As ICE has conducted raids across the country, public libraries are grappling with how to prepare staff and protect patrons.

We opened an adult literacy program in the basement of the old Carnegie branch I managed, almost four months from the day Merlene, one of our regular patrons, confided that she’d been pretending her ...

Are you looking for a smart and efficient way to store your library’s growing collection of books, journals, and other materials? Do you want to optimize your offsite storage space and reduce ...

Jennifer Pate, director of OpenEd at Texas A&M University in College Station, shares tips for team trivia nights. Photo: Carrie Smith, American Libraries It was a trivia night so good, the university ...

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 ...

The year 2023 was another record-breaker for book bans. The American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) documented 1,247 attempts to censor library books and other ...

Welcome to the 2021 Library Design Showcase, American Libraries’ annual celebration of new and renovated libraries that address user needs in unique, interesting, and effective ways. That this year’s ...

A woman using the card catalog at the main reading room of the Library of Congress, circa 1940. Photo: Library of Congress OCLC printed its last library catalog cards on October 1, 2015, ending an era ...

When Jessie Carney Smith arrived at Fisk University in Nashville in 1965, she says many people there did not know about black literature. Smith, the dean of the library, says, “Many scholars were told ...

On January 26, the American Library Association (ALA) announced the top books, digital media, video, and audiobooks for children and young adults—including the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newbery, ...

In the decade since the Supreme Court upheld the implementation of the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), internet filtering has become a frequent practice in public libraries. It has also ...