Library Guides: Folsom Library Collection Highlights: National Library Week

About National Library Week

“National Library Week is an annual celebration highlighting the valuable role libraries, librarians, and library workers play in transforming lives and strengthening our communities.” - American Library Association

In honor of National Library Week (April 6th-12th, 2025), we are highlighting the role of libraries and library staff in making information accessible for everyone. This year's theme, 'Drawn to the Library', asks us to consider how we are drawn into library spaces. As a library, we choose to highlight content from our collection's holdings related to banned books, the history of libraries, and information literacy resources. Listed down below are the following celebration days that fall during National Library Week and please consider how you can celebrate alongside us! (Learn more about Libraries in the Credo Reference Database.)

Monday, April 7: Right to Read Day, a day for readers, advocates, and library lovers to take action to protect, defend, and celebrate the right to read. The American Library Association (ALA) kicks off National Library Week with the release of its State of America's Libraries Report, including the list of Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2024.
Tuesday, April 8: National Library Workers Day, a day for library staff, users, administrators, and Friends groups to recognize the valuable contributions made by all library workers.
Wednesday, April 9: National Library Outreach Day (formerly National Bookmobile Day), a day to celebrate library outreach and the dedicated library professionals who are meeting their patrons where they are.
Thursday, April 10: Take Action for Libraries Day, a day to rally advocates to support libraries.

Banned Books

The term 'banned' or 'challenged' books refer books or other material that have been either censored or attempted to be censored in public, school, and academic libraries. The titles below refer to books in the Folsom Library's catalog that have either been challenged or outright banned at other libraries due to the objections of an individual person or group. To help celebrate everyone's right to read, we encourage taking some time to read a 'banned' book or check out the American Library Association website to learn more about book censorship in the United States.

1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) by George Orwell
Call Number: PR6029.R8 N56
ISBN: 9788382920987
It is 1984, and the worlds' three major powers-Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia-are constantly at war. In Oceania, where the Party is in power, the thought police unearth every act of dissent, and Big Brother is always watching. Winston Smith, a dutiful citizen of Oceania, works for the Ministry of Truth as a propaganda writer who rewrites history to suit the needs of the authoritarian government. But when Winston falls in love with fellow worker Julia, they begin to question the very system they work for, placing them in immense danger. Pursuing their forbidden love affair, Winston plans a rebellion against the Party in order to regain the freedom to shape his own future. But the ever-watchful Big Brother will not tolerate opposition, and for those who speak up against the system or dare to think what the Party does not want them to think, Room 101 awaits them . . .
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Call Number: PS3563.O8749 B4 1988b
ISBN: 0452261368
Publication Date: 1988-09-01
After Paul D. finds his old slave friend Sethe in Ohio and moves in with her and her daughter Denver, a strange girl comes along by the name of "Beloved." Sethe and Denver take her in and then strange things begin to happen. Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story ... read it and tremble. At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyones future.
Brave New World by Aldous. Huxley
Call Number: PR6015.U9 B65 2006
ISBN: 0060850523
Publication Date: 2006-10-17
Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future--where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment" --Back cover."Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order-all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elite.
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Call Number: PS3537 .A426 C3X 1951
ISBN: 0316769533
Publication Date: 1951-07-16
In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City."The hero-narrator of 'The Catcher in the Rye' is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.
The Diary of a Anne Frank by Anne Frank; B. M. Mooyaart (Translator); Eleanor. Roosevelt (Introduction by)
Call Number: D810.J4 F15 1967
ISBN: 0385040199
Publication Date: 1987-07-15
Compelling and candid, this diary introduced the world to a girl filled with the emotional concerns of a typical teenager but living in stifling and terrifying circumstances.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Call Number: PN6727 .B3757 Z46 2006
ISBN: 0618871713
Publication Date: 2007-06-05
This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale perfectly suited to the graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned 'fun home, ' as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift, graphic, and redemptive.
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Call Number: PR9199.3 .A8 H3X 1987
ISBN: 0449212602
Publication Date: 1986-12-12
Set in the near future, America has become a puritanical theocracy and Offred tells her story as a Handmaid under the new social order.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Call Number: PR6051.D3352 H5 1979a
ISBN: 9780345391803
Publication Date: 1995-09-27
After Earth is demolished to make way for a new hyperspatial expressway, Arthur Dent begins to hitch-hike through space.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; Oprah Winfrey (Foreword by)
Call Number: PS3551.N464 Z466 2002
ISBN: 0375507892
Publication Date: 2002-03-05
Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute insult of bigotry, and the wonder of words that can make the world right. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local “powhitetrash.” At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors (“I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare”) will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned. Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings will touch hearts and change minds for as long as people read.
The Kite Runner (Essential Edition) by Khaled Hosseini
Call Number: PS3608.O832 K58 2005
ISBN: 1594481776
Publication Date: 2005-09-06
An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present. The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons-their love, their sacrifices, their lies.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Call Number: PS3572.O5 S6 1969
ISBN: 0385333846
Publication Date: 1969
Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki (Illustrator); Mariko Tamaki
Call Number: PZ7.7.T355 Thi 2014
ISBN: 9781626720947
Publication Date: 2014-05-06
Every summer, Rose goes with her mom and dad to a lake house in Awago Beach. It's their getaway, their refuge. Rosie's friend Windy is always there, too, like the little sister she never had. But this summer is different. Rose's mom and dad won't stop fighting, and when Rose and Windy seek a distraction from the drama, they find themselves with a whole new set of problems. One of the local teens - just a couple of years older than Rose and Windy - is caught up in something bad ... Something life threatening. It's a summer of secrets, and sorrow, and growing up, and it's a good thing Rose and Windy have each other. This One Summer is a tremendously exciting new teen graphic novel from two creators with true literary clout. Cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, the team behind Skim, have collaborated on this gorgeous, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful story about a girl on the cusp of childhood.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Call Number: PS3562.E353 T6 2015
ISBN: 0062420704
Publication Date: 2015-03-03
A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice--but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.

The History of Libraries

Throughout human history, libraries have taken on various forms - from collections of clay cuneiform tablets to traveling libraries or 'bookmobiles'. The titles below to books in the Folsom Library's catalog that shed light into the origins and evolution of libraries, archives, and other information systems. By doing so, we hope to recognize the valuable contributions made by library workers to ensure the survival of information throughout the centuries and see how libraries have responded to an everchanging world.

Archives by Andrew Lison; Marcel Mars; Tomislav Medak; Rick Prelinger
ISBN: 1452961840
Publication Date: 2019-07-30
Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. Electronic files, search engines, video sites, and media player libraries make the concepts of "archival" and "retrieval" practically synonymous with the experience of interconnected computing. Archives today are the center of much attention but few agendas. Can archives inform the redistribution of power and resources when the concept of the public library as an institution makes knowledge and culture accessible to all members of society regardless of social or economic status? This book sets out to show that archives need our active support and continuing engagement. This volume offers three distinct perspectives on the present status of archives that are at once in disagreement and solidarity with each other, from contributors whose backgrounds cut across the theory-practice divide. Is the increasing digital storage of knowledge pushing us toward a turning point in its democratization? Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle? Is there a downside to the present-day impulse toward total preservation?
BiblioTech by John Palfrey
ISBN: 9780465040605
Publication Date: 2015-05-05
Libraries today are more important than ever. More than just book repositories, libraries can become bulwarks against some of the most crucial challenges of our age: unequal access to education, jobs, and information. In BiblioTech, educator and technology expert John Palfrey argues that anyone seeking to participate in the 21st century needs to understand how to find and use the vast stores of information available online. And libraries, which play a crucial role in making these skills and information available, are at risk. In order to survive our rapidly modernizing world and dwindling govergovernment funding, libraries must make the transition to a digital future as soon as possible by digitizing print material and ensuring that born-digital material is publicly available online.
Digital Libraries by William Y. Arms
ISBN: 0585281327
Publication Date: 2000-01-01
The emergence of the Internet and the wide availability of affordable computing equipment have created tremendous interest in digital libraries and electronic publishing. This book is the first to provide an integrated overview of the field, including a historical perspective, a survey of the state of the art, and an examination of current research.
Double Fold by Nicholson Baker
Call Number: Z695.655 .B35 2001
ISBN: 0375504443
Publication Date: 2001-04-10
Since the 1950s, our country's libraries have followed a policy of "destroying to preserve": They have methodically dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers, cut up hundreds of thousands of so-called brittle books, and replaced them with microfilmed copies - copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age. Half a century on, the results on this policy are jarringly apparent: There are no longer any complete editions remaining of most of America's great newspapers. The loss to historians and future generations in inestimable." "In this book, writer Nicholson Baker explains the marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it. Pleading the case for saving our newspapers and books so that they can continue to be read in their original forms, he tells how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public's trust by selling off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself, who discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper archive is to cash in his retirement savings and buy it - all twenty tons of it.
Forbidden fruit : banned, censored, and challenged books from Dante to Harry Potter by Pearce J. Carefoote ; with an introduction by Alberto Manguel.
Call Number: Z657 .C37 2007
ISBN: 9780978176549
Publication Date: 2007
From the New Testament to The Diary of Anne Frank to current objections to the Harry Potter series--dubbed the most frequently challenged books of the 21st century by the American Library Association--the tradition of banning, censoring, and challenging books has been remarkably enduring. Forbidden Fruit is a fascinating overview of "objectionable" books published in the last 500 years. Many of the works discussed are very familiar and most readers will be surprised to see the writing that has been and continues to be challenged in Western society. While most citizens of a democracy say that they oppose literary censorship and support the freedom of expression, [the author] provokes us to face some of the thorny questions of modern censorship: how do we respond when a ... teacher is disciplined for assigning [Shakespeare's] The Merchant of Venice? Or when the only bookstore in ... town decides not to carry [Salmon Rushdie's] The Satanic Verses for fear of reprisals? Or when certain magazines and novels fall into that grey area between literature and pornography? In a world where freedom of speech, ideas, and religion clash with various forms of fundamentalism, where, post-9/11, democratic societies debate the limits to freedom of speech, Forbidden Fruit calls on all of us to examine the long history of censoring ideas and reminds us that the impetus to ban books is still very much alive.
Libraries in the Ancient World by Lionel Casson
ISBN: 9780300133134
Publication Date: 2008-10-01
This delightful book tells the story of ancient libraries from their very beginnings, when 'books' were clay tablets and writing was a new phenomenon. Renowned classicist Lionel Casson takes us on a lively tour, from the royal libraries of the most ancient Near East, through the private and public libraries of Greece and Rome, down to the first Christian monastic libraries. To the founders of the first public libraries of the Greek world goes the credit for creating the prototype of today's library buildings and the science of organising books in them. Casson recounts the development of ancient library buildings, systems, holdings, and patrons, addressing questions on a wide variety of topics, such as: What was the connection between the rise in eduction and literacy and the growth of libraries?; Who contributed to the early development of public libraries, especially the great library at Alexandria?; What did ancient libraries include in their holdings?; How did ancient libraries acquire books?; What was the nature of publishing in the Greek and Roman world?; How did differnt types of users (royalty, scholars, religious figures) and different kinds of 'books' (tablets, scrolls, codices) affect library arrangements?; How did Christianity transform the nature of library holdings?; Just as a library yields unexpected treasures to a meandering browser, this entertaining book offers to its perusers the surprising history of the rise and development of ancient libraries - a fascinating story never told before.
Palaces for the People by Eric Klinenberg
Call Number: HC79.C3 K55 2018
ISBN: 9781524761165
Publication Date: 2018-09-11
An eminent sociologist offers an inspiring blueprint for rebuilding our fractured society. We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, and cultural lines, leading to a level of polarization that the country hasn't seen since the Civil War. Pundits and politicians are calling for us to come together, to find common purpose. But how, exactly, can this be done? In this book, the author suggests a way forward. He believes that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, churches, synagogues, and parks where crucial, sometimes life-saving connections, are formed. These are places where people gather and linger, making friends across group lines and strengthening the entire community. The author calls this the "social infrastructure": when it is strong, neighborhoods flourish; when it is neglected, as it has been in recent years, families and individuals must fend for themselves. The author takes us around the globe - from a floating school in Bangladesh to an arts incubator in Chicago, from a soccer pitch in Queens to an evangelical church in Houston - to show how social infrastructure is helping to solve some of our most pressing challenges: isolation, crime, education, addiction, political polarization, and even climate change.
Information Science by David G. Luenberger
ISBN: 9781400829286
Publication Date: 2012-01-12
From cell phones to Web portals, advances in information and communications technology have thrust society into an information age that is far-reaching, fast-moving, increasingly complex, and yet essential to modern life. Now, renowned scholar and author David Luenberger has produced Information Science, a text that distills and explains the most important concepts and insights at the core of this ongoing revolution. The book represents the material used in a widely acclaimed course offered at Stanford University. Drawing concepts from each of the constituent subfields that collectively comprise information science, Luenberger builds his book around the five "E's" of information: Entropy, Economics, Encryption, Extraction, and Emission. Each area directly impacts modern information products, services, and technology--everything from word processors to digital cash, database systems to decision making, marketing strategy to spread spectrum communication. To study these principles is to learn how English text, music, and pictures can be compressed, how it is possible to construct a digital signature that cannot simply be copied, how beautiful photographs can be sent from distant planets with a tiny battery, how communication networks expand, and how producers of information products can make a profit under difficult market conditions.
Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
Call Number: Z721 .B28 2003
ISBN: 0393020290
Publication Date: 2003-06-01
From the clay-tablet collections of ancient Mesopotamia to the storied Alexandria libraries in Egypt, from the burned scrolls of China's Qing Dynasty to the book pyres of the Hitler Youth, from the great medieval library in Baghdad to the priceless volumes destroyed in the multi-cultural Bosnian National Library in Sarajevo, the library has been a battleground of competing notions of what books mean to us. Battles explores how, throughout its many changes, the library has served two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, the urge to exalt canons of literature, to secure and worship the best and most beautiful words; on the other, the desire to contain and control all forms of human knowledge.
Part of Our Lives by Wayne A. Wiegand
ISBN: 9780190248017
Publication Date: 2015-09-10
Despite dire predictions in the late twentieth century that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Two of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year, and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, generations of library patrons tell a different story. In Part of Our Lives, Wayne A. Wiegand delves into the heart of why Americans love their libraries. The book traces the history of the public library, featuring records and testimonies from as early as 1850. Rather than analyzing the words of library founders and managers, Wiegand listens to the voices of everyday patrons who cherished libraries. Drawing on newspaper articles, memoirs, and biographies, Part of Our Lives paints a clear and engaging picture of Americans who value libraries not only as civic institutions, but also as social spaces for promoting and maintaining community. Whether as a public space, a place for accessing information, or a home for reading material that helps patrons make sense of the world around them, the public library has a rich history of meaning for millions of Americans.

Information Literacy

'Information Literacy' on Percipio
Check our dedicated 'Information Literacy' channel on Percipio, which offers various modules to promote the discovery of information, scholarship as a conversation, and the use of information to further knowledge.
ProQuest Research Companion
The Rensselaer Libraries provides access to ProQuest's Research Companion to help you learn more about the research process. You can create an account to keep track of your progress and access pre- and post-video assessment questions. For a self-guided tutorial on the entire research process, access the Research Companion using the link below. Learning modules and interactive tools providing self-guided information literacy, writing, and research skills instruction - includes transcripts for all videos.

Folsom Library Collection Highlights

Welcome to Folsom Library Collection Highlights

About National Library Week

Banned Books

The History of Libraries

Information Literacy

Explore Related Concepts (Requires RPI login credentials)