US Libraries: Constrained, Vilified, Holding On.

Much of my work depends on the library community to value and subscribe to my company’s products. I’ve not seen as much anxiety and stress over the current environment libraries - both public and academic - are working in and the future for libraries looks very uncertain. This series evolved out of some research I conducted recently looking at the performance of key statistics in library land. In addition to a presentation deck with all the statistics, I’ve written a series of blog posts to expand on certain topic areas.

This series draws on ten years of national data — FY2014 through FY2023 — to examine where American libraries stand structurally, financially, and operationally heading into the second half of the 2020s. The primary data sources are the IMLS Public Libraries Survey, NCES Academic Libraries Survey, ARL Statistics, ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, OCLC, the Pew Research Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Both public and academic library sectors are covered, with particular attention to the dynamics that aggregate annual reporting tends to obscure.

The seven posts follow the same content structure as the deck and cover: library finances and fiscal structure; community usage and digital access; services and physical spaces; academic library transformation; workforce, technology, and intellectual freedom; the economics of digital lending in public libraries and the conflict with trade publishers; and the emerging threat to COUNTER usage metrics posed by AI-driven research intermediation. Each post is written to stand alone, though read together they tell a coherent story about a sector that is simultaneously more valued, more pressured, and more structurally vulnerable than at any point in recent memory.

First Blog Post: The Money is There: The Structure is the Problem