Some writers aim to smuggle what Iran censors

Melissa Etehad writes: “The members of this particular online book club spent zero time talking about literature per se, instead focusing on how to smuggle banned writings into Iran. Prospective readers, the members said, should not have to worry about authorities in the Islamic Republic obtaining their personal information. They should have the freedom to choose what books they want to read.”

Los Angeles Times, March 5

Latest Library Links

6h

ALA and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees have reached a settlement with the US Department of Justice in their lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The April 9 settlement allows IMLS to continue carrying out its congressionally mandated work. On April 6, The Trump administration also withdrew its appeal in a separate but similar case brought by the attorneys general of 21 states to protect IMLS. The administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal eliminates all IMLS funding, although Trump’s initial proposals have consistently eliminated IMLS funding only to have funding preserved or increased after library advocacy efforts.

ALA Public Policy and Advocacy Office, Apr. 9, Apr. 7, Apr. 3
11h

ALA’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy Working Group has released the draft document Guidance of the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Libraries. The group was established by Council in June 2025 with a charge to develop a unified, critically informed ALA position on AI in libraries through the lens of ALA’s Core Values. All ALA members are invited to provide feedback by May 8 to inform revisions that will be incorporated into a final document that will be presented for approval by Council at the 2026 ALA Annual Conference.

ALA AI Policy Working Group
14h

American Libraries celebrates park collections and libraries’ connections to the National Park Service. Discover the number of preserved plants in the herbarium at Zion National Park in Utah, the number of books written by naturalist John Muir (one of the driving forces behind the creation of several national parks, including the Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, and Petrified Forest, Sequoia, and Yosemite National Parks), and the year that Yosemite Research Library began acquiring its collection.

American Libraries Trend, Mar./Apr.
3d

Adaeze Uche writes: “There are only a few people who learn Excel in an academic setting. Most of us pick it up as we go, learning just enough to get through whatever task is in front of us. It’s great that we can build our Excel skills this way, but we also tend to pick up inefficient habits. Once you identify and unlearn them, you put yourself in position to use Excel more effectively.”

MakeUseOf, Apr. 5
3d

Stephanie Gamble writes: “When I first started as a school librarian I had a lot of frustrations with the 300s. Arriving in my grade 9–12 library after a history PhD and years at research universities, I chalked up my frustrations with Dewey—especially the way the 300s pulled critical aspects of history out of ‘History’ when it involved minority groups—to a need to break my old Library of Congress Classification habits. But why do we use Dewey? Our mission is to prep our students for college level research, but we aren’t teaching them college library organization.”

AISL Independent Ideas, Apr. 1
4d

Daisy Auger-Domínguez writes: “Workplace burnout is often discussed as if it were a single condition with a single solution: fewer hours, better boundaries, more resilience. That framing is incomplete and misleading. Burnout takes different forms depending on where someone sits in the organization; what they’re accountable for; and how much clarity, control, and moral alignment they have. Burnout is rarely a personal failure. It is usually a design failure. When capable, committed people are exhausted, the issue is not resilience—it is work engineered without regard for human limits and systems that quietly reward overextension.”

Harvard Business Review, Apr. 3
4d

Claire Woodcock writes: “Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries. Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway. One such experiment indicates a desire to accelerate content production of book reviews for conservative book-rating sites and explicitly defines ‘educational inappropriateness’ as ‘content offensive to conservative values.’”

404 Media, Apr. 1

View more Latest Library Links