Impacts

Each year, millions of dollars awarded to libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) fund a variety of processing, digitization, and digital infrastructure projects. In the process, the field creates hundreds of contingent and precarious positions. Workers dedicated to their fields’ missions to steward, preserve, and share knowledge and culture accept low salaries, benefit-less positions, and cycles of precarity.

Ithaka S+R recently released the third phase of its multi-part Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success (CCLASSS) project, which examines student goals and challenges, and how community colleges and their libraries can work together to serve them. The resulting report, “Student Needs Are Academic Needs,” affirms that while libraries can—and do—play a critical role in student success initiatives, they are not always the partners that come to mind first.

Dated October 15, ALA’s report to Congress summarizes challenges facing the library field with regard to ebooks, streaming content, the pricing of digital academic journal subscriptions, anti-competitive behavior in digital textbook publishing, and the publishing industry’s capture and use of student data.

There will always be a place in libraries for people to fill traditional roles in programming, collection development, and working with children or teens. But many recent graduates earning their MLS (or equivalent degree) have learned new competencies that are increasingly in demand.

In early September, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies released a statement about the next phase of Measures that Matter. It will focus on the “potential relationships between public library activities and community outcomes.” In this next phase of the project, the initiative decided to explore job development in public libraries.

Current students are likely to begin their postsecondary education at age 22 or far older. They may be the first members of their families to attend college. They may be recent immigrants or English-language learners. They may be career changers or veterans. They may be incarcerated. And, as many institutions are discovering, academic libraries are uniquely positioned to meet their needs.

The next generation of adult (and almost there) readers shows some traditional—and surprising—reading traits.

While it has long been clear to library practitioners that public programming positively impacts their communities, there has been little existing research on the effects of such programs, or on how best to equip library staff. In response to this need, ALA has released the “National Impact of Library Public Programs Assessment [NILPPA]: Phase 1: A White Paper on the Dimensions of Library Programs and the Skills and Training for Library Program Professionals,” the first stage of a multiyear, multiphasic foundational study.

Part one of LJ’s deep dive into generational reading behaviors shows that the millennial generation—often credited in the media with “killing” industries in which they don’t care to, or simply can’t afford to, partake—are known to be killing it as readers in the opposite sense: they’re enthusiastic book consumers, library users, and, perhaps surprisingly, print fans.