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Garland County Library, AR; North Bergen Free Public Library, NJ; and Queens Public Library, NY, demonstrate the resourceful programming, robust partnerships, and care for their communities that has earned them Honorable Mention for the 2020 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize.

Strong mutual support among community partners, and a conscious shift over the past decade to investigate what each of its neighborhoods needs most, and then step up to those needs, has earned St. Louis County Library the 2024–25 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize.

In contrast to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s characterization of fact-checking as unwanted censorship, most Americans actually agree that the U.S. government and technology companies should each take steps to restrict false information and extremely violent content online.

The Prison Library Support Network, established in 2015, works to meet the information needs of people who are incarcerated through a nationwide letter-writing project. Since the reference by mail program started in 2021, the New York City–based collective of librarians, graduate students, and activists has responded to nearly all of the 3,000 queries it has received from people in prisons across the United States, with the majority of letters coming from Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Florida.

Nardia Cumberbatch, librarian at Florida’s Valencia College, was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work in helping the college achieve the Sustainable Library Certification Program, the second academic library in the country and the first library in Florida to have done so. We recently spoke with Cumberbatch about what it took to earn that certification and its resulting impact.

We have now passed the point of no return: We have not acted fast enough to slow the increasing frequency and severity of the impacts of the climate emergency in our lifetime. Even if we were to do everything “right,” climate scientists predict we have at least 30 more years of increasingly dire impacts from climate change. We now find ourselves facing this reality with an incoming administration that has already declared plans to roll back environmental protections that would have helped us do things “right” for future generations. So, what now?

Welcome to our first AI Watch column! The three of us talk monthly in the Libraries Lead Podcast (available at librarieslead.libraryjournal.com), and now we share content from that segment of the podcast in digital and print form through Library Journal.

In a significant decision for the freedom to read, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas recently declared two key sections of Arkansas Act 372—which expose librarians and booksellers to criminal penalties—unconstitutional. Section 1’s criminal penalties for “furnishing harmful items to minors” were deemed overly broad; Section 5’s process for giving decisions on book challenges and appeals to local government officials lacked constitutional safeguards and threatened a chilling effect on library staff and users alike.

On December 9, the American Library Association (ALA) announced that it will receive an approximately $25 million bequest from James W. Lewis, senior vice president and senior relationship manager of the Lewis Group, an investment company within the Washington, DC, office of Merrill Lynch, to fund library school scholarships for students with demonstrated financial needs. The bequest is the largest in ALA’s history.