3 years after fight over LGBTQ+ books, an Arkansas community takes up vote to cut library money; Arkansas Advocate, November 2, 2026

 TESS VRBIN , Arkansas Advocate; 3 years after fight over LGBTQ+ books, an Arkansas community takes up vote to cut library money

Ballot measure driven by Saline County elected officials, not private citizens

"Saline County has been a primary battleground over Arkansas libraries’ funding and content in the past few years, part of a larger fight libraries around the country have faced over efforts to restrict access to books addressing race, sexuality or other controversial subjects. The vote comes three years after Saline County’s library director was fired in a standoff with conservatives who wanted books about LGBTQ+ topics removed from shelves. 

The library’s Facebook page includes information about voting, but no mention of Issue 5.

“If a ballot initiative had been run by citizens… the library could have come out and defended itself,” Chism said. “They can’t do anything when it’s their own elected officials doing it.”

The all-Republican Saline County Quorum Court voted 10-2 in May, after much public pushback, to allow the public to vote on reducing the Saline County Library’s millage to 1.1 mills. The library currently receives 1.7 mills, or $1.70 for every $1,000 of assessed property tax in the county of more than 131,000 people.

If voters approve Issue 5, the library is expected to lose $1.4 million per year, or about one-third of its projected $5.7 million operating budget for 2027."

If British Library reading rooms become ‘co-working spaces’, what, exactly, is a national library for?; The Guardian, October 29, 2026

 Andy Beckett , The Guardian; If British Library reading rooms become ‘co-working spaces’, what, exactly, is a national library for?

"In a crowded country that is short of public money, any expansive public building that seems underused in any way is vulnerable. Professional critics of state spending can claim taxpayers’ money is being wasted. Managers of the building who are under financial pressure can argue it needs to be used more intensely, perhaps that some spaces should be commercialised and offered for rent. The original open, uncommodified, egalitarian quality of the building can be steadily sliced away.

The British Library in London is in danger of that fate. A huge brick battleship moored on the Euston Road since 1997, it claims to be the largest public building constructed in the UK in the 20th century. Its both forbidding and exhilarating exterior conceals 11 unusually elegant and comfortable reading rooms and one of the world’s most extensive print and digital collections, free to use for anyone who is over 18. Last week, these readers received an email with the subject line, “Transforming your Library”. Next summer, the library would “begin work on repurposing our [three] Science and Social Sciences Reading Rooms to become a flexible workspace … available for hire by workers and businesses for co-working, collaboration and meetings”. The reason given for removing more than a quarter of the library’s much-loved research space was “ensuring we generate the necessary revenue to keep our core services free”.

The library has a current annual budget of about £170m – a third the size of my local London hospital’s – 84% of which comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The rest is from donations, investments and “charitable and other trading activities”, such as the private parties and ticketed exhibitions already frequently held in the sweeping interior connecting its reading rooms. Even with these multiple income streams, the library’s financial reserves are perilously low – according to its latest accounts – thanks to inflation and austerity, which mean its state funding has in real terms declined to two-thirds of what it was in 2010, and also a devastating cyber-attack in 2023, from which the library has still not fully recovered.

Despite this troubled context, and in some ways because of it, the library’s drastic reading room reduction plan has provoked “outrage” from staff, say the Prospect and Public and Commercial Services (PCS) unions that represent them. Reading room staff understandably fear for their jobs, but also for the building’s fundamental purpose, which was set out by law in 1972 – an indication of how hard the complex was to conceive and build – as “the establishment for the United Kingdom of a national library”. Staff are now “the most furious I’ve ever seen them about anything”, says a union source. A strike over the reading room plan, following one last year over low pay, could begin as soon as December.

Behind this potentially explosive dispute – not least because many well-connected authors, academics and journalists use the library – lurks a big question. In a digital age of decentralised study and dispersed online resources, what is a national library for?"

The Dallas Public Library is getting rid of English classes. A volunteer calls the cuts 'baffling'; KERA News, September 4, 2026

 

Miranda Suarez, 

Ron Corning

, KERA News; The Dallas Public Library is getting rid of English classes. A volunteer calls the cuts 'baffling'

"The Dallas Public Library is cutting its adult education programs, including classes for English language learners, as the city tries to deal with a $51 million budget shortfall. Similar resources will now be much harder to find, especially for undocumented students, one library volunteer told NTX Now.

The program elimination was necessary to keep all of the city's library branches open, Library Director Manya Shorr previously said. The system is also cutting more than 70 positions, about 30 of which are currently filled, according to The Dallas Morning News."

Budget cuts mean some Missouri kids won’t get free books through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library; St. Louis Public Library, May 21, 2026

Rebecca Thiele , St. Louis Public Library; Budget cuts mean some Missouri kids won’t get free books through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library

"The state will no longer be able to send all Missouri children free books through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. The program set up by the famous country artist mails age-appropriate books to children from birth to age 5.

Missouri lawmakers cut the Imagination Library’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year by more than half, from about $6 million to $2 million.

The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education said it won’t have the money to enroll new children in the program after next month. The department said kids who are enrolled now will continue to receive books as funding allows.

Education department officials said they could potentially partner with local programs or private donors to revive the Imagination Library."

Microsoft Shuts Down Library, Replaces It With AI; Futurism, January 16, 2026

 Frank Landymore, Futurism; Microsoft Shuts Down Library, Replaces It With AI

"Does Microsoft hate books more, or its own workers? It’s hard to say, because The Verge reports that the multitrillion dollar giant is gutting its employee library and cutting down on digital subscriptions in favor of pursuing what’s internally described as an “AI-powered learning experience” — whatever in Clippy’s name that’s supposed to mean."

Microsoft is closing its employee library and cutting back on subscriptions; The Verge, January 15, 2026

Tom Warren, The Verge; Microsoft is closing its employee library and cutting back on subscriptions

"Microsoft is closing its physical library of books and cutting employee subscriptions. It's part of cost cutting and a move to AI."

NASA’s Rocky History Of Library Closures; NASA Watch, January 3, 2026

Keith Cowing, NASA Watch; NASA’s Rocky History Of Library Closures

"Keith’s note: NASA has been closing its libraries for a long time. Budgetary and building issues are usually the prime reason. Usually, stuff gets moved around and put in storage for years until the storage costs mount and then a portion ends up in someone’s library – somewhere – and the rest gets shipped to some generic GSA warehouse – or thrown away. Now it is GSFC’s turn to go through this painful process – not only with their collection but also the NASA HQ library that was moved there when the HQ library was converted to a visitor center. They have assured NASA HQ that nothing valuable will be lost. NASA’s record in this regard is somewhat rocky. More below.

To be certain, a lot of the material is already online at places like The  NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) or the Internet Archive or university libraries. But a lot of the material is NASA-generated and niche-oriented such that only a few copies – sometimes one copy – exists. A lot of it goes back to NACA days.

I took this picture (above) at NASA Ames while their library was being removed. I am told that NASA HQ has been assured that nothing of value will be thrown out and that important things that have not been electronically stored will be. But the budget pressures are strong.

Some of you may recall the time when Dennis Wingo and I did a diving catch of all the 1960s Lunar Orbiter program image tapes that were in a remote warehouse and JPL wanted to get rid of them. We started the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP). We drove the tapes up to NASA Ames in two large rental trucks and assembled a team of retirees and college kids to bring the data back (link to New York Times) from the past at resolutions simply impossible to achieve back in the day. And of course you recall the whole ‘lost Apollo 11 landing tapes’ thing.

So, as these libraries close, I hope everyone at GSFC please keeps their eyes open to assure that NASA is preserving this history and not throwing it out. And if they are not then let me know. Below are some earlier examples of controversial NASA library closures.

• Memo: The Army Is Closing A Library That NASA MSFC Paid For, (2019)
• GSFC Memo: NASA’s New Strategy: Close Its Reference Libraries (2011) related post
• NASA ARC Solicitation: Packing Dismantling, and Reconstruction of Main Technical Library, (2005) related post
• NASA ARC Internal Memo: Library Reshaping, (2005) related post
• NASA Ames Library “Downsizing” (2005) related post"

The Revolution Will Be Card Cataloged: Dispatches From The Law Librarian Frontlines; Above The Law, July 25, 2025

 Joe Patrice , Above The Law; The Revolution Will Be Card Cataloged: Dispatches From The Law Librarian Frontlines

"In his keynote address, Roosevelt Weeks, the Fort Bend County library director, reaffirmed the core values of the profession to serve the public and preserve knowledge. And that calling requires librarians to be both “strategic and subversive,” prompting a cathartic release from an assembled body battered by an assault of budget cuts and book bans. Step outside the comfort zone to make sure the money people understand the library’s importance and make sure the customer gets the knowledge they seek at a time where powerful interests keep throwing up roadblocks. It sparked the librarian equivalent of running through a wall after a locker room speech: filing out of the room in an orderly fashion."

The hidden ways Trump, DOGE are shutting down parts of the U.S. government; The Washington Post, May 11, 2025

Hannah Natanson

 and 

Maxine Joselow

, The Washington Post ; The hidden ways Trump, DOGE are shutting down parts of the U.S. government

[Kip Currier: Billionaires and millionaires doing everything they can to intentionally break our federal government is unconscionably amoral and appalling.

Think about all of the people being hurt by these actions, as highlighted in this Washington Post article. While the richest man in the world gaslights people that this will benefit them.

Now imagine all of the millions and millions of people being hurt by Trump 2.0 whose stories we don't know.]

[Excerpt]

"Across the federal government, Trump officials are halting a wide range of operations by declining to approve key funds. This unofficial hold on many activities has incapacitated many agencies’ divisions, even though they remain technically intact...

Elon Musk, who is preparing to step back from his work leading DOGE, recently told reporters at the White House that his team had remade the government in a way that would benefit Americans.

“In the grand scheme of things, I think we’ve been effective,” he said. “Not as effective as I’d like. I think we could be more effective. But we’ve made progress.”

However, Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said the Trump administration and DOGE appear to be “deliberately embedding red tape into government” by instituting “needless additional reviews of already-approved grants.”

“This makes sense if you assume that the purpose of DOGE is not to make government work better,” Moynihan said in an email, “but to stop government from working at all.”"

Facing Cuts Likely to Worsen Under Trump, Academic Librarians Urgently Organize; Truthout, November 17, 2024

 Emily Drabinski, Truthout; Facing Cuts Likely to Worsen Under Trump, Academic Librarians Urgently Organize

"The Project 2025 blueprint for the next Trump administration sets its sights on two crucial public institutions: libraries and higher education. Librarians show up on page 5 — targeted for their support for LGBTQIA+ reading — while dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating student loan programs, and restricting what can be taught about gender, race and class feature throughout the document. But even as academic librarians live in dread of what will happen to their libraries after January 20, many of them are also already facing termination now...

In March, the Department of Education (DOE) announced plans to eliminate data collection about academic libraries from its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. In contemporary higher education, resources are allocated to those who can make a data-driven case for them — that’s part of what it means to run a school like a business. Removing libraries from the survey means that they can’t be counted at all. In a joint comment, several major library associations argued that such a decision would make it impossible to benchmark resources and services at the 3,700 academic libraries in the U.S. that data librarians use to argue for increased staffing and materials budgets. Such erasure will also make it impossible “to understand the cost of information over time, as well as the correlation between research expenditures and the cost of information.” The DOE still plans to eliminate academic library data beginning in 2025-26, undercutting the capacity of librarians to articulate their value in the data-driven language required by the contemporary university."

The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts; The Guardian, October 9, 2023

Brewster Kahle, The Guardian; The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts

"he US library system, once the model for the world, is under assault from politicians, rightwing activists and corporate publishers. Book bans are at record levels, and libraries across the country are facing catastrophic budget cuts, a fate only narrowly avoided by New York City’s public libraries this summer. In a separate line of attack, library collections are being squeezed by draconian licensing deals, and even sued to stop lending digitized books.

This war on libraries – and on the traditional values of equal opportunity, universal education and cultural preservation they represent – directly contravenes the will of the majority in the United States. Polls reveal that public support for libraries is as strong as ever. But the profession of librarianship has become a hazardous one, because of the actions of a hostile minority. It’s time to reverse course."

Communities suffer when library budgets are cut​​​​​​​ - Sean McNamara; The Scotsman, May 22, 2022

Sean McNamara, The Scotsman; Communities suffer when library budgets are cut​​​​​​​ - Sean McNamara

How much value a nation or local authority attaches to its libraries can often be a good indication over how much it values its people.

[Kip Currier: Interesting 5/22/22 perspective on the vital role libraries/librarians fill for communities in Scotland, mirroring many of the challenges libraries/librarians are facing in the U.S. now too. The "culture of firefighting" metaphor (see excerpt below) perfectly captures the need for us to be proactive, rather than reactive.]

"In Scotland we have supportive politicians at all levels, a public that defends their libraries, a national strategy and strong collaboration between national bodies. And yet, the monetary support for libraries continues to fall often creating a culture of firefighting rather than the robust service building and forward planning we need in 2022.

Libraries in Scotland help meet some of our biggest financial and societal challenges. They do this by providing life changing and equitable access to books and computers, by improving health and wellbeing, by reducing social isolation and by being free at point of use, often one of the only places that is in many communities...

Libraries are backed by an excellent national plan and are hugely popular, recently gaining 45 million annual visits, up 40 per cent from 2010, yet spending has fallen by around 30 per cent in the same period. We have incredible libraries and skilled librarians, but they are dealing with year-on-year budget cuts and staff too often on low pay or insecure contracts. This cannot continue, Scotland’s communities and their librarians deserve better."