ALA releases 2014 State of America’s Libraries Report

Libraries continue to transform to meet society’s changing needs, and more than 90 percent of the respondents in an independent national survey said that libraries are important to the community.

But school libraries continue to feel the combined pressures of recession-driven financial tightening and federal neglect. School libraries in some districts and some states still face elimination or de-professionalization of their programs.

Libraries witnessed a number of developments in 2013 in the area of e-books and copyright issues. E-books continue to make gains among reading Americans, according to another Pew survey, but few readers have completely replaced print with digital editions -- and the advent of digital reading brings with it a continuing tangle of legal issues involving
publishers and libraries.

“Print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits,” the Pew researchers found. Most people who read e-books also read print books, they reported, and only 4 percent of readers described themselves as “e-book only.” After years of conflict between publishers and libraries, 2013 ended with all the major US publishers participating in the library e-book market, though important challenges, such as availability and prices, remain.

Other key trends detailed in the 2014 State of America’s Libraries Report:

• More and more public libraries are turning to the use of web technologies, including websites, online account access, blogs, rich site summary (RSS) feeds, catalog search boxes, sharing interfaces, Facebook and Twitter.
• The economic downturn is continuing at most institutions of higher learning, and academic librarians are working to transform programs and services by re-purposing space and redeploying staff in the digital resources environment.
• President Barack Obama signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill in January that will fund the federal government through September and partially restore funding to the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) -- the primary source of annual funding for libraries in the federal budget -- that were dramatically cut in the 2013 fiscal year under sequestration.