April Witteveen

Funding trends in 2025 reflected an unsettled landscape, with few identifiable trends and many questions about what the future may hold.

Since the release of the March 14 executive order calling for the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), libraries across the country have been managing the immediate fallout while also considering the long-term effects of losing federal funding. For small and rural libraries without multiple revenue streams, a future without IMLS is particularly uncertain.

This year's Budgets and Funding Survey showed mixed results for fiscal trends in 2024, from robust forward motion to defunding—with more uncertainty ahead.

While Texas continues to be a leading state in the number of book bans reported each year, a recent challenge at the Montgomery County Memorial Library has been reversed. The Texas Freedom to Read Project reported that a children’s book, Colonization and the Wampanoag Story by Linda Coombs (Aquinnah Wampanoag)—an account of American colonization and Native traditions described from an Indigenous perspective—was challenged in September and subsequently moved out of the juvenile nonfiction area to the fiction collection.

LJ’s 2024 Placements & Salaries Survey sees new grads grapple with questions of relocation, living wages, and job drift, but eager to begin careers in the field.

On August 13, a New College of Florida student posted images to social media showing a dumpster full of books situated outside the campus library. As the story and images went viral, New College issued a statement that the library’s weeding project was separate from the removal of items from the GDC, and that the center was being “repurposed.”

It has been a busy legislative session in the Louisiana House, with several bills poised to impact libraries and library workers halted at various points, while others have been approved and moved on to the Senate. As they proliferate, grassroots library advocacy organizations are stepping up to combat them.

From the first known caricature of Abraham Lincoln to a Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoon satirizing the Tammany Hall political machine, the Michael and Susan Kahn Political Cartoon Collection, now at UCLA, contains thousands of individual images, periodicals, books, and ephemera dating back to the late 17th century.

All eyes are on Texas as HB 900, the state’s controversial new book rating law, is slated to take effect September 1, 2023. Signed by Governor Greg Abbott on June 12, the legislation aims to prevent the sale of books deemed “sexually explicit” or “sexually relevant” to school districts by requiring book publishers and vendors to rate individual titles based on content.