James LaRue - myliblog

Librarians are generally a deliberate lot. We keep calm and gather information. But many of us are genuinely alarmed about recent actions by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Back on March 20, DOGE and Department of Homeland Security officials showed up unannounced at the headquarters of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). They appointed a new Acting Director in the lobby — Keith Sonderling, who is also the Secretary of the Department of Labor. By March 31 all the employees were placed on 90-day administrative leave, with no access to their government email. What is IMLS? IMLS was established in 1996 by a Republican-led Congress. Its mission is to “advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.” It was actually the merger of two previous government agencies, including the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and the Institute of Museum Service...

I know you do. Everything changed in 2010. Patrons handed library staff their shiny Christmas present: Kindles. “Make them work!” Despite the many predictions of a paperless society, eBooks really hadn’t caught on. But suddenly it was possible to carry 15 or 20 or 100 books around with you in your preferred font type and size. That same year, 2010, also marked the beginning of a big shift in the publishing landscape. At that time, there were about 300,000 new titles published a year by “the Big Five” (Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster). There were roughly 60,000 new titles per year published by small and independent publishers who just couldn’t match the distribution system of the major publishers. There were about 10,000 so-called vanity press titles a year. Today we call them “self-published,” even though the platform usually belongs to someone else — Amazon, Apple and Barnes and Noble, probably. Almost overnight regional, small and ind...