"If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."

The banning of books today is neither infrequent nor discriminatory. As we are all members of an academic community here at Penn State, we must remain especially vigilant against the censorship of expression or ideas.

Hundreds of titles have been removed or challenged in our nations schools. In 1997, the most censored books (as compiled by the ALA) were:

In order to combat the ignorance that encourages trhe banning of books the PSU-ACLU is participating in an effort called PROJECT GUTTENBERG.

Project Guttenberg seeks to put as many books as possible on the World Wide Web as possible, in order to make them accessible to as many people as possible. The Books are stored in ASCII (or plain text) format in order to ensure that they will remain free and available forever.

Project Guttengerg was started in 1971 by Micheal Hart when he input the Declaration of Independence into the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. By the end of the 1970's many historical documents and other small pieces were digitized. Larger projects were not possible as there was not yet enough computing power to do this. Almost the entire decade of the 1980's was spent digitizing the Bible. However, now there are over 2,000 titles available.

The PSU-ACLU has volunteered for the project to digitize a text of our choice.