Welcome to the 2025 Library Design Showcase, American Libraries’ annual celebration of new and renovated libraries throughout North America. Today’s libraries are places where people from diverse communities can connect, learn, and grow. The institutions featured in this year’s showcase embody the library’s role as a true third space while honoring local histories and cultures … Continue reading 2025 Library Design Showcase
Award recipients were honored at a June 29 ceremony and reception during ALA’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia. This selection represents only some of those recognized in 2025. For a complete list of winners, visit ala.org/awards. Scholastic Library Publishing Award Clare Graham As director of the Malvern–Hot Spring County (Ark.) Library, Graham acts … Continue reading 2025 ALA Award Winners
A total of 14,292 people registered for the event, whose programs included many dedicated to anticensorship efforts, programming challenges, funding cuts, and other existential threats. In these dark times, when the very mission of libraries is being scrutinized and politicized, attendees took comfort in collective engagement and critical discussions about intellectual freedom, diversity, and other … Continue reading 2025 Annual Conference Wrap-Up
With more than 600 vendors and a variety of live stages and pavilions, the Library Marketplace showcased products for libraries facing intense new challenges. Services and solutions that focused on libraries’ ongoing needs for efficiency and impact were in high demand. Palpable politics The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) booth, which sat empty … Continue reading Solidarity amid Uncertainty
With The Girl Who Was Too Big for the Page (Philomel Books, April), Davis offers a funny and self-referential take on embracing differences. She talked to American Libraries at the American Library Association’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia about her new book, striving for equitable representation in media, and the roles for which … Continue reading Newsmaker: Geena Davis
Clockwise from top left: Tiwanna Nevels, assistant state librarian at State Library of North Carolina in Raleigh, sits with some of her favorite challenged books in the Big Chair (sponsored by Sage, the Banned Books Week Coalition, and ALA’s Unite Against Book Bans); Amy Hermon, librarian at Royal Oak (Mich.) High School and host of … Continue reading Bookend: Speaking Out
As library professionals, we often traffic in the timeless—in books, archives, and community memory. But this year’s ALA Annual Conference reminded us that timing matters, too. At a moment when the core tenets of librarianship—intellectual freedom, the right to read, equitable access to information—are under direct attack across the country, gathering in Philadelphia felt as … Continue reading Why We Show Up
ALA returns to this historic and vibrant city for its 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition, to be held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center June 26–30. As the Association—and the nation—approach monumental anniversaries, library workers will reaffirm and celebrate what it means to run institutions foundational to democracy, equity, and civic discourse. Many sessions in this year’s … Continue reading 2025 Annual Conference Preview
Even COVID-19 couldn’t slow our culinary roll, and while we lost many old favorites and promising new spots to the pandemic, we quickly bounced back—and back onto the lists of internationally acclaimed restaurants—all somehow without losing our street cred for comfort food. As an Annual Conference attendee, you’re doubly lucky to be stationed at the … Continue reading Revolutionary Eats
That relief has been a long time coming for Hickson, who retired late last year from her job as media specialist at North Hunterdon High School in Annandale, New Jersey. Just three years earlier, she had been called a pedophile and a pornographer at a public school-board meeting by a group of parents demanding to … Continue reading Banning the Book Bans
Welcome to Edible Alphabet, the flagship series of Free Library of Philadelphia’s (FLP) Culinary Literacy Center. Since 2015, the program has convened those learning English as a second language (ESL)—many from the Caribbean, Central America, the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia—to practice conversation and cook a recipe under the direction of an ESL … Continue reading Bookend: Eat and Greet
