University of South Florida Polytechnic students, faculty and staff will celebrate the freedom to read by reading aloud from banned or challenged books. Sponsored by the USF Polytechnic Library during Banned Books Week, the Read Aloud event takes place Oct. 2 from 11:30 AM to 1 PM and from 4:30 PM to 6 PM on the LTB terrace outside the USFP Library. Volunteers will read for 15-minute periods.

"The Read Aloud event is a gentle introduction to the perils of censorship," says Catherine Lavallée-Welch, associate librarian, USF Polytechnic. "If you ban books, then you ban ideas, you restrict freedom of speech and freedom of thought. That leads to ignorance, intolerance and possibly leads to authoritarianism as an extreme conclusion."

"We are lucky in this country to have freedom of speech as one of the tenets of the Constitution," says Lavallée-Welch. "I don't think that freedom is always fully understood or appreciated, especially by the younger generations. Having a person read aloud from a challenged or banned book concretely illustrates that freedom. There is no microphone, no sitting audience - you read from a passage of your choice from a book of your choice in a normal voice to passers-by. Passers-by can agree or disagree with what they hear - that's the beauty of it. From the friction of ideas come new knowledge and intellectual growth. "

Books to be read during the event include "Of Mice and Men", "To Kill a Mockingbird", the Bible, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", "Baseball Saved Us", "And Tango Makes Three" and "The Bluest Eye."

Sponsored by the American Library Association since 1982, Banned Books Week is observed during the last week of September each year.

Opened in 2007, the USF Polytechnic Library opened as part of the USF Library system and provides access to more than two million books, 48,000 e-books, 6,500 e-journal subscriptions, 500 aggregator databases containing another 13,000 unique e-journal titles, and 150,000 digital images, audio and video files.