Introduction 

    This website contains a list of books, magazines, newspapers and some music materials that have been subject to censorship challenges in British Columbia, including materials that have been banned nation-wide by the government of Canada.  The list was compiled from existing print sources  (mainly newspapers) and websites, and thus includes only censorship challenges reported in the media.  When gathering information for the site, the researcher used the definitions of censorship found in the Oxford English Dictionary and Websters Third New International Dictionary.  An amalgamation of these two definitions reads as follows:

    Censorship: The act or system of changing the content of, or restricting or prohibiting access to information because an individual or organization finds the information unacceptible; the deliberate attempt of governments, churches, groups and individual persons to prevent others from freely expressing themselves.

    The researcher relies on an amalgamation of the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's Third New International Dictionary definitions of censorship, but recognizes that there are widely divergent views of what constitutes censorship
    Historical research and site design/construction were carried out by Corey Schultz, MLIS 2001 graduate of the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia (UBC).  The project was initiated by the British Columbia Library Association (BCLA) Intellectual Freedom Committee, and supervised by Dr. Ann Curry, Associate Professor, SLAIS-UBC.

In order to obtain maximum coverage of reported censorship activity, this project utilized the BC Legislative Library Subject Index and BC Public Libraries in the News to the greatest extent.  Mind War and the Vancouver Public Library clipping file helped to provide documentation for the 1970s; they also provided information on censorship cases that were not listed in the Subject Index, and served to cross-reference data already collected from the other sources.  For more current data, a variety of online indexes were consulted.  All information possible about the author and title is given in this report; this infomation, however, was sometimes missing from the media source.  In such cases, the databases Books in Print and Books Out of Print were checked to find the missing information.
    The data was mainly generated from the following sources:
  • The BC Legislative Library Subject Index indexed the following papers from the periods 1900 to 1910, and 1916 to 1970:
    • Daily Colonist
    • Province
    • Vancouver News Herald
    • Vancouver Sun
    • Vancouver Times
    • Victoria Colonist
    • Victoria Times
  • BC Public Libraries in the News is a compilation of newspaper articles about libraries taken from community newspapers throughout the province.
  • Canadian News Disc, articles from 1994 to the present.
  • Canadian Periodical Index, articles from 1988 to the present. 

    • Secondary sources included:
  • Birdsall, Peter and Delores Broten.  Mind War: Book Censorship in English Canada.  Victoria: CANLIT, 1978.  The authors used the BC Legislative Library Subject Index, the clipping file at the Toronto Globe and Mail, and Quill & Quire for the bulk of their data.  Although their range was much broader and extended to all of English-speaking Canada, their research contained a significant amount of data regarding censorship challenges in British Columbia.
  • Pauls, Naomi and Charles Campbell.  The Georgia Straight: What the Hell Happened?  Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997.  A concise history of this Vancouver alternative newspaper; contains a selection of articles that have been previously published.
  • Dick, Judith.  Not in Our Schools?!!!: School Book Censorship in Canada.  Ottawa: Canadian Library Association, 1982. Case studies of textbook censorship in Canada.

    • This research is dependent upon cases of censorship as reported in the media.  It is important to remember, however, that not all censorship activities are reported.  Numerous surveys regarding censorship also indicate there is a significant amount of covert censorship taking place in the library;  books are removed from the shelves or placed in restricted areas with little or no controversy.  These cases would therefore not be found by reviewing media reports.

    Newspapers are regarded as reliable sources in that the time lapse between an event and its recording in a newspaper is usually quite short. Newspapers, however, can be selective in the news they report and the way they present it, and can be influenced by the political climate.  Often, newspapers do not follow up on stories that they had initiated in earlier editions, and do not provide continuous news of these events.  There is also a chance of factual error since the data may become corrupted as the story is passed from its writer to the proofreader to the editor and, finally, to the printer.  If a factual error is discovered in an article, often the errors are not corrected until later editions.  Newspapers can also share stories; thus, a single article written in one paper would be rewritten in countless others, with no secondary verification of data.

    There are still more resources to cover.  Since this research project is a compilation of censorship events in British Columbia, new data can be easily added to the list without compromising the integrity of the original research.

    Comments about this site should be directed to Beth Davies, Chair of the  BCLA Intellectual Freedom Committee (beth.davies@telus.net) or to Dr. Ann Curry (ann.curry@ubc.ca).

    While I have tried to make this resource as accurate as possible, neither Corey Schultz, the BCLA Intellectual Freedom Committee, the School of Library and Information Studies, the University of British Columbia, nor any of those organizations whose resources were used in the construction of this project is responsible for the consequences of any errors or omissions. 


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