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Following community protests and a union complaint filed with the Illinois Labor Relations Board, the Niles-Maine District Library Board on July 21 refrained from making $1.5 million in budget cuts and instead opted to approve a compromise budget. It does not reduce current staffing or cut building hours; however, it does include several other cuts, including to programs, books and materials, and sending librarians and books to schools and nursing homes.
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Archivist Mary Kidd writes: “Earlier this year, I read an article titled ‘Hail the Maintainers.’ The authors, writing on the rise of Silicon Valley, argue that too much value is given to innovation, rather than the labor involved in maintaining the technologies resulting from it. I drew parallels between this sort of technological maintenance labor that the authors described and the day-to-day tasks performed by library and archives workers, especially within and in support of special or research collections. Coincidentally, I read this article while involved in two projects where I developed calculator tools that can measure the impact of a single acquisition in terms of staff capacity and associated supplies, transportation, and labor costs.”
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Justin Hoenke writes: “One of the best decisions I have ever made in my career as a library leader/manager was to install people counters at the Benson Memorial Library in Titusville, Pennsylvania, at the end of 2015. I paid around $300 for the counters, I installed them myself, and every day I came to the library I would check the number for the previous day, reset the counters, and record our daily tally in a spreadsheet. Over the years those numbers all came together and they told a story: The numbers that were previously reported were off by about 60,000 visits/year, and visits to the library during my time as executive director grew steadily over 4.5 years.”
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Tom Sens and Kyle Moll write: “When it comes to the use of academic libraries, it is imperative for stakeholders to understand how and why students use that space and what their expectations are. Ask Your Target Market, an independent online research firm, collected input from 500 students from across the country over a two-week period in October 2020. The top five areas where students spent their time in the library were: quiet study space (58.6%), computer lab (37.8%), reading room (35%), café (33.8%), and group study space (32.2%).”
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A report published July 19 from School Librarian Investigation: Decline or Evolution?, a research project through Antioch University Seattle and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, highlights an ongoing decline in the number of districts nationwide with school librarians. According to the findings, there were about 20% fewer librarians during the 2018–2019 school year in the 13,000 districts examined than a decade prior. But the absence of these educators isn’t equally distributed: Smaller, rural districts, and those with higher proportions of English-language learners, Latinx students, and low-income students were more likely to lack a librarian.
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Thorin Klosowski writes: “As products get more difficult to repair, a growing right-to-repair movement has been pushing for legislation that requires access to repair tools. On July 9, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that pushes the Federal Trade Commission to make third-party product repair easier, but that’s just part of the larger issue. Let’s take a look at how and why any of this matters.”
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James Hennelly writes: “If you have paid any attention to cataloging matters over the past three years, you might have heard rumblings about something called the 3R Project, which is having a large impact on RDA cataloging. Among the 3R Project’s goals was optimization of RDA for international use and in linked-data environments. The emphasis on these two areas is based on a vision for future cataloging that will require greater sharing of metadata for more efficient creation of records but still allow for local practices to better meet the needs of library users. In short, the post-3R RDA is for those who want to catalog locally but share globally.”
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Since its emergence in New York City in the late 1970s, hip-hop has grown to become a musical, cultural, and economic force around the world. And it’s been embraced by libraries, which are using the art form for community outreach, teaching, preservation, and more. In Episode 64, Call Number with American Libraries looks at libraries and hip-hop.
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July marks Disability Pride Month, a movement that seeks to celebrate people with disabilities for who they are, as they are—no exceptions. New York Public Library rounded up several books that celebrate and elevate people with disabilities, call for disability justice, and challenge ableism through reading.
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Francesca Tripodi, sociologist and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, recently released a study looking at the gender bias on Wikipedia and who gets to be “notable.” Of more than a million and a half biographies on the English-language version of the site, fewer than 19% are about women, and editors have to jump through extra hoops to get those pages to stick.
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Since their swearing in on May 19, the new board members of Niles-Maine District Library in Illinois have wasted no time in imposing a much more conservative agenda—slashing budgets and hours, firing staff, and eliminating outreach to schools and nursing homes. In places ranging from Kootenai County, Idaho, to Ann Arundel County, Maryland, to Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, to Frisco, Texas, local efforts are under way to limit what libraries offer—especially when it comes to promoting racial equity and gender inclusivity.
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ALA Executive Director Tracie D. Hall writes: “Author Anne Lamott reminds us of the order in which effective change-making must come: ‘First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping.’ As someone innately attracted to meaningful, people- and community-centered work and galvanized by opportunities to help and to serve, I sometimes have to be reminded how essential it is that I take time to nurture the fire that lights the way. When library leaders and stewards allow our light to dim, the path forward becomes harder to discern and serves no one.”
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