Days after the Alberta government paused a controversial ministerial order that would have affected the books school libraries were able to make available to students this fall, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides has issued a new order that restricts its effects to “explicit visual depictions” of sexual acts.

The new order, released on Sept. 8, included language that hadn’t been included in the previous order; namely, that the government “recognizes the educational merit of school libraries, including the importance of access to classic literary works.”

The previous order, which was decried by critics as being “sweeping and vague,” called for school libraries to remove materials with “sexually explicit content,” and to limit access to materials with “non-explicit sexual content” to students in Grade 10 and above.

The order came under renewed fire in late August, when a list of more than 200 books Edmonton Public Schools would be removing from their libraries to comply with the new rules – including classics such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple – was made public.

The new order spells out more explicitly how school authorities are to make these decisions: “The school authority must ensure that school literary materials containing any explicit visual depiction of a sexual act are not accessible or available to children or students in a school, and must ensure that no such school literary materials are selected for inclusion in a school library, unless such materials are for information or reference, such as technical materials, dictionaries or encyclopedias, that are not narrative in nature,” the order reads.

In a series of tweets earlier this month, Nicolaides released photos of the books his government had been targeting with this order. All of the photos showed young adult and teen graphic novels depicting coming-of-age stories from queer creators, including the award-winning titles Flamer by Mike Curato and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe.

School authorities are to give the ministry a list of affected materials by Oct. 31, with the new standard implemented by Jan. 5.