News

Every public library is a star to the community it serves. LJ’s Star Library Ratings and the LJ Index of Public Library Service spotlight the best of the best across America. The 2020 edition is the 13th. This year, 5,608 U.S. public libraries are scored on the LJ Index, and there are 262 Star Libraries.

Academic librarians are seeing more interest in open access (OA) content and open educational resources (OER) during the COVID-19 pandemic, survey respondents reported, due in part to a lack of access to physical materials and a desire to keep textbook costs low. Those are some of the findings from the Library Journal Open Access Content/Open Educational Resources in Academic Libraries Survey, released this month.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg discuss the fourth and final analysis of their Academic Library Response to COVID-19 survey, “Indications of the New Normal,” looking at the current phases of academic library pandemic reactions.

The LJ placement and salaries survey provides a valuable professional snapshot of the job-seeking experiences of graduates and their institutions as a service to the LIS community. LJ invited each of the 52 American Library Association–accredited library and information science schools located in the United States to participate.

Library Journal’s annual Placements & Salaries survey reports on the experiences of LIS students who graduated and sought their first librarian jobs in the previous year: in this case, 2019. Salaries and full-time employment are up, but so are unemployment and the gender gap; 2019 graduates faced a mixed job market even before the pandemic.

There is probably no single cause more popular than literacy. While libraries of all types are of course front and center in the fight, everything from a plethora of other governmental agencies to literacy-specific nonprofits international and domestic to giant for-profit corporations like McDonalds have dedicated resources to promoting reading and addressing the literacy crisis we scoped in our April issue.

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.

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.”

At many of our institutions, student-parents—students with one or more dependent children—are a growing population. Research in higher education has long demonstrated that student-parents face a number of obstacles to completing degrees and participating in college experiences. Academic librarians, however, have done little work to study what student-parents uniquely need to succeed academically.