Lisa Peet

This year’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities was delivered on October 7 by Father Columba Stewart, OSB—a Benedictine monk, scholar of early religions, and executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN. Stewart has spent the past 15 years working to digitize documents at risk of theft, damage, and destruction due to war, regime change, or climate instability in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and South Asia.

John Rothman, director of the New York Times’ corporate archives and creator of the New York Times Information Bank, an early electronic news repository, died on September 26 of a stroke at the age of 95.

Julius C. Jefferson Jr., section head of the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service, is the American Library Association (ALA) president-elect for 2020–21.

When Clyde Scoles, longtime director of the Toledo Lucas County Public Library (TLCPL), OH, died unexpectedly in February, Deputy Director Jason Kucsma stepped up as acting director for the 21-branch system. Scoles had announced his retirement only a few weeks before, and Kucsma was already considering his next steps. On August 1, the TLCPL board of trustees voted to appoint Kucsma as executive director and chief financial officer. 

How much coffee do library workers need to get their jobs done? The results of LJ’s informal poll are in, and as it turns out, only about 60 percent drink coffee at all, with tea the beverage of choice for abstainers.

Patricia “Patty” M. Wong, City Librarian at Santa Monica Public Library, CA, and Steven Yates, Assistant Director of the University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies, Tuscaloosa, are the candidates for the American Library Association (ALA) 2020–21 presidency.

Four librarians were among the eight tenured faculty members laid off from St. Cloud State University, MN, at the beginning of the 2019–20 academic year. Final notices to those impacted, who also included three philosophy professors and a theater professor, were delivered on September 16. Their contracts will be terminated effective May 13, 2020. Laying off four full-time librarians would cut the library’s faculty by one-quarter; currently 13 full-time library faculty serve a student body of over 13,000, as well as members of the St. Cloud community.