In July 2024, when Idaho’s House Bill 710 went into effect, libraries across the state felt its impact in large and small ways, from refining policies to removing contested titles from their shelves. The law, passed by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Brad Little, prohibits libraries and schools from allowing anyone under age 18 to access material containing “sexual content,” regardless of their age—the law makes no distinction between infants and 17-year-olds—or the books’ literary merit. In February a coalition of publishers, authors, parents, students, and the Donnelly Public Library (DPL) District filed a lawsuit challenging HB 710 on the grounds that it violates the First and 14th Amendment rights of librarians, educators, publishers, authors, parents, and students.
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.
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.
Garland County Library, AR; North Bergen Free Public Library, NJ; and Queens Public Library, NY, demonstrate the resourceful programming, robust partnerships, and care for their communities that has earned them Honorable Mention for the 2020 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize.
In contrast to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s characterization of fact-checking as unwanted censorship, most Americans actually agree that the U.S. government and technology companies should each take steps to restrict false information and extremely violent content online.
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.
Nardia Cumberbatch, librarian at Florida’s Valencia College, was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work in helping the college achieve the Sustainable Library Certification Program, the second academic library in the country and the first library in Florida to have done so. We recently spoke with Cumberbatch about what it took to earn that certification and its resulting impact.
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?
Welcome to our first AI Watch column! The three of us talk monthly in the Libraries Lead Podcast (available at librarieslead.libraryjournal.com), and now we share content from that segment of the podcast in digital and print form through Library Journal.
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