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LJ has received an Eddie award for its February 2024 cover story “Hungry for Connection: Addressing Loneliness Through the Library,” by Editor-in-Chief Hallie Rich. In May, 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory calling attention to loneliness, isolation, and a lack of connection as a public health crisis increasing the risk of mental health challenges and even premature death. LJ’s feature examined how library programs “can build the very relationships our nation’s public health experts say we most need to cultivate.”
In celebration of National Bike Month (May in the United States, June in Canada), libraries are offering innovative ways to support bicycling all year round.
Monnee Tong’s career has been shaped by her passion for social justice, which carries through to her work as supervising librarian at San Diego Public Library.
For Siva Ramakrishnan, being director of Young Adult Programs and Services for New York Public Library (NYPL)—part of NYPL’s Tisch Youth Education Programs—means giving teenagers the resources they need to grow, whether that involves 3-D printers or a sense of community.
Ericson Public Library, IA, needed a program that highlighted the varied dimensions of equity while bringing members of the community together—a program that demonstrated how diversity unites us, rather than divides us. We found that opportunity through round two of the American Library Association’s Libraries Transforming Communities grant, receiving funding to implement an equity project called “Activating Community Voices.”
Demand for educational video resources continues to grow. Apps including Craft & Hobby, Creativebug, and Hiveclass, as well as streaming DIY video from OverDrive and hoopla, are helping patrons learn how to do everything from sewing to pickleball.
Alicia Deal and KayCee Choi nominated each other for the same reason—their advocacy for d/Deaf (Hard of Hearing/Deaf) culture. The two have spearheaded Dallas Public Library programming for National Deaf History Month in April; Deal and Choi created programs about major league baseball player William Hoy and author and activist Helen Keller, among others, which drew about 100 patrons total.
Courtney Shaw's innovative programming across numerous communities—including prisons and a local nonprofit that supports youth and adults experiencing homelessness—features Techie Senior classes to help decrease social isolation for the elderly, story time and early literacy education, youth STEM programs focused on coding and robotics, health and financial literacy programs, library card signups and mobile phone circulation, and arts and cultural offerings.
Prince George’s County Memorial Library System, MD, last August hosted its first annual social justice summer camp. During five full days at five separate branches, groups of teens learned about the history of social justice movements along with project management skills to help effect change in their own communities.
Youth Services LibrarianElaine Pelton from the Washington, DC Public Library shares how to have a successful Evil Laugh Contest virtual library program in 16 easy steps.
Openness, accessibility, democracy, and the dignity of the public. We at Brooklyn Public Library had these words in mind when we started to work on our 28th Amendment Project.
No matter how audience behaviors ultimately swing in the future, hybrid events will be a pillar of our new normal. We must continue to refine our capability of being anywhere and everywhere for anybody.
Library gardens help address food insecurity, ease environmental impact, provide stress relief, and serve as pandemic-safe space for community connection.
In Maryland, public libraries across the state have developed models for maximizing the impact of social justice–focused virtual programs by copresenting and cross-promoting selected events. Maryland libraries were able to rely on high quality programs from neighboring systems to provide a more robust lineup of virtual events.
ValChoice, an independent data analytics company focused on the U.S. insurance industry, is offering public and academic libraries permanent, unlimited access to online calculators, insurance company ratings, tutorials and “how-to” videos, worksheets, and other tools designed to help users understand how insurance—such as car and home insurance—is priced, and how to decide on policies based on their age, deductibles, coverage limits, and other factors.
In partnership with 10 state libraries, BiblioLabs has announced that more than 4,000 digital comics, graphic novels, and children’s materials will be available for free, unlimited simultaneous use through August 31. In addition, the library partners will be participating in a new Virtual Library Comic Convention scheduled to be held on July 30.
Librarians can now download the 2020 Summer Scares programming guide, which offers booktalking tips, read-alikes, and creative programming ideas—many of which can be done virtually.
Public and academic libraries alike have been educating their users, holding seminars, and doing Q&As to help people learn about the disease as well as dispel misconceptions.
On June 6, poet, essayist, playwright, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine launched the New York premiere of her first published play, a new one-act called The White Card, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) Steven A. Schwarzman building.
The most meaningful library programming comes out of community collaboration. This was certainly the case with Genderful!, a series that kicked off on October 14, 2017, at the Brooklyn Public Library as an event for children and caregivers to explore gender through art and creativity.
How can a community have brave, challenging conversations? That was the question St. Paul, MN Mayor Melvin Carter III posed to Catherine Penkert, director of the St. Paul Public Library. Her response was to launch the citywide reading initiative, Read Brave St. Paul, in January and February.
Using the Cornell Portal outside Olin Library, Emma Wagner ’21 talked with two young people from Kigali, Rwanda, who told her health care is better in urban areas than rural ones and explained the country’s universal health care system. The Rwandans also asked Wagner about the MeToo movement in the U.S.
A model and inspiration for public libraries worldwide, the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL)—with its committed staff, transformational leadership, amazing array of programs, partnerships, popularity, and community connections—is the 2018 Gale/LJ Library of the Year.
The MIT Media Lab has expanded beyond academic and corporate collaborations to join forces with public libraries for the Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX), coordinated by the Media Lab Learning Initiative and MIT Libraries and supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation.
Students who can confidently analyze primary sources “look at things with a critical eye,” says school librarian Tom Bober. But cultivating this crucial skill can be daunting, as he discovered as a classroom teacher. After attending the Library of Congress (LC) Summer Institute in 2013, however, Bober was armed with strategies—and ready to spread the word.
When it comes to funding programs at the Kokomo–Howard County Public Library (KHCPL), Trina Evans has dubbed herself the #persistentlibrarian. “I am not afraid to ask, be told ‘no,’ or wear people down until they say ‘yes,’ ” Evans explains. Since she began working a few hours a week for KHCPL in 2014, Evans has become, in the words of Director Faith Brautigam, a “one-woman tidal wave.”
“My mind-set is to think through a process or procedure or problem and connect the threads of a solution,” Amy Mikel says. “Then I keep at it, even if it takes years.” That may explain how Mikel’s in-person class for 20 teachers has in three years become a digital class for more than 1,000.
Tracey Wong is not one to take no for an answer. Early in her career as a classroom teacher in the Bronx, NY, she asked the principal to reopen the shuttered school library, since she would soon have her library degree. He said budgets made that impossible. “So I started pretending I was the librarian,” Wong says. “I emailed him articles on test scores and how to change school culture. I brought in an author. I manually checked out books to my reading groups. I did colleague lunch-and-learns on my own.”
Long before Liesl Toates moved to her new job at the Monroe #1 BOCES School Library System in September 2017, she had made a mark on education in western New York at the Genesee Valley School Library System, where she worked for eight years.
In a 2015 journal article for Weave: Journal of Library User Experience, Reed College Library’s Annie Downey and Joe Márquez defined service design as “a holistic, cocreative, and user-centered approach to understanding customer behavior for the creation or refining of services.” They laid out a flexible, user-centered approach to understanding user and service provider experiences using qualitative tools—and then creating holistic solutions.
In Saskatoon, First Nations people make up nine percent of the population, and Jenny Ryan wanted to find ways to serve those communities. So when she came across the story of a new DC superhero, Equinox—a young, female Cree—she got excited. “I had been trying to find representation of indigenous teens to add to the collection, and I wanted more female representation, too,” she says.
Being named School Library Journal’s 2015 School Librarian of the Year could be considered the crowning achievement of any school librarian’s career. But Kristina Holzweiss is not one to rest on her laurels. If anything, that honor only heralded more inventive and far-reaching initiatives.
After 15 years as an elementary school classroom teacher, Fran Glick enrolled in a master’s degree program in instructional technology, with a concentration in school library media. “The moment I entered the program, my inner librarian was awakened,” she says.
The 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin broke Angel Tucker’s heart. Then a young adult librarian at the Central branch of Kansas’s Johnson County Library system, located in the metropolitan Kansas City area, Tucker teamed up with a library committee led by civic engagement librarian Louisa Whitfield Smith to host a public, deliberative dialog about the controversial ruling.
In April 2015, when a group of Philadelphia teens shared their distress over the death of Freddie Gray while he was in Baltimore police custody, Erin Hoopes found a way to help them voice their emotions by creating the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Social Justice Symposium for Teens. Library staff regularly converse with teens about issues such as police brutality and racism, and Hoopes, who has extensive experience designing programs for teens, sought to deepen the dialog.
Kristin Treviño, youth and digital services librarian at the South Irving Library, part of Texas’s Irving Public Library, used her knowledge of the impact that connecting young readers with the right book can have to plan an immensely popular event, the North Texas Teen Book Festival.
Allie Stevens’s lightbulb moment came when she took an introductory public libraries course at Louisiana State University. Before that, Stevens thought she’d be a science or medical librarian. The class opened her eyes to the many skills required to be a public librarian. “I loved the inherent challenge in that—to learn something new on any given day and to help people in direct and tangible ways.”
Dayna Hart was inspired to bring project-based learning (PBL) to Constable Neil Bruce Middle School, where she’s been a teacher librarian since 2006, after attending a workshop in Texas in 2011 with Jillian Cornock and Ryan Holly, both teachers at the school. The trio put together a ninth grade social studies graphic novel unit looking at historical wrongs. Hart says, “We had no idea how powerful this unit would be.”
“Failure is a critical ingredient to success,” says Heather Acerro, head of youth services at the Rochester Public Library (RPL). Her creative approaches to community needs have resulted in positive outcomes for RPL. Despite the challenge presented by Minnesota’s “11-and-a-half months of winter,” as Acerro jokes, she wrote a grant that resulted in the addition of a bicycle-pulled trailer (the first in the state) for library outreach. In 2017, after winning a citywide award for the project, Acerro used the prize money to add an ArtCart, filled with supplies for creative projects.
As a Mexican American child whose mother spoke only Spanish to her until she was three, Elizabeth Negrete Gaylor discovered her local library when her ESL teacher encouraged her to go there for more reading material. “To me [it] was a wondrous place that had infinite possibilities,” she says. Now she strives to create such possibilities for her patrons as literacy and outreach librarian at the Ardmore Public Library (APL).
Calhoun County Library (CCL) director Kristen Simensen knows how to hook patrons. The library’s pollinator project gives fourth graders an opportunity to study bees up close but connects with adults, too. (“How are our bees?” is a common refrain, Simensen says.)
Orquidea Olvera runs Monterey County Free Libraries’ (MCFL) Early Literacy Mobile Outreach and improves MCFL's ability to serve the county’s large Spanish-speaking population. Just two reasons she is LJ’s 2018 Paralibrarian of the Year, sponsored by DEMCO.
On January 31 the Aspen Institute Dialogue on Public Libraries (DPL) released “Libraries: Building Community Resilience in Colorado.” The report presents the findings of The Aspen Institute Colorado Dialogue on Public Libraries, a meeting of community stakeholders and library leaders held on May 25, 2017, and builds on DPL’s work examining the evolving roles of public libraries and developing models to drive discussions between libraries and their communities.
Gun violence has recently impacted public spaces such as concerts, schools, churches—and libraries. In this environment, many library leaders are taking new steps to keep their staff and patrons safe.
Arizona State University is partnering with Phoenix-area libraries to develop field-tested, replicable, low-cost toolkits of citizen science resources for public libraries. Funded by a 2017 National Leadership Grant for Libraries from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, researchers from ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and librarians from ASU’s Hayden Library have joined forces with Arizona State Library, the citizen science hub SciStarter, and the National Informal STEM Education Network (NISE Net).
Update: ALA president-elect Loida García-Febo told LJ that disaster relief organizations and library groups like REFORMA (the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking) are still assessing the damage. ALA has established contact with the University of Puerto Rico Library and the Puerto Rican chapter of REFORMA—the organization’s largest—she reported, and is just beginning to gauge their needs.
In many types of libraries nationwide, staff are trying to make more space for people. Increasingly, libraries support learning that is social and emotional as well as intellectual, carving out room for learning commons, flexible spaces, quiet contemplation, and active collaboration.
After a group of middle schoolers from Wilmington, NC had the chance to share in the discovery of some rare primary source documents, transcribe them, and get an up-close look at the digitization process, North Carolina may have a few more aspiring archivists ready to help preserve its past.
Arriving hard on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, Irma cut a destructive swath through the northeastern Caribbean and Florida Keys. More than $50 billion worth of damage was reported in the United States, as well as 39 fatalities.
Participatory Design (PD) is a method for engaging deeply with users in order to build inclusive, future-oriented, user-centered services. This year I piloted a PD project with a group of four Native American students at Montana State University (MSU) called User Experience with Underrepresented Populations (UXUP). With 650 enrolled Native students, comprising four percent of our student population, this is a growing and important user community for our library.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, has awarded 12 organizations Community Catalyst Grants totaling $1,637,271. Libraries are project partners of eight of the 12.
U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) director Davita Vance-Cooks has asked the Depository Library Council (DLC) to recommend changes to Chapter 19 of Title 44 of the U.S. Code, a request that has some members of the government information community concerned and others encouraged. Chapter 19 codifies GPO’s Federal Deposit Library Program (FDLP) into law, guaranteeing that the government will provide its information for free to the general public, and has not been significantly revised since the early 1990s.
Public and college libraries alike faced challenges and tough choices this weekend in Charlottesville, VA, when clashes between white nationalist demonstrators and counterprotesters from social justice, civil rights, and anti-fascist groups took place on the campus of the University of Virginia and across the city, leaving three dead and 34 injured.
PLTW President and CEO and New York Times bestselling author Vince Bertram Ed.D. is publishing Dream Differently: Candid Advice for America’s Students (Regnery) this month. He recently spoke with LJ about changing the U.S. approach to STEM education, how students can better navigate the transition from school to college to careers, and what public, academic, and K–12 libraries can do to help them along the way.
While some believe that libraries should remain entirely objective, several speakers at an ALA annual conference panel stressed the importance of using exhibits and programs to express political opinions and take a stand.
Libraries of all types are reevaluating the role they play in their community, questioning whether it is still good enough to provide equal access, or if it is time to pursue an active equitable access that focuses on empowering the less powerful and amplifying the voices of the unheard.
The Lane Library at Armstrong State University (ASU) does not have a bookmobile, but on April 12, four librarians fashioned one out of a golf cart for National Bookmobile Day. The location was the entire ASU campus in Savannah. The weather was perfect, with a high of 79°.
In the scope of its programs, services, and collections; the incredible reach of its efforts in cooperation with other public agencies, departments, and local businesses; and its work to identify and fulfill needs of both the mainstream and marginalized people of Nashville and Davidson County, the Nashville Public Library (NPL), the Gale/LJ 2017 Library of the Year, is a model for the nation and the world.
First-year college and university students enter with widely varying levels of information literacy, particularly in light of the funding crisis that has left so many K–12 public schools without functioning school libraries and trained school librarians/media specialists. LJ recently set out to understand what information literacy instruction entering students need, what they’re getting, and what impact it has on their experience as first-year students.
Do you want to web stream your story times? The Youth Services Department at the Fayetteville Public Library, AR, hoped to make these events available to parents and children who couldn’t get to the library, and our patrons’ response has been fantastic!
Just two years after she immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, Patricia Pacheco landed a library assistant position as the first bilingual staff member at the Sterling Branch of the Loudoun County Public Library system in Virginia. She had been a kindergarten teacher for nearly 20 years and had dealt with children of all ages in her home country. Early on in her time in the States, she volunteered part time in the Ashburn Library of Loudoun County. So when the Sterling branch announced that it sought a bilingual staff member, Pacheco applied and was hired. That was back in May 2015.
The results of the 2016 presidential election caught many by surprise. With the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, and his immediate remaking of American policy through executive orders, public and academic librarians began to mobilize. From book displays addressing resistance and inclusivity, to graphics proclaiming that all are welcome in the library, to topical LibGuides, to online groups organized by discipline or principles, library staff and supporters across the country joined forces with like thinkers to do what they do best: share information where it’s most needed.
One of the most effective ways to test and evaluate a new program or service is to conduct a pilot project, but how do you scale up from there? How do you translate the small successes into sustainable, permanent additions to your library?
I wrote recently that the rate of media illiteracy is the information crisis of our time (“Faked Out,” School Library Journal, 1/17, p. 6), but now that very real issue has nonetheless been trumped by a full-on deliberate assault on the flow of information—from journalism and scientific research to dissemination via social media and traditional channels. There is no such thing as an alternate fact, but there is certainly an alternate reality: a chilling, censorial, obfuscating one being offered as a threatening new normal by the new federal administration in the first days and weeks of 2017.
The Book-Rich Environment Initiative will serve children living in HUD-assisted housing—and encourage families to use local libraries. The U.S. DOE and the National Book Foundation are among the new project's partners.
Since the last of Canada’s Indian residential schools closed in 1996, the nation has been attempting to shape a response to the legacy of abuse that the residential school system—which removed native children from their homes and families—inflicted on its Indigenous Peoples. Saskatoon Public Library (SPL), Saskatchewan, has become the first public library to incorporate a space permanently dedicated to truth and reconciliation. On November 21 SPL’s Frances Morrison Central Library opened the Read for Reconciliation reading area, which includes a full set of the reports compiled by the TRC over five years, plus a variety of books about Canada’s history of residential schools, as well as an extensive reading list on the history and legacy of residential schools in Canada on its homepage.
As the United States—and the world—prepare for the January 20, 2017 presidential inauguration, libraries, institutions, and citizens are joining forces to identify federal government websites to be captured and saved in the End of Term (EOT) Web Archive.
When youth specialist Mary Shortino at the Johnson County Public Library (JCPL), a suburban system near Kansas City, KS, read Tanner Colby’s Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America (Penguin Bks.), she got excited. About a quarter of the book is about Kansas City, where racial real estate covenants first began, and the specialist, who is in her 50s, remembered when the city’s schools were first integrated. Shortino pulled in Angel Tucker, youth services manager of JCPL, and the two went to see Colby speak nearby in Kansas City, MO. Colby’s response to meeting them, says Tucker, was, “ ‘I should’ve come to your library,’ ” and with that, a collaboration was born.
Aiming to help faculty and graduate students learn essential coding skills to facilitate their research, the University of Oklahoma Libraries (OU) have been offering two-day, hands-on workshops developed by Software Carpentry.
Featuring the Poway Library, San Diego County Library; San José Public Library’s Village Square Branch, CA; Jamestown Bluffs Library, St. Louis County Library, Florissant, MO; Winfield Library, KS; and Canfield Branch Library, Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County, OH.
On Halloween night, Friends and trustees of New York Public Library (NYPL) got a treat that didn’t require a costume: Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and NYPL President Tony Marx sat down together for a lively hour-long discussion of research, preservation, digitization, Hayden’s plans for the Library of Congress (LC), and the influence of Hamilton.
These days, collecting deep public input before the design phase of a new construction or renovation of a library is de rigueur, with methods ranging from focus groups to community outreach to social media. But a few libraries are taking it to the next level, not just finding out what patrons need or value and filtering that through the lens of librarian and architect expertise but also letting users directly drive design decisions in collaboration with the professionals.
According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, an estimated 650,000 children in Uganda have been orphaned by AIDS. The majority of them are now cared for by their grandmothers. The adult literacy rate reported by UNESCO is 73.9 percent, and only 66.9 percent among women; these discrepancies are particularly acute in AIDS-affected populations. In an effort to address these issues, the Nyaka AIDS Orphan Project (NAOP), a nonprofit working on behalf of AIDS and HIV orphans in rural Uganda, has recently established two libraries for HIV- and AIDS-affected communities with support from the Stephen Lewis Foundation (SLF), a Canada-based nonprofit.
Nearly nine out of ten adults have difficulty using health information, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This isn’t surprising—thanks to the open access movement, there are a plethora of reliable medical sources out there, but many are not written for a lay audience. Meanwhile, drug companies on the one hand and anti–traditional medicine advocates on the other flood the Internet with authoritative-sounding contradictory material.
While library board members and leaders are usually elected or appointed, one library district will be awarding its top role to the young library user who provides the best reasons for wanting to be library president—for a day, at any rate.
Iowa City Public Library (ICPL) prides itself on welcoming all members of the community, and recently found a way to extend that service by introducing an Autism Accessible Browsing Hour for all ages. The library’s bright and inviting children’s room plays host to a variety of kids of all abilities, including through its Sensory Storytimes for children on the autism spectrum, but the boisterous atmosphere can be too loud, too bright, and too busy for some children with sensory issues.
“We have to focus on a deeper understanding of the relational nature of learning” says Brigid Barron, associate professor at the school of education at California’s Stanford University. A faculty colead of the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) center, Barron and her colleagues explore the importance of social learning environments through the National Science Foundation–funded project.
To Rivkah Sass, executive director, Sacramento Public Library (SPL), CA, there is no greater enemy to young children than the “play gap”—the shrinking time to explore, invent, and run amok. Hence the Sacramento Play Summit (SPS), a one-day program for parents, teachers, caregivers, and librarians to discuss play, why it’s important, and how to bring more of it to children.
Human-centered design, a highly creative approach to problem solving, is gaining popularity in libraries as they plan for what lies ahead. Also known as design thinking, it focuses on defining and then resolving concerns by paying attention to the needs, aspirations, and wishes of people—in the case of libraries, not only a library’s patrons but its staff, administration, and members of the community who may not be library customers…yet.
When LJ Mover & Shaker Dustin Fife first arrived at Utah Valley University Library in Orem and took the job of Outreach & Patron Services Librarian—charged with working on interlibrary loan, E-reserve, and faculty delivery—his employers placed great emphasis on the “outreach” aspect of the position.
This fall series, sponsored by littleBits, explores the education technology topics educators are talking about this school year, from virtual reality and STEAM to popular culture and digital literacy.
While many libraries have come up with creative rewards for staff innovation, the Birmingham Public Library (BPL) Innovative Cool Awards do double duty. The monthly award, funded and run by BPL’s ten-member Board of Trustees, is an incentive for staff to develop—and promote—engaging new programs and workshops, and also a way to connect the board with staff.
Where's Pikachu? How libraries are connecting with patrons over this wildly popular new virtual treasure hunt that uses geolocation—and why the game raises privacy concerns.
Update: ALA is planning a planning a memorial gathering at the Annual Conference on Saturday, June 25, 8–8:30 a.m. in the OCCC Auditorium, and a special conference Read Out co-sponsored by GLBTRT and OIF. Details on other support activities during the conference can be found here. In the wake of the shooting in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub on the night of June 12, which killed 49 people and injured 53 others, library administration and staff, organizations and vendors have stepped up with statements of solidarity, offers of help, and opportunities to join forces with the GLBT and Latinx communities—the shooting occurred during Pulse's Latin night—to mourn those killed and wounded.
Former New York City Mayor David Dinkins was on hand to cheer the city's first public library-based sites, 26 branches in Queens, a county of 2.3 million that's one of the most ethnically diverse in the country.
The wildfire that ravaged the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, for more than two weeks forced the evacuation of some 88,000 residents—many of them making their way to Edmonton, the nearest large city, and some as far south as Calgary. Throughout the area, local services stepped up to help the evacuees, from shipments of food, bottled water, and diapers to prepaid debit cards to a Facebook page that gathered donations of prom dresses for teenagers forced to flee without their clothing. Edmonton and Calgary public and academic libraries did their parts as well, ensuring access to library services, providing library cards to evacuees, and doing outreach at evacuation centers.
Heather Moorefield-Lang has witnessed the face of freshman terror when the first-year students walk into the college library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, are confronted by two million books, and don’t know where to start. As an assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Sciences, she knows that relieving that angst is her job.
Children are naturally curious about the world around them. Science programs and activities are a great way to capture their interest and encourage the development of early literacy skills. Many science activities and materials are easy to incorporate into library programs; you may find that you’re already including elements that increase STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) knowledge, for example, talking about color mixing or identifying and playing with shapes.
