What happens when a librarian in her rookie season of quilting gets together with a scientist that quilts data? You end up with a quilted data visualization of book challenges! 

Associate Reference and Instruction Librarian Annie Jansen, along with Distinguished Professor of Earth Sciences Laura Guertin, have been collaborators for years on information literacy instruction and student engagement projects at Penn State Brandywine (Media, PA). Both balance their academic activities with generating creative projects through sewing, crocheting – and now, collaborative quilting. Their collaboration led to this quilt, titled Challenged Stitches with Banned Book Data, entered into the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Data Viz Championship for Love Data Week (February 9-13, 2026). 

The story of this quilt begins in Summer 2025, when Annie and Laura started discussing a quilt they could make together. Annie was new to quilting, while Laura has been stitching science stories in quilts for years. They worked together in brainstorming ideas for the data and design. Annie located a series of reports from the American Library Association (ALA) that documented the attempts to censor library books and other materials. This led to having the quilt focus on 11 years of annual data on book challenges in the United States. 

After several sketches of how these data could be visualized, the pair went shopping in Philadelphia’s Fabric Row. After finding the perfect border fabric at Jack B. Fabrics (a Jessica Jones Design for Braemore that appears to be a collection of books) and using scraps of existing fabric, Annie and Laura commenced the quilting process. 

The table below has the data used in the quilt. The books are represented on a bookshelf with trim on the spine of the books. The height of each book left-to-right represents a year (2014-2024) and the number of books challenged per year. We started by scaling the height of the year with the largest number of challenged books (2023, with 4,240 books) to 48 inches to represent the data in the quilt. Then, the number of book challenges each year were scaled to inches on the quilt based upon the ratio of books-to-challenges for 2023.

Year	Number of books challenged
2014	311
2015	275
2016	323
2017	416
2018	483
2019	334
2020	223
2021	1858
2022	2571
2023	4240
2024	2452

While constructing the quilt, Annie and Laura became concerned with the overall size, especially when scaling the numbers for each year – the 2023 data would have added much more height to the quilt. So Annie came up with the idea of having this bar/book break through the top of the quilt to call attention to this large value. 

This quilting duo hopes that viewers of this quilt question and reflect upon what caused the substantial rise in 2021 and moving forward. [Hint – see this NPR article and this NPR article for a discussion on this topic, as well as this ALA News Release and another from ALA.

Another special part of the story behind this quilt is that it was entirely sewn in the Brandywine Library on a sewing machine purchased through a grant from the Brandywine Valley Quilters (Aston, PA). Now that Annie and Laura have made their first quilt together on new equipment, they look forward to mentoring students on collaborative and independent quilt projects on campus. 

The quilt was completed November 25, 2025. The quilt measures 39 inches across and 46 inches in height, with the red bar extending an additional 10 inches above the quilt.

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APA citation for reports

American Library Association. (2025). The State of America’s Libraries 2024. https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2025-04/state-of-americas-libraries-report-2025-WEB.pdf 

American Library Association. (2024). The State of America’s Libraries 2023. https://live-alaorg.pantheonsite.io/sites/default/files/2024-04/state-of-americas-libraries-report-2024-accessible-web-version_0.pdf 

American Library Association. (2023). The State of America’s Libraries 2022. https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/news/content/state-of-americas-libraries-report-2023-web-version.pdf  

American Library Association. (2022). The State of America’s Libraries 2021. https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/news/content/State-of-Americas-Libraries-Report-2021-4-21.pdf

American Library Association. (2022). The State of America’s Libraries Report Archive. https://www.ala.org/news/mediapresscenter/americaslibraries/soal_archive