The Cleveland Public Library is ending fines for overdue materials. That announcement was made during a "State of the Library" address by executive director Felton Thomas Jr. at the City Club of Cleveland on Wednesday, Feb. 27. Thomas also laid out plans for a year-long sesquicentennial celebration that, he said, "focuses on places, programs and people."

As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier.

On Tuesday, the City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee heard testimony on Councilmember Daniel Dromm’s bill, Int. 1184, that requires the Department of Correction to provide access to the library for all incarcerated people within 48 hours of entering the jail system. The Department would be required to report on the number of books they receive, the source of those books and, if books are censored, the reason for the censorship.

School districts would no longer be required to have a school nurse and a teacher librarian under a proposal advanced in the Iowa Senate Tuesday. Sen. Amy Sinclair, R-Allerton, chair of the Education Committee, said the bill would give school boards and communities more power to make decisions that are best for local students. “Do we trust those people and their teachers to make the decisions that are appropriate to their students, or not?

Highly selective journals, in particular, argued that they have high internal costs that couldn’t reasonably be recouped in a fully open-access model, and that cutting costs would risk reducing journals’ quality.

Many of these institutions have begun to embrace this marriage of ideas. Hip-hop curricula, archives, conferences, and fellowships now have homes in even the nation’s most venerable academic institutions, including Cornell University, Harvard University, Duke University, and many more.

That tension between Seuss and Seuss-free classrooms is emblematic of a bigger debate playing out across the country — should we continue to teach classic books that may be problematic, or eschew them in favor of works that more positively represent of people of color?

School librarians, who are required to teach in a classroom for two years and in many cases receive a master’s degree to qualify for the position, would be excluded from legislation offering a $5,000 pay raise to all Texas teachers. Senate Bill 3 would allocate $3.7 billion over two years to boost pay for classroom teachers but not other education employees such as bus drivers, counselors or librarians.

Lincoln library officials say librarians have been inspecting each item checked back into the eight branches, committed to keeping out any bedbugs. The library system discovered bedbugs in some books in 2014, amid a national rash of bedbug reports from a variety of places, including theaters and thrift stores, college dorms and apartment buildings, hotel rooms and surgical centers.

Smreker is a French teacher at Harding Charter Prep and in her free time she loves to collect used books. But, she says sometimes it's not just the tale they are intended to tell that make them interesting.