Bringing it all together

U-M Libraries Territorial Acknowledgment Working Group hosted an event centered on the Maawn Doobiigeng System.

This guide is intended to help academic libraries create policies for responding to challenges to library materials.

South Carolina considering a law that withholds public library funds if "inappropriate" materials are available and more censorship news.

Every library — academic, public, and school (public, private, charter, independent, and international) — should have a comprehensive written policy that guides the selection, deselection or weeding, and reconsideration of library resources. The most valuable selection policy is current; it is reviewed and revised on a regular basis; and it is familiar to all members of a library’s staff. The policy should be approved by the library’s governing board or other policy-making body and disseminated widely for understanding by all stakeholders.

Democrat Rhode Island lawmakers on Wednesday promoted a suite of bills motivated by the Freedom to Read movement — an assertion of libraries’ right to hold controversial books, amid an ongoing culture clash over the written word.

Both the Indiana and Iowa State Legislatures have introduced legislation regarding criminally charging libraries and librarians over “inappropriate” material. These bills are closely related to widespread book challenges occurring at schools and public libraries across the nation, with people trying to remove books that address certain topics relating to gender, sexuality, and race from library collections. In many cases there is already a clear process for reconsidering materials in a collection, so how do legal defenses play a role in this and what do the bills change?

This paper introduces a subfield of management studies, "critical management studies" (CMS) in order to rethink mainstream management practices in academic libraries, with strategic planning as an illustrative example. Mainstream management models from the corporate sector prioritize efficiency, productivity, and numerical measures for assessing impact. Academic libraries have generally borrowed uncritically from this mainstream management praxis, but how well does this serve our needs, especially when it comes to the most complex issues we face? CMS draws on critical theory to interrogate the methods and goals of mainstream management, with an emphasis on denaturalizing "taken for granted" practices and prioritizing ethics and worker equity. After providing a brief overview of the history and adoption of mainstream management in academic libraries, this paper focuses on strategic planning as an illustrative exploration of CMS principles in an academic library context. Strategic planning is a common managerial practice that has been embraced by academic libraries and generally modeled after mainstream approaches. Yet, CMS scholars contend that traditional strategic planning reproduces workplace inequities and universalizes managerial interests. In this article, I employ ideas from CMS to rethink library strategic planning by opening participation, reframing problems, and embracing our ethical agency.

Editor’s Note: This guest post has been authored by Alejandro Marquez (Science and Engineering Librarian at the University of Denver Libraries) and Brady Niemitalo Woods (Patron Training Specialist at Jefferson County Public Library, Colorado). The fall semester started recently, marking the begi

Creating an inclusive library : approaches for increasing engagement and use with students of color-book

List of books by Native authors that have been challenged or banned

One of the things small town librarian Amanda Jones values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss "book content," she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. Amanda would be damned if her community were to ban stories representing minority groups. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo, and a porn-pusher; she has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns--funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians--in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and "Christian." But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a fight: she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.

The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is pleased to announce the publication of Library Trends 72 (1). This issue, "Indigenous Librarianship," examines the current state of Indigenous librarianship. Ulia Gosart and Rachel Fu served as guest editors. Library Trends, in partnership with the guest editors and select authors, will host a virtual webinar featuring lightning talks based on articles from the upcoming issue.

The American Library Association and the Sustainable Libraries Initiative have announced the new National Climate Action Strategy for Libraries and created an implementation guide to help libraries incorporate climate action locally into strategic and facility plans.

Expert Contributes to First Update in American Library Association Standards Since 1992

"The health of the nation’s libraries is a national security issue," writes Elyse Graham.

Two new reports provide a mixed but compelling outlook on the wave of book removals and challenges as the annual Banned Books Week begins for schools, stores and libraries nationwide.

The final count for the 2023-2024 school year will be released later this fall along with a public Index of School Book Bans.

Have you ever wondered how library catalogs, like Emory’s Library Search, are built and maintained? Or how library catalogers decide upon the best terms to describe the books, articles, and other m…

The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) has released new data documenting book challenges throughout the United States, finding that challenges were nearly double that of 2021, reaching the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.

"As part of the profession's ongoing EDISJ efforts to redress librarianship's problematic past, practitioners from across the field are questioning long-held library authorities and standards. They're undertaking a critical and rigorous re-examination of so-called "best" practices and the decisionmakers behind them, pointing out heretofore unscrutinized injustices within our library systems of organization and making concrete steps towards progressive change. This collection from Core records the efforts of some of the many librarians who are working to improve our systems and collections, in the process inspiring those who have yet to enact change by demonstrating that this work is scalable, possible, and necessary. From this book, readers will gain an understanding of the theoretical underpinning for the actions that create our history and be challenged to reconsider their perspectives; learn about the important role of the library catalog in real-world EDISJ initiatives through examples ranging from accessibility metadata and gendered information to inclusive comics cataloging and revising LC call numbers for Black people and Indigenous people; discover more than a dozen case studies drawn from a variety of contexts including archives, academic and public libraries, and research institutions; and see ways to incorporate these ideas into their own work, with a variety of sample policies, "how to" documents, and other helpful tools provided in the text"--;"This volume seeks to record the efforts of many librarians who worked to improve our systems and collections as well as inspire those who have yet to enact change that this work is scalable, possible, and necessary"--

On September 10, 2024, AAP and allies filed a second amicus brief in support of Texas public library patron plaintiffs in Little v. Llano County following the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ order of a full court rehearing of its June 6, 2024 decision. That earlier decision largely—but not entirely—upheld a preliminary injunction against the unconstitutional […]

UW Magazine | University of Washington

As Publishers Weekly reported this week, the Internet Archive, nonprofit home to a robust digital library, has lost its latest appeal in a case brought by publishers. A panel from New York’s …

Making library websites accessible : a practical guide for librarians-book

"The book will serve as a "how to" guide for evaluating and crafting collection development policies that will help create equity in library collections. The book will not only help contextualize the need for inclusive collection development policies but will feature user-friendly tables, guides, and sample policies"--

"LinkedIn's most popular DEIJ expert offers compassionate and practical advice for stressed leaders under pressure from staff, customers, and partners to avoid diversity screw-ups. Centering the marginalized is the future of your business. You have what it takes to navigate beyond murky waters of purity and disposability"--

"Practical workbook companion to the bestselling DEI Deconstructed, the definitive comprehensive and foundational text for critically analyzing and applying actionable DEI techniques and strategies, written by one of LinkedIn's most popular experts on DEI. The importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace cannot be understated. But when half-baked and under-developed strategies are implemented, they often do more harm than good, leading the very constituents they aim to support to dismiss DEI entirely"--

After Amanda Jones got death threats for speaking out against censorship, she sued her attackers and wrote a memoir

For Black librarians like me, libraries also symbolize the literacy that was denied.