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As Congress works to finalize the nation’s infrastructure investments, ALA is asking advocates to ensure libraries aren’t left out. Urge your legislators to include the Build America’s Libraries Act in the 2022 budget resolution and reconciliation instructions. -
Kevin Strowder’s first day as director of ALA’s Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services was June 21—a mere few days before the start of the 2021 Annual Conference and Exhibition Virtual. As head of ODLOS, Strowder will oversee a unit that manages prominent programs, initiatives, awards, and relationships that support equity and inclusion through a lens of social justice. Strowder answered our 11 Questions to introduce himself to ALA members. -
Amy Carlton writes: “First published in 1974, ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Manual has become an essential reference for library workers who need dependable answers to thorny questions about book challenges, patron privacy, and policy development for their institutions. The 10th edition, coedited by Martin Garnar, director of Amherst (Mass.) College Library and former president of the Freedom to Read Foundation, and Trina Magi, library professor and reference and instruction librarian at University of Vermont, was released under the direction of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom earlier this year. American Libraries spoke with Garnar and Magi, as well as several of the manual’s contributors, about the latest challenges to intellectual freedom that library workers face.” Read “A Deeper Look: Censorship beyond Books,” an excerpt from the Intellectual Freedom Manual. -
Earlier this year, United for Libraries hosted “Friends and Trustees under 40: Recruit Them, Retain Them, Engage Them,” a webinar featuring tips for attracting millennials and younger adults to Friends groups, trustee boards, and foundations. The session was moderated by Jillian Wentworth, UFL’s manager of marketing and membership, and presented by members of UFL’s Millennial Engagement Task Force, and the panelists are coauthors of All Ages Welcome: Recruiting and Retaining Younger Generations for Library Boards, Friends Groups, and Foundations (ALA Editions, 2020). Read excerpts from the webinar in our July/August issue. -
ALA President Patricia “Patty” M. Wong writes: “Connection—across our diverse backgrounds, experiences, and futures—is a theme of my presidential year, and it is a necessary conversation. Demographers predict that by 2050, African Americans, Asian Pacific Islanders, Latinx, and Indigenous people will constitute the majority of Americans. So how does ALA fit into our rapidly evolving democracy? How can we connect to one another as librarians and use the tools of our profession to foster connections with others?” -
Lily Hay Newman writes: “There are certain sci-fi promises the future is supposed to hold: jetpacks, flying cars, a Mars colony. But there are also some seemingly more attainable goals that somehow also always feel just on the horizon. And one of the most tantalizing is the end of passwords. The good news is that the infrastructure—across all the major operating systems and browsers—is largely in place to support passwordless login. The less-good news? You’re still plugging passwords into multiple sites and services every day, and you will be for a while.” -
Jonathan Zittrain writes: “The absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on. Links work seamlessly until they don’t. And as tangible counterparts to online work fade, these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge.” -
Kahron Spearman writes: “People are trolling a Minneapolis-area police department for a tweet reporting alleged ‘thefts’ at a Little Free Library in Bloomington, Minnesota. You read that correctly: Thefts were being reported at a neighborhood book depot in which the books are supposed to be free to take.” -
A bookshop chain in Hungary has been fined for selling a children’s story depicting a day in the life of a child with same-sex parents, with officials condemning the picture book for featuring such families. The picture book, Micsoda Család!, is a Hungarian translation combining two titles by US author Lawrence Schimel and illustrator Elīna Brasliņa: Early One Morning, which shows a young boy’s morning with his two mothers, and Bedtime, Not Playtime!, in which a young girl with two fathers is reluctant to go to sleep. -
The Public Library of the Year award is presented every year to a newly built public library that combines functional architecture with creative IT solutions and includes digital development with local culture. Systematic is the main sponsor of the award, which comes with $5,000 (€4,200). An international jury of IFLA members chose this year’s five finalists: Marrickville Library, Australia; Deichmann Bjørvika–Oslo Public Library, Norway; Het Predikheren, Belgium; Ningbo New Library, China; and Forum Groningen, the Netherlands. The winner will be announced during IFLA’s annual congress, held online August 17–19.International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, July 5
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Stanwood (Wash.) Library Circulation Supervisor Marlene Moodie heard an unusual knocking at the library’s front door June 22. She and a coworker investigated and found a duckling desperately tapping its beak on the door frame and window, signaling that at least eight ducklings were trapped in the access well that houses ventilation pipes and leads to the library’s crawl space. With some help from city workers, the ducklings were rescued and are now recovering at a nearby wildlife care center. -
Greg Landgraf writes: “Though the ongoing pandemic prompted ALA to hold its 2021 Annual Conference and Exhibition virtually June 23–29, there was no shortage of enthusiasm or curiosity among the more than 9,100 attendees who gathered online to hear from speakers and authors and share their experiences.”
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