Lisa Peet

Los Angeles is a sprawling city with a range of geographic, economic, and social variables, and the wildfires that affected the Los Angeles metropolitan area in January were a demonstration of that diversity, with the area’s three main library systems—Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL), LA County Library, and Altadena Library District—impacted by the fires to very different degrees.

Three weeks after the fire was contained, Jessica Gleason, bookmobile librarian at the Wailuku Public Library, bookmobile driver Michael Tinker, and Lāhainā branch manager Chadde Holbron, hit the road to support Maui’s West Side community.

A new documentary, Banned Together—available to stream April 10—shines a spotlight on three young freedom to read advocates, and how, together and individually, they are standing up to make a difference.

To help coordinate and support the work of saving government data, ensure that individual efforts didn’t duplicate one another, and provide a secure, accessible repository for archived material, a group of concerned librarians created the Data Rescue Project (DRP). A “clearinghouse” for data preservation efforts, DRP builds on efforts that began during Trump’s first term. LJ spoke with DRP organizer Lynda Kellam about the project and to learn more about how to get involved.

In our Climate Crisis series, rolling out over the next two weeks, LJ writers examine climate chaos from multiple perspectives and offer their thoughts on ways to address climate impact.

In January, the HBCU Library Alliance announced the award of a $1,000,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support its multipart program “Empowering HBCU Libraries with Civil Rights Preservation, Digital Innovation, and Transformative Professional Development.”

On March 5, Clarivate issued an update  to its February 18 announcement of a new subscription-based content access strategy for ebooks and digital collections, acknowledging the need for community consultation and a new transition timeline. Because customers expressed that “the original communicated dates for the last orders would pose a considerable challenge,” the open letter stated, Clarivate will extend the ability to make perpetual purchases of print and ebooks on all platforms—including Ebook Central, OASIS, Rialto, and GOBI—through June 30, 2026.

The Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab (LIL) has created a data vault to download, authenticate, and provide access to copies of public government data that may be in danger of disappearing. The project will collect major portions of the datasets tracked by data.gov, federal GitHub depositories, and PubMed—information of value for researchers, scholars, and policymakers. When the public-facing site launched on February 6, the data vault had collected metadata and primary contents for more than 300,000 datasets available on data.gov.

Jennie Pu, director of Hoboken Public Library (HPL), NJ, has announced her run for New Jersey’s 32nd Legislative District Assembly. Pu, who has led HPL since 2021, would be the first librarian to run for state office in New Jersey (joining librarians Kathy Zappitello, who ran for Ohio state representative in 2022, and Rebekah Cummings, who ran for Lieutenant Governor of Utah in 2024). If elected, Pu will be the first Chinese American lawmaker in the state’s history and the first Asian American woman to represent Hudson County.