September/October 2025

Features & Trends

2025 Library Design Showcase

By Phil Morehart

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 →

2025 ALA/AIA Library Building Awards

The following libraries are winners of the 2025 Library Building Awards, sponsored by Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures (a division of the American Library Association) and the American Institute of Architects. The awards recognize the best in library architecture and design and are open to any architect licensed in the US. Projects may be located anywhere … Continue reading 2025 ALA/AIA Library Building Awards →

Illustration of a robot at a typewriter. Illustration: Tom Deja

Books by Bots

By Reema Saleh

When she came across a book titled Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book from the publisher Bold Kids, it seemed promising. Eklund hadn’t heard of Bold Kids before, but it offers nearly 500 books on Goodreads and Amazon, and its paperbacks aren’t expensive. Though the catalog showed only the book’s cover—not its interior—she put in the … Continue reading Books by Bots →

Columnists

Sustainability at Our Core
By Sam Helmick
Reading the Room
By Jasmine Simmons and Sophia Medina
The Teen Scene
By Christine Herman and Jo Phillips
Our Own Stories
By Allison Escoto

Latest Library Links

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Larry Neal writes: “When I volunteered to serve as ALA treasurer, I knew it was going to be one of the greatest challenges of my career. Only a few months in, it has already exceeded my expectations. ALA’s financial picture is not a pretty one. And it’s a similar picture currently seen at many other associations and nonprofit organizations. Fiscal year 2025, which ended in August, saw a deficit of $15.4 million. If this sounds like a financial crisis, it is. If it sounds like significant change is needed, it’s long overdue. If it sounds hopeless, it isn’t.”

American Libraries column, Jan./Feb.
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Last April, Choice convened the virtual panel “Affirmative Action and the Future of DEI.” Moderated by Fatima Mohie-Eldin, social sciences editor for Choice, the panel explored how these coalescing issues are impacting academic librarians and information scholars. The following are edited excerpts of their discussion, which considered how institutions can pursue and reaffirm their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion principles, the murky legal and political territory around education and information, and how collaboration can support access and inclusion.

American Libraries feature, Jan./Feb.
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“For many readers and viewers, HBOMax’s recent adaptation of Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry has become an entry-point for casual observers of the game played on ice with a puck—and hockey romances. You may not know what exactly is happening on the rink, or even in the locker room, but you can guess, and that’s half the fun!” See other lists from Johnson County (Kans.) Library, Multnomah County (Oreg.) Library, Mesa County (Colo.) Libraries, or Omaha (Nebr.) Public Library.

St. Louis Public Library, Dec. 27; Johnson County (Kans.) Library, Dec. 13; Multnomah (Oreg.) County Library, Dec. 11; Mesa County (Colo.) Libraries, Dec. 18; Omaha (Nebr.) Public Library, Dec. 4
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Stefan Milne writes: “Seattle Public Library is the only US library system that makes its anonymized, granular checkout data public. The hitch is that the library’s data set contains nearly 50 million rows. To track trends in the catalog over the last 20 years, University of Washington researchers analyzed the checkout data of the 93 authors included in the post-1945 volume of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, which is instrumental in standardizing the books and writers we’ve deemed culturally important.”

University of Washington News, Jan. 8
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Janette Wright writes: “I was appointed to a leadership role in local government during a period of corporate change and budget constraint. Staff had a low level of trust in leadership, a history of conflict and incivility, and low expectations of the opportunity for service improvements or development. In this article, I’ll reflect on the leadership challenges inherent in such transitions, drawing on my personal experience across the library sector and applying a theoretical framework to offer practical insights for leaders navigating similar terrain.”

Katina, Jan. 8
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Hong Zhou and Hiba Bishtawi write: “For decades, discovery has revolved around keywords: carefully chosen terms, Boolean operators, and increasingly sophisticated relevance ranking. Today, generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems are introducing a different interaction model altogether. Instead of asking how to search, researchers are starting to ask what they want to know and expecting the system to figure out the rest. When does natural language outperform traditional approaches, and what do current AI-powered discovery tools actually do well? We conducted a comparative analysis of four widely used AI-enabled research discovery tools.”

The Scholarly Kitchen, Jan. 6
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Hillel Aron writes: “The estate of legendary author Kurt Vonnegut, three authors, and two unnamed high school students sued the Utah Board of Education on January 6 over the removal of hundreds of books from school libraries. Among the books that have been effectively banned from certain school libraries are Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Utah’s so-called “book removal law,” H.B. 29, was updated in 2024 and automatically removes books from all school libraries that have been banned by three or more school districts.”

Courthouse News Service, Jan. 6