What's Needed: St. Louis County Library Wins 2024–25 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize

What's Needed: St. Louis County Library Wins 2024–25 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize

Strong mutual support among community partners, and a conscious shift over the past decade to investigate what each of its neighborhoods needs most, and then step up to those needs, has earned St. Louis County Library the 2024–25 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize.
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City Librarian: John Szabo Is LJ’s 2025 Librarian of the Year

Lisa Peet, Jan 07, 2025
Los Angeles Public Library director John F. Szabo connects with every corner of his adopted city through innovation and compassion.

Prison Library Support Network Volunteers Meet Incarcerated Information Needs with Grassroots Reference by Mail Service

Claire Kelley, Jan 30, 2025
The Prison Library Support Network, established in 2015, works to meet the information needs of people who are incarcerated through a nationwide letter-writing project. Since the reference by mail program started in 2021, the New York City–based collective of librarians, graduate students, and activists has responded to nearly all of the 3,000 queries it has received from people in prisons across the United States, with the majority of letters coming from Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Florida.

Deaf History is American History: An Exploration of Gallaudet University Archives | Archives Deep Dive

Elisa Shoenberger, Jan 23, 2025
Chartered by President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, Gallaudet University, in Washington, DC, holds the distinction of being the only bilingual university for Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and other Deaf Disabled students in the world. Consequently, it has the world’s largest archives of materials related to deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, with a mission to preserve “the institutional memory of the University and historic material from the global Deaf community,” according to the Gallaudet website.

It’s a New Era of Climate Activism in Libraries | Sustainability

Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, Jan 22, 2025
We have now passed the point of no return: We have not acted fast enough to slow the increasing frequency and severity of the impacts of the climate emergency in our lifetime. Even if we were to do everything “right,” climate scientists predict we have at least 30 more years of increasingly dire impacts from climate change. We now find ourselves facing this reality with an incoming administration that has already declared plans to roll back environmental protections that would have helped us do things “right” for future generations. So, what now?

Gary Price, Feb 08, 2025
From USC Dornsife: A $150,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant has been awarded to a team led by Sean Fraga, assistant professor (teaching) of environmental studies and history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences; Curtis Fletcher, director of the Ahmanson Lab at USC Libraries; and Peter Mancall, Distinguished Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of […]
Gary Price, Feb 08, 2025
From CBS News: President Trump has fired Archivist of the United States Colleen J. Shogan, the government official responsible for preserving and providing access to government records. Sergio Gor, director of the Presidential Personnel Office, announced Shogan’s dismissal Friday night. Shogan has held the job since 2023. Read the Complete Article From 404 Media: “It was an […]
Gary Price, Feb 07, 2025
  From the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Full Text): The University Libraries is altering its approach to large-scale agreements with major academic publishers, starting with Springer journals. The shift marks a significant departure from the “big deal” model that has dominated academic publishing in recent years, where libraries sign comprehensive, multi-million-dollar contracts with publishers to access […]
Gary Price, Feb 06, 2025
From a Library Innovation Lab Post: Today we released our archive of data.gov on source.coop. The 16TB collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025, a complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov. It will be updated daily as new datasets are added to data.gov. This is the first release in our new data […]
Mike Eisenberg, Feb 02, 2025
From the Libraries Lead Podcast - February 2025, AI Watch Segment. Dave Lankes explains and demonstrates DeepSeek - the Chinese-based AI system. Go "under the hood" on DeepSeek and see how it performed better than any other current AI on Beth's query about integration in Alabama schools.
Mike Eisenberg, Feb 02, 2025
Maybe it’s time to move on from a piecemeal “customer” focus, and consider to a more complete “whole people in communities” approach.
Mike Eisenberg, Jan 01, 2025
ENSHITTIFICATION. It’s a real thing—the purposeful degradation of the quality in systems in order to maximize profits. And we saw ICT as a boon to society, liberating not oppressing. Sigh. Listen in as we explore enshittification and the implications of all this profit-seeking across all types of information systems.
Sarah Wolberg,  Feb 07, 2025
Penguin issues new “First Impressions” editions of Jane Austen with refreshed covers, meant to appeal to young readers, romance fans, and “the BookTok demographic.” The Waterstones Children’s Book Prize shortlist is revealed. Poets & Writers reflects on 20 years of its annual celebration of debut poets. Spotify adds audiobooks from Crooked Lane and Podium. Plus, Page to Screen and new novels from Ian McEwan and John Irving.

Sarah Wolberg,  Feb 06, 2025
The winners of the UK PEN Translates Awards are announced. Notes to John, Joan Didion’s diary from 1999, will be published by Knopf. Literary organizations release a joint statement decrying the Trump administration’s anti-trans executive order. Plus, a new horror novel from Nick Medina, interviews with Sarah Chihaya, Elinor Lipman, and Alton Brown, and new title bestsellers.

F1000,  Feb 06, 2025
Preprints, or initial versions of scientific reports that researchers share before the formal peer review and publication process have been completed, have started to become more popular within academic circles—and now the Gates Foundation has changed its Open Access policy to require grant-funded research papers to appear as preprints before publication.

Lisa Peet,  Feb 06, 2025
The American Library Association (ALA) has filed an amicus brief on the U.S. Supreme Court case, Federal Communications Commission, et al., Petitioners v. Consumers’ Research, et al., which stands to decide the fate of federal programs supporting broadband access for half of the nation’s public libraries. The brief affirms both the constitutionality and the value of the Universal Service Fund and the programs it administers—particularly the E-Rate program, which helps power broadband-enabled services and access in U.S. public libraries and schools.

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