Multiple-award-winning author Toni Tipton-Martin is a culinary journalist, a community activist, and the editor in chief of Cook’s Country magazine. She is the author of the forthcoming Juke Joints, Jazz Clubs, and Juice: A Cocktail Recipe Book; Cocktails from Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks, as well as The Jemima Code and Jubilee. She is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance and Foodways Texas. 

At a time when collaboration is endangered by conflict and critical thinking is often jettisoned in favor of the latest “hot take,” I can’t help but feel like library professionals are the leaders we need to secure a brighter future.

In 1990 Congress officially passed a joint resolution signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, designating a National American Indian Heritage Month. Since 1994, this monthlong celebration, often referred to as Native American Heritage Month or National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month, has been observed during the month of November. With a mix of literary fiction, mystery, history, and even a cookbook, this booklist recognizes the challenges faced by Indigenous peoples and marks their cultures and accomplishments.

Often, medieval book bindings—as many as one in five from the 15th and 16th centuries—are reinforced with fragments of pages from older printed volumes that bookbinders considered obsolete. Without the option of dismantling precious books to reveal the fragments, specialists turn to x-ray technology to reveal words that have been hidden from view for hundreds of years. A team at the University of Iowa recently used familiar medical technology—a computerized tomography (CT) scanner—to do just that.

COVID shifts drove falling print circ and rising ebooks. But will it last? LJ's 2021 Materials Survey looks at some of the last year's trends.

This is the 13th year of the LJ Index of Public Library Service and Star Library ratings. The 2020 scores and ratings are based on FY18 data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Public Library Survey (PLS). Because of that delay, they don’t reflect the impact of the coronavirus; that won’t be reflected in the data until 2022. The big news in this year’s edition is that successful retrievals of electronic information (e-retrievals)—measuring usage of online content, such as databases, other than by title checkout—joins the six other measures that determine the LJ Index.

Whether librarians are providing services in-person or virtually, reference has changed with the pandemic.

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.

From Colorado Public Radio: A former librarian will receive $250,000 from the High Plains Library District as part of a settlement in a lengthy civil rights dispute over her firing. Brooky Parks lost her job at Erie Community Library in 2021 after promoting anti-racism and LGBTQ history workshops for teens. The programming drew backlash from the district’s […]

From Knowledge Exchange: Different alternative publishing platforms have appeared over recent years. But what are their pros and cons? Do they differ significantly from traditional scholarly journals? To better understand what individual publishing platforms do and how they fit in the open scholarly communication ecosystem, Knowledge Exchange invited platforms working in open access publishing to […]

From the Associated Press: A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts… Direct to Full Text See Also: More “Not Real News” […]

From the Federal Trade Commission: The Federal Trade Commission staff will be hosting a virtual roundtable discussion on October 4, 2023 to better understand the impact of the use of generative artificial intelligence on music, filmmaking, and other creative fields. FTC staff are seeking to better understand how the development and deployment of AI tools that […]

When the long-awaited COVID-19 vaccines began to roll out in mid-December 2020, their distribution was immediately complicated by a shortage of doses and widespread uncertainty about who would be given priority. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued suggested guidelines for phased allocation. When it was not yet clear who would be next, many library workers, leaders, and associations began advocating for public facing library workers to be vaccinated as soon as feasible.

In the messy middle of the pandemic, library leaders share how things have changed since March 2020, their takeways, and continuing challenges.

Whether librarians are providing services in-person or virtually, reference has changed with the pandemic.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of books on the subject has been increasing exponentially. This introductory list, which will be updated regularly, is meant to help collection development librarians get started on determining which books work best for their collections.

Shortlists for the Booker Prize and the Financial Times/Schroders Business Book of the Year are announced. Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias by John Lorinc has won the inaugural Pattis Family Foundation Global Cities Book Award. A new PEN America report finds a 33% jump in school book bans. Plus, Page to Screen and interviews with Aparna Nancherla, Jo Nesbø, Michael Wolff, and more.

Eileen Rhodes was named one of Library Journal’s 2021 Movers & Shakers for her work bringing Open Educational Resources to Capital Community College in Connecticut, enabling students who struggled with the cost of textbooks to continue pursuing their degree. We recently reached out to Rhodes and learned she’s currently the interim library director for Connecticut State Community College, a role that’s shifted her priorities and sent her in new directions.

A new Simon & Schuster program highlights the merits of books that have been subject to censorship and will provide resources for fighting book bans. The Academy of American Poets announces the winners of its annual poetry prizes. LeVar Burton will serve as the honorary chair of this year’s Banned Books Week. Amazon will require publishers on Kindle to disclose when any of their content is generated by artificial intelligence.

New American Library Association (ALA) President Emily Drabinski has her eye on ALA’s projects and goals, as well as the association’s ongoing work standing up for its organizational values. LJ caught up with her in between stops on her tour of U.S. libraries to hear more about what she has planned.