Library and Academic Institution Movements & the Law

There are currently more than 30 bills across the U.S. targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public colleges.

Proponents point to historic highs in book ban attempts, largely targeting people of color, women and LGBTQ+ communities. Opponents argue it should be up to the parents.

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This document is the result of a year of work and collaboration by the Trans Metadata Collective (TMDC; https://transmetadatacollective.org/), a group of dozens of cataloguers, librarians, archivists, scholars, and information professionals with a concerted interest in improving the description and classification of trans and gender diverse people in GLAMS (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Special Collections). The Collective’s primary goal was to develop a set of best practices for the description, cataloguing, and classification of information resources as well as the creation of metadata about trans and gender diverse people, including authors and other creators

What has—and hasn’t—changed in the legal landscape.

Policies in academic libraries, whether formal or informal, external or internal, carry high levels of importance for the functioning of the library. …

Since the start of the new Trump administration, hundreds of federal data sets and government websites have gone offline without warning, sometimes returning...

The White House has ordered thousands of government web pages to be taken down over the past month, leaving virtually no trace of some federal agencies’ policies regarding critical topics such as sexual orientation, January 6 cases and discrimination.

The Wayback Machine is helping preserve the record of government websites before they were changed by the Trump administration. CBS News Confirmed's Rhona Tarrant reports.

Georgia is considering a bill aimed at preventing children from accessing explicit library material. Opponents say it would chill free speech

The American Bar Association will temporarily suspend enforcement of its diversity and inclusion standard for law schools.

This is "The Lydia R. Otero Papers at Special Collections" by University of Arizona Libraries on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people…

To fairly reward talent in all its forms, companies need to remove barriers that prevent people’s potential and contributions from being recognized.

A series of bills targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in state agencies, colleges and universities are circulating through the Legislature as Republican lawmakers look to align with President Donald Trump’s executive order ending DEI programs.

The AHA has sent a letter to President Trump regarding his dismissal of the Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen J. Shogan.

The EveryLibrary Institute is collecting and analyzing polling and surveys about book bans, anti-access legislation, and the perception of libraries/librarians to help advocates quickly find and interpret results.

The Trump administration is facing a new legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s executive orders (EOs) to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiatives after a group of diversity officers, professors, and restaurant worker advocates filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Maryland on February 3, 2025, alleging the orders are vague and unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney General and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued memoranda on February 5, 2025, to implement the orders and guide federal agencies on their scope.

“Two is one, one is none.” This military adage, typically attributed to the US Navy Seals, advises that one should always have a backup plan, in the event that something inevitably fails or goes wr…

There is a lot of interest (with good reason) these days in data preservation and web archiving.  Two of the many projects getting some well-deserved attention are the End of Term Web Archive and the recently announced Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab Data.gov Archive. Another project that’s also been getting a lot of attention […]

NALP's annual Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms finds slow progress in the legal profession's 'fragile' pipeline of diverse talent.

How you communicate about your policies can be just as important as what those policies are.

"The debate over campus sexual violence is more heated than ever, but hardly anyone knows what actually happens inside Title IX offices. On the Wrong Side provides the first comprehensive account of the inner workings of the secretive Title IX system. Drawing on a yearlong study of survivors, perpetrators, and the administrators who oversaw their cases, sociologist Nicole Bedera exposes the structures that predictably punish survivors who come forward in the service of protecting-or even rewarding-their perpetrators. In doing so, she reveals that the system tasked with ending gender inequality on campus only intensifies it, upending survivors' lives and threatening the degrees that brought them to college in the first place. Equally heartbreaking and optimistic, On the Wrong Side makes it easy to imagine life-changing interventions for the next generation of students by proposing specific solutions to the structural problems of Title IX. Bedera proves that ending sexual violence is within our grasp-and dares us to be courageous enough to take action"--

Dear President Garimella, On January 21, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded its policy restricting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity in sensitive areas …

More than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from data.gov since Trump was inaugurated. But analyzing exactly what happened and where it went is going to take some time.

The race is on to save public information about health and science before Trump makes it disappear

The AAUP, along with the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and other plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s unlawful and unconstitutional DEI executive orders,

Patty Hector lost job after being targeted by campaign urging restriction of books with race and LGBTQ+ themes

2024 was an eventful year for the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and its membership of research libraries and archives in major public and private universities, federal government agencies, and...