National Library Week 2025 lands amid book bans, budget cuts, job losses ...Middle East

Library staff laid off, let go or placed on leave. Books banned, challenged and purged. Funding cut, slashed or outright ended.

Believe it or not, it’s National Library Week.

During the seven days from April 6-12, Americans honor the work of our libraries, librarians and staff and all they do for our communities. For this year’s theme of “Drawn to the Library,” the honorary chairs are best-selling authors and illustrators Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud, who teamed up on the just-published middle-grade graphic novel, “The Cartoonists Club.”

I spoke to Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association, about the 67th edition of the event, which comes amid unprecedented attacks on this most American of institutions and the public servants who staff them.

“We’re celebrating National Library Week – and it’s a crazy time to be celebrating anything,” says Hohl. “But I want to make sure that everyone understands that the role of the library is that we’re here for everyone. We’re free for everyone. It’s a safe space, it’s a healthy environment.”

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Polling cited by the ALA shows a majority of people across the political spectrum have high regard for librarians and are against book removals. Despite that, the ALA’s newly released The State of America’s Libraries report says 2024 was “the third-highest number of book challenges” since they began keeping track in 1990.

The vast majority of book censoring attempts – 72 percent – come from “well-funded, organized groups and movements long dedicated to curbing access to information and ideas,” according to the report; less than 5 percent come from individual library users.

“You have this small group of people saying, I don’t like those stories, I don’t like those characters, I don’t like any of that storyline. I don’t want my family to read it and I don’t want your family to read it either. Let’s get some authors banned. Let’s get publishers to stop publishing these works. Let’s get libraries to not have funding, because it’s my way or no way, my tax dollars are more important than my neighbors’. I have the right to say what my neighbor should have access to,” says Hohl. “It’s like, really – is that your argument?”

Hohl says that not every book is for everyone, and that’s all right.

“We absolutely want and expect caregivers to bring children to the library, to select books together, to bring those books home, to read them together – storytime with your child is so important, and it’s a great indicator of future success as a reader,” she says.

“But you know what families should not do? They should not tell their neighbor what to read, watch or listen to, because as Americans, we have our freedoms and we have a right to choose the information that we want to read.

“If we decide we don’t want to read a book, we can put that book down and pick up another one.”

A member of the Santee Sioux Nation of Nebraska, Hohl told me last year that she recalls how her mother took the family to the library soon after the family left the reservation.

“When we moved to the city, it was a very different experience because I was no longer surrounded by everyone I was related to, and one of the first things we did was our mom walked us over to the public library,” she said in 2024.

“Back home, our stories lived in our hearts; and in the city, they became alive in our hands as we held the book. And so that’s really the love of storytelling that I’ve held throughout my entire life.”

Hohl says that not only are books being targeted, but library staff is as well.

“Librarians are also parents, taxpayers, constituents and voters. We are your neighbors, we are your relatives, we are your family members,” she says. “It doesn’t make sense to me, because the data shows that the majority of Americans love their local library.”

When asked if she thinks there’s a connection between book bans and defunding efforts, she doesn’t hesitate.

“You can see the correlation here,” says Hohl. “When you look at the titles in question here, it was very obvious that the characters in the books, or even the authors themselves, were Black, Indigenous, People of Color or the storylines were about those who are of the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Hohl addressed the recent cuts at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) as well.

“The IMLS is a federal agency authorized by Congress, and it equals .003 percent of the federal budget. This very small amount goes to grants, policy making and research … to make resources available to improve and support the nation’s public libraries,” she says.

Libraries will have to pivot quickly to make up the loss of IMLS funds, Hohl says. Despite that, she says that the libraries will keep doing what they do best.

“Libraries don’t have adequate funding,” she says. “Libraries continue to do the very best they can to provide everyone with equal access to accurate information from credible sources. We open our doors every day to welcome Americans in, to welcome everyone in, to engage with the collection, the programs, services and materials, we do so in the best way possible.

“Library lovers support their library, and library lovers expect to be able to access the library services that are available in their community.”

City Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library John Szabo sees attempts to ban books as the most troubling challenge facing libraries.

“The threat that I think is the most serious is the growing trend nationally to ban library content – book bans and book challenges,” says Szabo. “It really represents a fundamental threat to the institution of public libraries in the United States.”

“This trend of book banning and book challenges across the country has resulted in decreased funding for libraries, defunding for libraries, removal of state funding for libraries, librarians losing their jobs, librarians being vilified,” he says. “It’s disgusting, it’s horrible, and it’s a fundamental attack on an institution that is really, really important and, I think, essential to our democracy.”

Public libraries, says Szabo, “are not icing on the cake or the cherry on top: They’re core, they’re essential, they’re important.”

“I worry,” he says, “that the trusted relationship we have with Americans in all parts of the country is being scratched at and is being tarnished for not good reasons and that deeply concerns me.”

As for what the public can do right now to help, Szabo has suggestions at the ready: Speak up in the community about why libraries are important. Write a letter to an elected official to let them know you support libraries and their funding.

“Public libraries are serving communities in more interesting, diverse, dynamic ways than ever,” he says citing the array of maker spaces, financial literacy classes, language courses, immigration and health services and childhood literacy activities and creative programming as well as science, technology, engineering, arts and math, or STEAM, offerings.

And people want what the library offers. “No public library in North America circulates more ebooks and e-audio books than the L.A. Public Library. So, you know, Los Angeles is a city of readers,” says Szabo. “We prove that.”

Szabo adds that on Saturday, April 12, the library is offering a Maker Faire with more than 100 exhibitors from JPL, USC, UCLA and many science oganizations.

“It’ll be a great family day there and thousands of people attend every year,” he says. “The library is doing a lot of really creative, innovative work … and National Library Week is an opportunity to lift libraries up.

“I think it’s more important now than ever to do that,” he says.

If you’re looking for a rich, thoughtful and upbeat celebration of all that libraries do, keep an eye out for the PBS Independent Lens documentary, “Free for All: The Public Library,”  which premieres April 29.

“When you’re in the library, everyone’s equal,” says Crosby Kemper, former IMLS director, in the documentary. “And you have equal access to this huge inheritance – you’re an equal owner of that inheritance with everybody else who comes to the library.”

I got an early look at the documentary by filmmakers Dawn Logsdon and Lucie Faulknor this week and it’s terrific, honoring the great good our libraries do while also not ignoring how these “free for all” institutions weren’t always open to those who weren’t White males.

The stories are compelling. There’s Annie Lou McPheeters, one of the first African American librarians in Atlanta, who recalled quoting lines of poetry back and forth with a young Martin Luther King Jr. Or the traveling library services of Lutie Sterns, which reminded me of Southern California’s own Dorothy Traver, a librarian who would travel all over San Bernardino delivering books to remote readers – and later on become the namesake of Dorothy, a Publishing Project.

It’s possible you may find yourself getting choked up seeing all these public servants not only doing their jobs, but going beyond their responsibilities to provide everything from healthcare to basic human kindness to people who might have no other opportunity to get it.

It’s a wonderful documentary, giving voice to everyone from historians, scholars and librarians as well as regular users, such as a religious homeschooling mother of 15 children and a 9-year-old named Angel, who says, “I’m just an ordinary, typical kid who just comes to the library everyday.”

If all of these folks can agree on the need to support local libraries, it’s unclear why anyone could find a reason to oppose them.

Or as the ALA’s Hohl put it, we need our libraries.

“The day that libraries close in this country is the day that democracy dies. It’s plain and simple,” she says.

So many books!

Check out 34 new releases coming in our spring 2025 preview you’ll add to your TBR pile. READ MORE

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