Los Angeles Public Library director John F. Szabo connects with every corner of his adopted city through innovation and compassion.

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.

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.

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?

Title Charting Open Science Landscapes: A Systematized Review of US Academic Libraries’ Engagement in Open Research Practices Authors Kristen L. Scotti Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Chenyue Jiao University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Melanie Gainey Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Emily Bongiovanni Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Emma Slayton Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Source  via OSF Preprints DOI: […]

From The Decoder: Microsoft is taking a new approach to using copyrighted books for AI training by offering payment to HarperCollins authors. The deal sheds light on how the industry values creative work in the AI era. The company has proposed a licensing agreement with publisher HarperCollins that would pay $5,000 per book for AI […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

Maybe it’s time to move on from a piecemeal “customer” focus, and consider to a more complete “whole people in communities” approach.

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.

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.

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.

Although considerably smaller than ALA’s Midwinter and LibLearnX conferences of the past, there was a palpable sense of community and nostalgia around the last midwinter gathering.

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.