Public Libraries

Modern libraries aren’t just places for reading and research. They’re vibrant and active community centers where the people and programming play just as critical a role as the collections.

As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in work, creative pursuits, and the generation of online misinformation, public libraries have a major new role to play in digital literacy.

While Texas continues to be a leading state in the number of book bans reported each year, a recent challenge at the Montgomery County Memorial Library has been reversed. The Texas Freedom to Read Project reported that a children’s book, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story by Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag)—an account of American colonization and Native traditions described from an Indigenous perspective—was challenged in September and subsequently moved out of the juvenile nonfiction area to the fiction collection.

The data for new public library buildings and renovations featured in LJ's Year in Architecture 2024.

Keeping up with the constantly changing technological and information landscape has presented a major challenge to the field of library science. Here are some of the leading library and information science (MLIS) master’s degree programs that are stepping up to meet these challenges.

Wilmington Public Library enlists community input alongside vibrant in-house marketing to build excitement around innovative events. San José Public Library, CA, and Worcester Public Library, MA, received honorable mentions.

For the past four years, EveryLibrary has been working to fight the book-banning movement. A large part of that fight is developing effective messaging against book bans, as well as conducting extensive message testing, surveys, and focus groups to understand the impact of messaging and determine which messages perform best.

Two and a half years after launch, Books Unbanned has continued to grow as a vital resource for people in schools and communities where book challenges otherwise put content out of reach.

These are only a few of the wide-ranging limited edition library card iterations popping up seemingly everywhere. Why are all these libraries putting time and resources into small-run cards?