59m
As community demand continues to ramp up, organizations representing the vast majority of North American public libraries, including ALA’s Public Library Association, released a joint statement May 26 calling for change in licensing for digital content. The explosion in usage is straining public library budgets and dragging down wait lists for readers in ways that are not sustainable. While libraries are able to purchase physical books and lend them indefinitely, digital content is typically licensed to libraries for a limited time, allow limited checkouts, or both.
Public Library Association, May 26
3h
Jennifer A. Peterson writes: “The Indian Trails Library Giving Garden began in 2009 and is active thanks to a dedicated team of staff and volunteers from the Wheeling (Ill.) Garden Club. The programs are truly intergenerational, and community focused with young children, caregivers, and adults of all ages participating in planting, weeding, pruning, and picking the fruits and vegetables. When children attend these programs, not only are they harvesting food for the food pantry, but they are also making a direct impact on their community.”
ALSC Blog, May 23
20h
“Everyone’s path to academic libraries is a little different. One common refrain that’s come up among this year’s ACRLog First-Year Academic Librarians is what we’ve learned from our past jobs—which could be anything from previous careers, library jobs that we had during grad school, and non-library jobs—that we use in our work today in academic libraries. Today, three of us are sharing some thoughts and suggestions about what we learned from previous jobs.”
ACRLog, May 19
1d
Steve Tetreault writes: “I am fortunate enough to get to talk to school librarians from all over. I’ve noticed during many of these conversations that, as passionate as school librarians are about doing what they do, they also frequently refer to what they, personally, do as nothing special. Each and every time, this hurts my heart, because nothing could be further from the truth. Having any kind of school library program provides resources and access for which students and staff would otherwise go wanting. And I have met very few school librarians who are just bare-minimum kinds of folks!”
Knowledge Quest, May 20
1d
Anne Ford writes: “Like many ALA staffers, librarian and archivist Colleen Barbus remembers the Association’s previous headquarters. ‘The stacks led you into a couple of little rabbit warrens,’ she says. The rabbit-warren days are over. Since ALA headquarters moved in 2020 to its present location at Chicago’s 225 North Michigan Avenue, Barbus has presided over a completely reimagined in-house library. Visitors step off the elevator to find a large, open, bright area that’s home to not only the office’s main reception desk but also row upon row of low book-filled shelves.”
American Libraries feature, May
5d
Andrea Rosa writes: “The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a 9th-century book in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’ appears within some copies of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The discovery sheds light on the English language’s wide diffusion, long before what was previously understood,” The earliest printed version of the poem previously known dates from the 12th century, although two earlier texts included it as marginalia.
Associated Press, May 17
5d
Lily Ray writes: “Over the past several months, I have been monitoring more than 220 websites that were publicly identified as customers of various AI content creation, automation, and scaling platforms. Many of these tools also now focus on driving visibility, mentions, and citations in AI search responses. A consistent pattern emerged: It works, until it doesn’t. The data makes clear that scaling content production with AI is not a low-risk strategy for organic search. It can produce real short-term gains in both search engine optimization and AI search, but across this data set, those gains have rarely held.”
Search Engine Journal, May 18
