University of South Florida Polytechnic students, faculty and staff will celebrate the freedom to read by reading aloud from banned or challenged books during Banned Books Week, Sept. 26 - Oct. 3. Sponsored by the USF Polytechnic Library, the Read Out event takes place Sept. 29 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. - 6 p.m. outside the USFP Library. Volunteers will read for 15-minute periods.

"There is no microphone, no sitting audience - you read a passage of your choice from a book of your choice in a normal voice to passers-by," says Catherine Lavallée-Welch, associate librarian, USF Polytechnic. "Passers-by can agree or disagree with what they hear - that's the beauty of it. From the friction of ideas comes new knowledge and intellectual growth."

According to Lavallée-Welch, "This event is a gentle introduction to the perils of censorship. 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. "Having a person read aloud from a challenged or banned book concretely illustrates that freedom."

For more information on the Read Out event contact Catherine Lavallée-Welch at (863) 667-7737 or clw@poly.usf.edu.

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 is part of the USF Libraries system and provides access to more than two million books, 60,000 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.