Statement From EveryLibrary: “This Election Should Not Determine the Fate of Libraries (But it Might Have)”

From an EveryLibrary Statement Released Today (about1400 words):

 The conventional wisdom is that libraries are a local matter. It was a given that library funding and policies were decided by local voters across hundreds of local zip codes and that the top of the ticket and national politics don’t matter. Last night we watched as local election results rolled in. As a country, we believed that – if given the opportunity – people would support the First Amendment and the right to access diverse collections.

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Libraries have never been immune from political and social movements, but we have behaved as if we are somehow a special place, a place apart from these fights. The last three years of censorship and discrimination fights should have been a wake-up call for our library organizations, stakeholders, advocates, and allies. Before the pandemic, we were under direct attack by anti-tax groups who questioned the legitimacy of our institutions. Now, state-by-state efforts to criminalize books and label the profession as offenders are succeeding.

This ended on Election Night, 2024. 

Last night, American voters elected politicians who proposed defunding libraries while slandering library workers. The previous Trump administration proposed gutting Federal Funding for libraries every year he was in office. Project 2025’s stated anti-library aims are clear. EveryLibrary has been shouting about the threats to public libraries, school libraries, academic libraries, and the people they serve for months. We are committed to working in coalition with local, state, and national libraries and allied organizations to oppose the framework and proposals embedded in Project 2025.

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We expect these threats to increase in depth and scope.

The library industry will need to do significant work over the next four years to mitigate potential cuts to library funding at the local, state, and federal levels. We must come together as an industry and commit to expending significant resources to alleviate pressure from these threats. This will include organizing communities, providing resources to citizens to push back locally, and raising and spending significant funding on national campaigns to combat misinformation about the role of libraries in American society.

Read the Complete Statement (about 1400 words)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Associations and Organizations, Funding, Libraries, National Libraries, News, Public Libraries, School Libraries