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Photo: Aaron Clamage First things first: Legends don’t need middle names. “It’s Smokey Bear, not Smokey the Bear,” says Sara Lee (pictured), lead librarian for special collections at the National Agricultural Library (NAL), who oversees the US Forest Service Smokey Bear Collection. That’s just one of many intriguing tidbits to be learned while visiting the […]
Sustainability is a promise we make to future generations that libraries will continue to be cornerstones of community life and prosperity. Recognized as a core value of our profession, sustainability is one of the five essential values guiding our work and decisions to balance environmental stewardship, societal well-being, and economic feasibility. Aldo Leopold, a writer […]
Today’s guest post is from Hana Beckerle and Spencer Zidarich of the Collections Digitization Division at the Library of Congress. Hana Beckerle and Spencer Zidarich of the Library’s Collections Digitization Division (CDD) have been named as the Library of Congress co-leads for the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Still Image Working Group, effective July 1, […]
Yikes! I can’t say I’m surprised, but I just received the following email from Typepad support (this blog is hosted on Typepad): We want to inform you that we have made the difficult decision to discontinue Typepad, effective September 30, 2025. What Does This Mean for You? After September 30, 2025, access to Typepad – […]
A new report shows how Ontario library professionals are using AI tools in their day-to-day work and their perspectives on these burgeoning technologies. See the press release and access the 8-page PDF at https://ocul.on.ca/ai-machine-learning-2025-survey-report Surely Ontario isn’t unique? This is one of the first reports I recall seeing that includes at least a few specifics […]
The world we dream about I’m finding it really difficult to find the right words to say goodbye to Hadestown. This show and this cast have been the very best that live theater can be; a moment, a happening, an emergent experience that was so much more than the sum of the parts. The cast, […]
This post was written by Sahar Kazmi and edited by Jaime Mears. A longer version of this post appeared in the Library of Congress staff Gazette on July 25th, 2025. The Library of Congress has embarked on a new multiyear digital initiative, LOCal, that will help expand access to the digital collections through partnerships with […]
This is a fascinating summary of a big problem with some AI-enhanced library products: The AI powered Library Search That Refused to Search (Aaron Tay). The link to the ACRLog post is also worth a read: “We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question”. In a nutshell, it appears that Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI content filter, […]
Three news releases in quick succession made my antennae stand up, though they’ve actually been trickling out over the past month. In the order I saw them: Introducing Lumo, the AI where every conversation is confidential. A new privacy-focussed LLM Chatbot from Proton. I’ve only poked at it a bit, but it seems solid, aside […]
Libraries are having a Hollywood moment, as several documentarians have recently turned their lenses towards libraries, librarians, and intellectual freedom issues. Some of these films made their mark at the recent American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia, on PBS, at the Sundance Film Festival, and even at the Oscars, where The […]
Today’s guest post is from Sabrina Templeton, a 2025 Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress. Sabrina is pursuing her MS in Information Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to starting her degree, she worked as a software engineer and she is passionate about the intersection of library and technology spaces. As this […]
Geena Davis at the American Library Association’s 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Philadelphia on June 30.Photo: EPNAC Hollywood has no shortage of polymaths, but Geena Davis might be in a category of her own. She has won Academy Awards for both acting and advocacy, founded the groundbreaking nonprofit Geena Davis Institute, written the memoir […]
Photos: EPNAC Attendees expressed their views on a range of topics—and each in their unique way—at the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2025 Annual Conference and Exhibition, held June 26–30 in Philadelphia. Clockwise from top left: Tiwanna Nevels, assistant state librarian at State Library of North Carolina in Raleigh, sits with some of her favorite challenged […]
As the United States prepares for its 250th anniversary and the American Library Association nears its 150th next year, more than 14,000 library workers, advocates, and allies gathered in Philadelphia this summer—the birthplace of the First Amendment—to affirm that our values are not negotiable. As library professionals, we often traffic in the timeless—in books, archives, […]
I just spent some time exploring the site at Systemic Misalignment: Exposing Key Failures of Surface-Level AI Alignment Methods, and it’s a thought-provoking place. In the context of AI, “alignment is the process of encoding human values and goals into large language models to make them as helpful, safe, and reliable as possible.[1]” Researchers at […]
This blog post is co-authored by Isabel Brador and Sahar Kazmi. Vivian Li, the Library’s 2025 Innovator in Residence, spent several days learning from Library staff and exploring the collections during a visit to the Library in May. Her trip followed the selection of Seattle, Southeastern Wyoming, and Chicago as the three locations for “Anywhere […]
In this interview, Tim St. Onge and Meagan Snow explain how web archiving is preserving documentation essential to understanding the evolution of modern cartography. They outline the motivations behind the Geospatial Software and File Formats Documentation Web Archive, describe their curatorial approach, and highlight the collection’s value for both current and future researchers. This is […]
Since founding the Internet Archive in 1996, Brewster Kahle has helped preserve nearly three decades of digital history—along with millions of books, audio recordings, videos, images, and software programs. But in 2023, four major publishers successfully sued the Archive, forcing it to remove their copyrighted books from its digital lending library. Now the Archive is […]
Photo: John Sterling Ruth/Visit Philadelphia The City of Brotherly Love is also a city of firsts: The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731, is considered the country’s first public library. Philadelphia was the original capital of the United States. And the American Library Association (ALA) held its inaugural Convention of Librarians […]
Steak with onions at Pat’s King of Steaks Photo: Pat’s King of Steaks No one was more surprised than Philadelphians when our restaurants and chefs started raking in James Beard Awards over the past half a dozen years. We knew we had good food, but we figured the rest of the country had long since […]
