Lisa Peet

As calls for accountability are amplified across the country, many institutions are starting by addressing their racist history—many of which involved naming rights for funders or founders. Recently the Board of Supervisors of Louisiana State University (LSU) unanimously voted to remove the name of former university president Troy H. Middleton, whose 1961 correspondence stated his wish to keep the school segregated, from the LSU Library.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of [white] women’s suffrage and the 50th anniversary of the American Library Association’s (ALA) Social Responsibilities Round Table Feminist Task Force (FTF). In honor of both milestones, the ALA Virtual Conference panel “Herstory Through Activism: Women, Libraries, and Activism” offered a compelling look at the intersections of feminist activism in libraries, and how the current era of COVID-19 has changed the panelists’ priorities for urgent change. 

A live panel of transgender and nonbinary librarians and allies, held on June 24 at the American Library Association’s (ALA) virtual conference, offered an abundance of useful information and resources for libraries to better serve their transgender communities and ensure that transgender staff are comfortable in the workplace.

As libraries prepare to reopen, measures to keep staff and patrons as safe as possible from coronavirus infection are being instituted across the country. But most of those measures require patron cooperation. General worries over lack of compliance or having to enforce new rules have added an extra layer of uncertainty for those returning to work. 

Joy Bivins is the new Associate Director of Collections and Research Services at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Maureen Sullivan is the Interim State Librarian at the Connecticut State Library, Chad Helton was named director of the Hennepin County Library system, and more library people news.

The American Library Association’s (ALA) recent survey on how U.S. public, academic, and K–12 libraries have responded to the coronavirus pandemic will not surprise anyone with an eye on the field, but serves as a snapshot of mid-May concerns and projections.

UPDATE 6/3/20: The REALM Project is currently conducting literature reviews to help define the project's scope and the needs of its stakeholders. Battelle researchers have completed the first review—a set of findings from publicly available scientific literature—as well as a document, Test Plan for the Natural Attenuation of SARS-CoV-2 as a Decontamination Approach. The test plan describes how Battelle's laboratory will test for the COVID-19 virus's longevity on materials and the length of time required before the virus is undetectable. 

The Seattle Public Library has turned its attention outward, actively listening to community needs and transforming its work to make equity a top priority, earning it the 2020 Gale/LJ Library of the Year award.

Kaetrena Davis Kendrick recently completed a new study examining low workplace morale among public librarians, and is working on a report analyzing responses to a November 2018 call for librarians who wished to talk about their experiences. What she discovered included a disturbing level of abuse coming from patrons, a lack of institutional support to help librarians resolve such issues, and a mindset in which librarians view surviving such abuses as “earning their stripes.”