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Make Libraries Great Again – ‘The Librarians’ (2025) and the fight against book bans  

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Written up by Catherine Birch, Jules McGee-Russell, and Summer Mainstone-Cotton 

On 24th September, the Weston Library hosted a screening of The Librarians, a new documentary about banned books, censorship, and free speech in libraries across the USA. The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, but this was only its second screening in the UK, and the audience was packed with librarians, readers, and film buffs alike. Naturally, a few trainees decided that an entire day spent working in a library wasn’t enough, so we decided to go along that evening too. 

The Weston was steadily filling up with people as we arrived, and there was a lively atmosphere full of conversation and laughter throughout the building. We mingled, chatted, networked, and partook in the drinks and nibbles on offer. However, we didn’t have long to mill around, as seats were being taken fast, and it was time for the event to begin.  

The welcome reception in Blackwell Hall @cyrusoxford

Before the film screening, there was a small ceremony held by the Royal Society of Literature to celebrate the Bodleian’s own Richard Ovenden. Richard was recently awarded the RSL’s Benson Medal for outstanding services to literature – in this case, his significant career as a librarian, and his roles leading organisations like the Digital Preservation Coalition and the university’s Gardens, Libraries, and Museums group. On top of this, he also recently wrote a book on the history of book burnings – Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack – which makes a brief cameo in The Librarians! The award was certainly well-deserved, and the audience were enthusiastic with cheers and applause. After a short speech and some votes of thanks, he handed over to the director, Kim A. Synder, for a short introduction to the film. From there, all that was left to do was dim the lights, set the stage, and start the screening.  

Richard Ovenden accepting the Benson Medal
& his acceptance speech @cyrusoxford

The film itself was a compelling look at the recent wave of protests against school libraries in the United States. For those unaware: in 2021, public school superintendents across Texas were sent a list of 850 books challenged for potentially causing “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or…psychological distress” to schoolchildren.1 The list was compiled by state representative Matt Krause and predominantly included books which featured sex education, black history, and LGBTQ+ characters; many were also simply written by LGBTQ+ or non-white authors.2 School districts in other parts of the country began similar investigations, and soon libraries throughout the US were facing book bans. Parents began calling for the removal of material that they deemed sexually explicit or inappropriate for children, schools pulled up to hundreds of books from their shelves out of caution, and librarians who protested this were silenced.3 The Librarians follows the people who pushed back against these investigations, exploring their stories and their struggles.    

The film began in Texas but didn’t stop there, travelling to Florida, New Jersey, and other states impacted by book bans. It exposed how school librarians were subjected to bullying, victimisation, and even unemployment for questioning these book bans, and how those who protested more vocally received targeted online harassment and threats of physical violence. The film featured interviews with these librarians, as well as the students and school board members directly impacted by these bans. It also examined the role of politicians, pressure groups, and parents in this ongoing struggle, combining original documentary footage with social media content and relevant news stories for a more complete view of the situation. Interspersed throughout were clips from The Twilight Zone, Fahrenheit 451 (1966), and Storm Centre (1956), as well as archival footage of Nazi book burnings and Joseph McCarthy speeches. Time and again the film returned to these examples of historical censorship to emphasise the necessity of information, the dangers of book bans, and the inalienable right to freedom of expression. It was a moving watch, balancing humour and emotion with a poignant lasting message about the importance of libraries and literature to society. 

The crowd applauding Julie Miller and Amanda Jones
& a close up on the discussion panel @cyrusoxford

After the screening, a panel sat down to discuss the film and take questions from the audience. As well as the director and producers, it featured Dame Mary Beard, Richard Ovenden, and two of the librarians who featured most prominently within the documentary: Julie Miller and Amanda Jones. Discussion quickly turned to the Bodleian’s own experiences with book bans over the centuries, as Richard explained how the original Bodley’s Librarian specifically collected books denounced by religious authorities, preserving this information against censorship or wilful destruction. However, as Dame Mary then pointed out, it is important not to just rest on this legacy. She advised the librarians present to be conscious of how we treat ideas or books that we don’t personally endorse, reminding us that to fight against censorship we must fight for all speech to be free. As the panel reflected on the position of foreign academic librarians in this struggle, they returned to a central motif of the film – that silence is compliance when faced with systematic suppression. 

The panel also discussed how these attacks on librarians have progressed since the film was finished in late 2024: perhaps most notably, in May 2025, the President unceremoniously fired the fourteenth Librarian of Congress.4 Carla Hayden, both the first woman and first African American to hold this post, was removed on the grounds that she had promoted DEI and placed “inappropriate books for children” in the library.5 This directly echoes the sentiments expressed about school librarians within the documentary, emphasising the increasing scope and scale of this crisis. Julie and Amanda took this opportunity to speak about their continued activism within their local communities and beyond, while the producers explained their plans to publicise the film further and gain international support for the librarians affected by these repressive campaigns. Discussion ended shortly after this, but not without a final round of applause for the librarians, politicians, and everyone behind the film continuing to fight to speak freely and be heard. 

Some familiar faces deep in conversation @cyrusoxford

After all that talking, it was finally time for… more talking! There was a short drinks reception in Blackwell Hall following the screening, which gave us the opportunity to chat with other library staff and visitors who’d come to the viewing. The room really came alive, and the hall was buzzing with noise as the film gave everyone a lot to talk about. We had some interesting conversations about public services, the accessibility of our libraries, and our responsibilities in this struggle as new professionals. We also got the chance to tell some other attendees about our traineeships, and found time to catch up with some former trainees! All-in-all, a great end to the night.  

The Librarians is an ambitious project – creating a film about a rapidly developing political storm and screening it internationally is no easy feat – but it is certainly a worthwhile one. The documentary highlights the cultural role of libraries in the past and present, providing useful insight into the politics of information and the tactics used to undermine it. While many of us had heard about these book bans across the US, we weren’t aware of the scale of the issue or the extent of the harm it was causing to individual librarians, and the film was an eye-opening call to act.  As trainees, we are just entering the world of libraries: this film urges us to work to ensure the libraries are still there for us in future. The Librarians was released in the UK on the 26th of September, with more details of showtimes available here. It will also be available on BBC iPlayer for over a year. If you’re at all interested in libraries and literature, it’s definitely worth a watch. And if our review still hasn’t convinced you, here’s the trailer to speak for itself.  

With thanks to Cyrus Mower (@cyrusoxford) for taking all of the photos included in this blog post 

Notes:

  1. Krause’s letter to school superintendents ↩︎
  2. Texas lawmaker Matt Krause targets 850 books he says could make students uneasy – NPR ↩︎
  3. District’s list of purged school library books circulates around Tennessee – Chalkbeat ↩︎
  4. Trump fires Librarian of Congress, continuing to shape cultural institutions – NPR ↩︎
  5. White House reveals why Trump fired Librarian of Congress as Democrats call her ouster a ‘disgrace’ – The Independent ↩︎

Bodley Medal: Sir Philip Pullman

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The prestigious Bodley Medal has been awarded since 2002, in its current iteration, to recognise outstanding contributions to the worlds of books and literature, libraries, science, philanthropy and other fields. Previous recipients including include novelists Colm Tóibín, Zadie Smith, and Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, among others. Earlier this month, on a chilly November evening, the Bodley Medal was awarded to author Sir Philip Pullman under the baroque ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre.  

The evening opened with a panel discussion about Pullman’s work, chaired by author and critic, Erica Wagner, along with children’s author and former Waterstones Children’s Laureate, Cressida Cowell MBE, Dr Philip Goff, author, philosopher and professor at Durham University and Dr Margaret Kean, the Dame Helen Gardner Fellow in English and Tutor in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

A screen at the front of a lecture theatre with a picture of en engraved circular medal on the left hand side. Philip Pullman and Richard Ovenden stand on a stage in front of the screen looked on by a crowded audience.
Philip Pullman presented with the Bodley Medal by Richard Ovenden in the Sheldonian Theatre.

Each of the panellists keenly recalled their own experiences of encountering Pullman’s works for the first time, whether as teenage readers desperately grappling with Pullman’s exploration of dark matter, multiple universes, and philosophy, or as adults: parents, critics, or fellow authors. Amongst the varying accounts of each of the panellists’ initial encounters with Pullman’s work, there were commonalities too: an insistence on the deep visual impressions left, the richness and abundance his prose summons, and the expansivity of the works. Erica Wagner, the panel’s chair, noted “the way in which [Pullman] has created a whole cosmology, a whole universe […] for us to enter.” [1] 

The panel discussion was followed by Sir Philip Pullman in conversation with Richard Ovenden, Head of Gardens, Libraries and Museums at the University of Oxford and Bodley’s Librarian. During their conversation, Richard Ovenden described Pullman as “a great friend of libraries”, which was more than evident from the clear reverence with which Pullman described his experiences of both public and academic libraries. The first library ticket one owns, he suggested, is an “enormous gift, a key to open a wonderland.” The loss of approximately 1000 branches of public libraries in the last 12 years, and the cuts to funding which have both prompted and accompanied this, Pullman described as a “a slow, quiet, subtle, well-concealed disaster.” In the earlier panel discussion, Cressida Cowell exalted Pullman’s aptitude for storytelling itself, explicitly identifying one of the great qualities of Pullman’s work to be its power in creating generations of readers. Pullman charted his own experience of the Bodleian Libraries from his days as an undergraduate English student (a discipline which didn’t allow him to read the texts he was drawn to). Instead, Pullman found himself magnetically pulled to the public library in Oxford. This roving between the public library and the academic spaces of Oxford’s Bodleian libraries is still evident in Pullman’s account of the power of libraries. Pullman added to this with a resounding defence of the role of the school library, and, particularly, he stated, the need for a school library to be cared for by a qualified librarian. This is an especially desperate requirement at a time when the National Literacy Trust has recently published new research suggesting that children’s enjoyment of reading is at its lowest level in two decades. [2] 

 

A reading room of the Old Bodleian with book shelves on hte left and right side of the image under an ornately decorated wooden panelled ceiling. In the centre of the image in the distnace there is an ornate arched stained glass window, with someone sat a desk studying in front of it.
Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Old Bodleian, known in Pullman’s works as Bodley’s Library. photo (c) John Cairns

Whilst rooted in the city of Oxford itself, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy expands our perspective outwards to a consideration of a multiplicity of universes. Oxford echoes through the series like a palimpsest, resounding throughout Pullman’s created worlds. The Bodleian Library itself appears in a mirrored form throughout Pullman’s work as Bodley’s Library. It is, perhaps, excellent symmetry then, for Pullman to receive the Bodleian’s most prestigious award, the Bodley Medal itself. The honour, and the event accompanying its bestowal, are both a celebration of libraries and the work done by those who love and promote them. 

For more history on the Bodley Medal, see here.  

[1] Wagner, Erica, “Bodley Medal: Sir Philip Pullman”, Event. Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. November 9th 2023. All following quotes unless otherwise stated are transcribed from this event.  

[2] https://literacytrust.org.uk/news/childrens-reading-enjoyment-at-lowest-level-in-almost-two-decades/ Accessed: November 28th 2023. 

 

Library Lates: Sensational Books and Excavating the Egyptians

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From reading rooms that smell of Rich Tea biscuits to practising calligraphy and visiting the fascinating Tutankhamun exhibition, the Library Lates at the Weston Library have been among the highlights of the first Michaelmas term working in Oxford for myself and previous and current trainees. The Library Lates took place in the evening between 7.00pm and 9.30pm and featured free talks, drop-in activities and exciting performances.

Sensational Books

Sensational books print
Sensational Books print

The first Library Late took place in October and showcased the delightful Sensational Books exhibition at the Weston. It began with a guided tour of the exhibition by one of the curators, who spoke about the aims of the exhibition: to highlight different ways in which readers engage and interact with books using senses such as sight, sound, taste, smell, touch and proprioception. Books on display included illuminated manuscripts, pop-up books, very large and very small books that need to be moved with extreme care, books made from fruit and vegetables, the ‘cheese book’ (a book kept permanently in a fridge and made entirely of cheese slices, as the name suggests!), along with many more interesting and unusual items.

I was very much intrigued by the collection of bottled scents available for visitors to smell. Each one captured the aroma of certain books in the Bodleian Library’s vast collection, or the smell of certain readings rooms. For instance, the Duke Humphreys Library, I can now testify, smells of Rich Tea biscuits.

Following the tour, we had the opportunity to engage with a number of activities set up in the Blackwell Hall. These included embossing our initials in a Gothic font, attempting calligraphy, speaking with members of Bodleian Conservation and learning a bit more about the work they do. Along with other trainees, I found myself gravitating towards the Guide Dogs and then the printing press, where we had the exciting opportunity to create our own little prints which we proudly took home. We also had the chance to choose and take home a flip book – artwork commissioned by Oxford for the Sensational Books exhibition [1].

As well as activities, there were also several short lectures that visitors were invited and encouraged to attend. Topics ranged from the creation of multisensory books to the use of smells to support children’s engagement with books and their stories, as well as unusual books (including a presentation on a book covered in mushroom spores!) and what this means for libraries and conservators.

Excavating the Egyptians:

Excavating the Egyptians print
Excavating the Egyptians print

The second Library Late took place in mid-November (100 years since Howard Carter and his team discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb) and celebrated the wonderful exhibition: Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive, which is still on at the Weston. A wide range of performances, presentations and activities awaited us in the Blackwell Hall. From watching screenings of an artist’s work, listening to analyses of Carter’s diaries, writing our names in hieroglyphs, playing ancient Egyptian board games in the Weston café, to being inspired by images of the golden Shrine to Nekhbet in order to create and emboss our own foil decorations, we trainees had an enjoyable and entertaining evening at the Weston.

I highly recommend visiting the wonderful (and free) Tutankhamun: Excavating the Archive exhibition, which is running until the 5th of February next year. Items on display include photographs and annotated drawings of the archaeological discoveries made during the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, as well as pages from the diary Carter kept in 1922. Nearer to the end of the exhibition there was a short video which used records from archives to show what the tomb must have looked like originally in 1922 when it was first discovered.

References:

[1] https://visit.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/event/sensational-books 

Classifying the world: John Wilkins and the invention of a universal language

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I decided to allow my inner geek have a trip out, and so we went to the talk at Magdalen College Library ‘Classifying the world: John Wilkins and the invention of a universal language’, by Tabitha Tuckett, who is one of the librarians there.

John Wilkins was a clergyman and scientist from the seventeenth century who decided to try and make up his own language, to be understood by all, and his method of doing so was essentially to classify the world. As Wikipedia says, it was “brilliant but hopeless”.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I mostly associate language invention with Tolkien, and my immediate mental image of an invented universal language is something like Esperanto. Wilkins’s invention of a universal language was different to both.He did not base his language on other European languages, rather, he believed that the way to achieve a language to be characterised by ease and usefulness was to base it on a logical system of classification. He would use categories and subcategories to create building blocks for conveying meaning, and attach phonemes to each building block to create words.

In the seventeenth century there was a movement to try and bring about a universal language, to create a language that could be understood by all. This movement was in part brought about by the decline in Latin as a lingua franca, and also by the increase in travel to parts of the world where the people spoke languages nothing like the European ones.

Wilkins developed a system of hierarchical classification, which he intended to be both spoken and written. The gist I got was that Wilkins’s aim was to arrange all human knowledge into categories, like Linnaeus would later do (with more success) with plants. He tried to arrange all of human knowledge into categories. Wilkins started with a broad concept, represented by one letter, and then added suffix after suffix to narrow it down. He had forty broad categories (genuses), ranging from God to disease to stones. Each genus could then be divided into sub categories, to aid the defining of them. Stones, for example, could then be divided into vulgar stones, middle prized, or precious; dissolvable and non-dissolvable. And vulgar stones could furthermore be sub categorised into greater or lesser magnitude, and so on.

His work then becomes of interest to linguists. I found the relationship between Wilkins’s language to his script and pronunciation quite hard to grasp. He developed a script, all squiggles, represented meaning directly. This means that his words could be written without ever being spoken, and his language was more of a classification scheme than a language that Tolkien might have made up.

I found it extremely interesting, especially how his language was limited by the inability to classify the extent of human knowledge. It was also limited by issues with tense and voice, and was a very brusque way of communicating. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to see how even attempting to add a classification system to the world could create a comprehendible language.