered to sit in that room on Saturdays and help people find what they were looking for (it was usually a family member).

A public library is a great thing, a community institution that lets every citizen have resources that would ordinarily be reserved only for the wealthy. Makes you wonder why some people are so bent on attacking libraries, an institution whose greatest sin is simply trying to serve as many people as it can.