State department proposes excluding 38 institutions from Diplomacy Lab partnership including Harvard and Yale

State-level mandates prompt changes and small acts of resistance at universities

Decades of carefully built infrastructure aimed at improving and tracking how American children learn vanished in an ideological attack

In the United States, book clubs are typically associated with the work of public or school librarians, due to their focus on extracurricular programs…

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published an addendum (pages 30–31) to the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries (2012), providing updated guidance...

Press Release: Growing Libraries and ReThinking Libraries announce a partnership to help libraries better serve their communities. Growing Libraries and ReThinking Libraries have announced a partnership that will supercharge strategic planning for libraries, enabling them to reach more community members and connect them with library services.

​Nearly three-quarters of college presidents say they are “extremely concerned” about the current administration’s impact on higher education, according to ACE’s Pulse Point survey, released today.

“I Don’t Think Librarians Can Save Us”: The Material Conditions of Information Literacy Instruction in the Misinformation Age

Despite increasing advocacy for open access (OA), its uptake in some disciplines has remained low. Existing studies have linked the low uptake of OA in the huma...

The aim of this case study was to empirically elucidate the core elements underpinning the legitimacy of twenty-first-century public libraries, with a particular focus on the New York Public Library (NYPL). We conducted a qualitative content analysis of 24 NYPL annual reports spanning the period from 2000 to 2023 to investigate the ways in which legitimacy is expressed at NYPL and explore the interrelationships among the dimensions of library legitimacy. A coding framework, grounded in the established legitimacy dimensions from Yamagishi, Koizumi, and Larsen’s (2024) research, was utilized alongside a periodization approach to assess how these dimensions interact during key historical events. We examined the NYPL’s reported practices through the lens of five primary dimensions of legitimacy. Analyzing how these practices are reported in annual reports revealed how these dimensions interact and evolve in response to significant societal challenges, including the 9/11 attacks, the global financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The research findings highlight the critical role of both internal factors (such as librarianship) and external influences (such as economic conditions) in sustaining the overall legitimacy of public libraries. This case study provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the complex and dynamic nature of legitimacy in public libraries and demonstrates how these institutions can adapt to and reflect broader societal changes. The findings hold important implications for the development and management of public libraries on a global scale.

Carla Hayden, the former Librarian of Congress fired by President Donald Trump, has joined the the country's foremost philanthropic supporter of the arts.

The American Bar Association (ABA) is maintaining its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) despite intensified political pressure from the Trump administration and recent legal developments that have challenged the organization’s authority and policies. During a recent forum in Cleveland, ABA leadership reaffirmed the association’s belief that DEI is essential to the excellence and […]

This work provides information to members and prospective members of the law librarian profession on the status, rights, and responsibilities of academic law li

Inclusive Leadership: Perspectives From Academic Library Leaders

Threats to DEI are only growing stronger, with continued plans to introduce bills in the next legislative session, and attacks occurring on the accreditation front. Use our interactive dashboard to keep track of the evolving attacks on DEI across the states.

Statement from the AAU Board of Directors.

A University of California at Los Angeles grant story from the Mellon Foundation.

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

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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

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

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

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.

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 […]

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...

We’ve documented actions taken on dozens of campuses to alter or eliminate jobs, offices, hiring practices, and programs amid mounting political pressure to end identity-conscious recruitment and retention of minority staff and students.

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.