Illinois currently ranks 7th out of 48 states and Washington D.C. for the total number of full-time-equivalent school librarians, according to the academic research group SLIDE, which monitors school library employment at the national, state, and district levels. (Tennessee and South Carolina don’t share their data with Slide.)
Only SOME think that??
I think anyone who runs a website is now going through the same thing. It is exhausting.
In this post, we share key findings from our Spring 2026 survey of public library workers about their experiences with and perspectives on the need for and usefulness of AI policies in public libraries. The findings show a low rate of AI policy adoption despite high demand for one, specific areas of policy needs, and underlying tensions related to AI adoption in public libraries. The findings are based on responses from a total of 327 participants. We removed survey responses that did not meet Qualtrics quality filters (e.g., completeness, cache checks, and bot detection) for quality purposes. Although this sample cannot capture the perspectives of all public library workers, it provides a starting point to hear directly from them about their concerns, areas of need, and preferences for AI policy guidelines and resources.
“This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market,” said Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy. “It’s not clear whether a court would enforce this, but publishers should assume that it would be enforceable.”
The State Board decided to look deeper into how library materials arrive in schools after members said they felt they lacked a full understanding of the process. Board member Emily Green said at a May meeting, “So we don't have to continue to be reactive to an industry that has full access to a minority population." She hopes the review will help align library practices with Utah’s sensitive materials law, which requires a book’s removal if at least three school districts or two districts and five charter schools independently find it meets the state’s definition of sensitive material.
While the bill does not require districts to create the SLACs, over a dozen districts in North Texas voted to form these councils. They met on average four times per year, in school libraries, small conference rooms and online — often without community members or concerned parents in attendance.
“The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us,” media theorist and CNN columnist Douglas Rushkoff wrote in 2013. “They are Facebook’s paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers.” Instead of paying firms to conduct research on consumers, by constantly engaging with Meta’s products, we provide it for them, he argued. More than a decade later, this sentiment couldn’t feel more true. Ultimately, Muse isn’t really a personal assistant — it’s a digital panopticon disguised as an imp.
In this Q&A with The Buckeye Flame, BIPOC LGBTQ+ librarians Amia Brown and Lisa Sanchez of Cleveland and Lajmar Anderson of Dayton share their own perspectives on librarianship, shaped by their experiences as LGBTQ+ people of color and their relationships with libraries.
It's not news that "AI" crawlers are an ongoing plague and that broadly the plague is getting worse. There seem to be more and more crawlers, and they're getting past more precautions. One possible future for the web in the face of this is websites with less features, at least for the general public, because fewer features means less to crawl and less crawler impact. Another possible web future is one of pervasive gatekeepers that must be satisfied to allow you access to many or most websites.
Most educators agree that there should be some guardrails regarding how students use AI in their independent work. Here, I argue for this guiding principle: Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.
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