Japanese writer Jun Ishikawa faced censorship under two different regimes.

In the 1930s, the nationalist Japanese government fined him for publishing a story that criticized militarism. A decade later, U.S. forces occupying the country told him to remove parts of a short story depicting an American soldier fraternizing with a Japanese woman, rendering the story nonsensical.

In other words, censorship was a “trans-war phenomenon in Japan,” said Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Helen Weetman.

Weetman presented on censorship pre- and post-World War II Japan on Wednesday as part of Banned Books Week, a national campaign to protest censorship and promote the freedom to read. To mark the week, �ֲ���ý Ladd Library held a series of presentations on censorship outside the United States in the 20th century.

It was a departure from last year’s series, which explored censorship in the United States and locally. Focusing on censorship around the world allowed the �ֲ���ý community to consider a broader range of reasons why governments, organizations, and individuals try to prevent books from being published or read.

Stephanie Pridgeon, visiting assistant professor of Spanish, presents on censorship in Argentina in the 1970s and 80’s as part of Banned Books Week. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

“In the United States, it’s much more about sex and religion, and in other countries it has more to do with politics,” Juraska said. “It’s an interesting difference of what tends to get banned where. It tells you something about the culture that we live in.”

In Germany in the 1930s, the initiative to suppress certain books came not from the Nazi government but from student organizations, said Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki. Students led the charge to collect and burn books by authors with an “un-German spirit,” many of whom were Jewish.

Book-burnings took place around the country on May 10, 1933. In Berlin, the students were encouraged by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Assistant Professor of German Jakub Kazecki presents on book-burning in Nazi Germany on Sept. 28 as part of Banned Books Week (Emily McConville/�ֲ���ý College)

“What always gets me when I look at the photographs of this event is the happy, smiling faces of the students,” Kazecki said. “They were so happy to participate in this event.”

In Argentina in the 1970s and 80’s, censorship also helped a military junta maintain power, said Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Stephanie Pridgeon.

Book burnings were also common there: At one point, in a quest to eradicate books that were not in keeping with nationalism and Catholicism, the regime collected and burned 1.5 million books from a single publisher, Pridgeon said. People suspected of subversion would often come home to find their bookshelves ransacked.

“At the same time books were being burned, they were also used as evidence of political activists’ subversion,” she said.

In Japan, in addition to censoring Ishikawa, the U.S. occupation government after World War II cracked down on materials that promoted militarism and nationalism, going so far as to have children black out parts of their textbooks with heavy ink, Weetman said.

Then, as Japanese political discourse tipped to the left, the occupation government began to censor suspected Communists, socialists, and unionists as well.

The censors were trying to suppress not only views the U.S. considered unfavorable, but also the existence of censorship itself.

“It’s essential that you make no reference to the fact that censorship is occurring, so you cannot refer to censorship,” Weetman said. “You also cannot largely refer to the occupation itself. It’s not that nobody does, but it’s discouraged.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese Helen Weetman discusses the history of censorship in Japan during Banned Books Week. (Emily McConville/�ֲ���ý College)

The totalitarian regimes in Argentina, Germany, and Japan eventually fell, the U.S. occupation of Japan ended, and — as within the United States — censorship became less severe in the later 20th century. Each country is reckoning with its past, and censorship, or the memory of it, is a factor in those reckonings.

Pridgeon said one former detention center in Argentina, now a museum and memory center, projects images of confiscated books on its walls — an expression of memory that is still fraught.

“The superimposition of this image comes as part of a broader movement that is deliberately seeking to re-insert politics and ideology into what had previously been presented as an ostensibly depoliticized space of human rights and memory,” she said.

Many book-burning sites in Germany have also become spaces of commemoration, Kazecki said.

At the location of the infamous 1933 book burning in Berlin, a plate of glass allows passersby to look underground into a set of empty bookshelves, enough to hold the books that were burned. On May 10 of each year, a man in Munich blowtorches the grass over a spot where books were burned — “I think it is necessary to remember without covering history with grass,” he has said.

On many of the plaques marking book burnings throughout the country, there is a quote from Heinrich Heine, a 19th-century writer who protested a symbolic book-burning in 1817: “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

A final presentation on LGBT and religious themes in international censorship by Visiting Assistant Professor of English Tiffany Slater will take place on Oct. 2.

Cooperation that began on a low key in 1977 hit a high note today when Ladd Library and its counterparts at Bowdoin and Colby unveiled an improved online catalog.

Given the reputation of the CBB colleges as competitors, the most intriguing aspect of the new CBBcat might be that collaboration is at its core, says Laura Juraska, an associate librarian at Ladd Library.

Instead of drawing from separate databases at each college, the new CBBcat draws from a single shared database.

The Ladd Library card catalog of the 1970s, seen here, has given way to its latest iteration: an online catalog based on a single database shared by �ֲ���ý, Bowdoin and Colby colleges. (Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collection Library)

“The back-end change of going to a single database is a strong affirmation of CBB library cooperation,” says Juraska, who oversees reference services.

On the front end, users will encounter a streamlined catalog search experience. Where users once had to choose whether to search the �ֲ���ý catalog or the CBBcat (itself a three-database system), today visitors to bates.edu/library/catalogs see just one search window called the “Colby, �ֲ���ý & Bowdoin Merged Catalog.”

Another benefit is that users can target a search specifically to one of the three libraries. Still another is being able to browse, in a virtual sense, a shelf of books from all three colleges, neatly arranged by their call numbers, thus taking advantage of collections that the three libraries now regard as one.

The combined catalog builds on existing cooperative practices, including shared purchasing, especially of scholarly monographs — that is, books by scholars that plumb the depths of a specialized academic subject — and shared licensing of electronic databases and online journals.

“The new database enables our colleges to improve service, reduce duplication of effort and reduce operating costs of the catalog,” says Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and librarian of the college.

The new online catalog is the product of months of collaborative work by CBB staff members, says Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and librarian. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

The new setup affords a “common platform,” Wiemers says, “so that we can take advantage of the diverse talent all three colleges have in providing library service without having to multiply everything we do by three.”

Beyond CBBcat, the refreshed site will also feature a robust new search engine called LibrarySearch+.

This engine allows users to go beyond CBB content to include the library’s online journals, newspapers and article-indexing databases as well as other open digital collections and open-access archives. Users can limit, modify and define search results in much the same way as on an e-commerce site such as Amazon.

Since the books we’re talking about are primarily in print, the most visible end result of CBB cooperation — the interlibrary loan — still occurs in the real world of bricks, mortar and highways.

These days, a commercial service managed by the Maine State Library offers one-day pickup and dropoff service at the CBB colleges and other Maine libraries, so there’s no long wait for books to arrive.

Each act of CBB cooperation is “all about opportunities,” says Associate Librarian Laura Juraska.

That service is offered five days a week, and the CBB libraries add Saturday delivery, so students can have the books (or CDs, DVDs and sometimes vinyl LPs) they need by Sunday. “That’s traditionally the busiest day for college libraries,” says Juraska.

CBB cooperation started with reciprocal borrowing privileges in 1977. It’s has grown to embrace online sharing, including partnerships with Maine InfoNet, a collaborative of Maine academic, public, school and special libraries; and NExpress, which connects �ֲ���ý to liberal arts college libraries in Massachusetts and Vermont.

The work to expand collaboration and sharing has been supported by two major grants to CBB libraries from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Juraska says that each move toward greater cooperation “is all about opportunities. Once you have a single tool that people at all three colleges can use, then you can identify efficiencies, where one person can do the task for their colleagues at Colby and Bowdoin.”

And the very process reaching agreement on a single database has yielded its own benefits, because “it’s made us agree on things, come to consensus.”

When the libraries first automated their circulation systems in 1988, the CBB libraries had the choice of creating one database, but the time wasn’t right, said Juraska. “Now it’s so logical. Nobody doubts that it is the right thing to do.”