If you were asked to list dangerous jobs in America, you might think of firefighters, power line workers, or maybe people in construction. But librarians?
In a recent survey, U.S. library workers reported more than 8,200 traumatic incidents in their jobs, ranging from harassment and threats to verbal abuse and physical assault. Betsy Gomez of the American Library Association (ALA) talked about some of those incidents during a virtual Red Wine & Blue event last month.
Earn your Easy A this week by watching this one-minute video from that event. It might surprise you to hear all the ways our librarians have to worry about their personal safety and security.
Public librarians should be planning children’s story hours, adult literacy workshops, and teen book clubs, but the latest trend in book banning has them making emergency safety plans instead. So next week, to help kick off ALA’s Banned Books Week, we’ll take another easy action in support of librarians, libraries, and the right to read.
Now that you’ve made your voting plan for the midterm elections – and maybe even voted early! – it’s time to take it one step further. It’s not enough just to vote this year. That’s because we know a lot of people don’t vote in midterm elections, and as rockstar...
There are probably a lot of reasons fewer people vote in midterm elections than in presidential elections. Maybe they don’t know that they’re happening. Maybe they don’t know who is running for state and local offices, or they don’t realize how important those offices...
Midterm Election Day is just around the corner on November 3, but early voting has already started, or is starting in many states soon. In other words, the election is now! We know it’s important to vote in the midterms, but we also know that many of our friends and...
We are just 26 days away from midterm Election Day, so let’s spend the next few weeks getting ourselves and everyone we know ready to vote. Voters usually turnout more in Presidential elections than they do in midterm elections. For example, 66% of voters cast a...
Unite Against Book Bans, an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA), hosts Banned Books Week every year. This year’s Banned Books Week starts in just a few days and runs from October 4 to 10. More than 4,200 books were challenged in 2025, and we need to...
