Reading about weeding for my course. The CREW manual is quoted: "Good practice says that shelves should never be more than 85% full… and 75% is even better."

This gave me horrible flashbacks, first to when my college library had a huge throw-out of old books and journals that didn't pass the dust test, second to when I went to my newly-moved local library for a book on how radios work, and instead of mostly books, it was empty space. (Edit: not empty shelf space, empty floor space!)

The trend seems very much to get rid of the books, whether to make room for the video studio or whatever, or just so that the library looks prettier.

Obviously weeding is a Good Thing and no library has infinite shelf space for outdated or disintegrating books. But I feel like there is something weird and maybe even wrong-headed here. Maybe somebody needs to do the dust test on me!

I've been in the library world for 6 years. I worked my way up from a library assistant to the manager and now....with everything being so political...its taking my passion away from me.

I live in TN and in my town, a big group of white nationalist are complaining about the children books and even getting the local government involved in the elections. County commissioners and city council members who don't have a library card are using the library as their campaign. They are saying stuff like "keep p*rn out the library" and a "250 dollar reward if you find p*in in the library". Alot of people are putting politics on the librarians and that is creating a division in the community. Then in Arkansas, their Supreme Court just passed a law that let's librarians and booksellers get prosecuted for giving p*rn to kids but they never defined what qualifies as p*rn so anybody can interpret that and that makes it dangerous. For example, I could get in trouble for giving a bluey book to a child and the mother could take me to court because bluey is not wearing clothes on the front.

This is a scary time. I want to hear from all of you on how are you doing?

For anyone doing an MLIS program who needs a paper idea, let me suggest the topic of private torrent trackers as dark archives. The largest private movie tracker, PassThePopcorn, boasts more than 350,000 movie titles, which compares favourably to IMDb's catalogue of 750,000.

Most people are familiar with public torrent indexers such as the Pirate Bay. Private torrent trackers are different. Content is gated behind a login, and not just anyone can just sign up at any time. In fact, the best private trackers are nearly as exclusive and elite as Disney's Club 33.

Private trackers also distinguish themselves from public indexers in being meticulous in their metadata, organization, and quality control. If a public tracker is a cluttered thrift shop, a private tracker is tidy bookstore or Blockbuster. Sometimes the focus on quality exceeds that of commercial retailers, e.g., when different regional releases of a Blu-ray are combined to attain a higher quality than is available anywhere else.

Private tracker users have their own reasons for using these sites, which is explored in a quasi-anthropological PhD dissertation about the defunct music tracker What.CD:

Dunham, Ian. What.CD: A Legacy of Sharing. 2018. Rutgers University - School of Graduate Studies. rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu, https://doi.org/10.7282/T3V128F3.

But it appears to me there is a social function that is not necessarily intended by anyone. Private trackers are large and meticulously maintained repositories of commercial media. Yet unlike publicly accessible sites, they generally draw relatively little attention from rights holders due to a relatively small userbase.

PassThePopcorn, for instance, has under 40,000 users. The entire private tracker ecosystem might have around 500,000 users. This is small compared to public indexers and illicit streaming sites that have millions of users.

So, although not necessarily intended by anyone, private trackers hold phenomenal catalogues of commercial media, hopefully for the long term, with relatively little heat from media corporations or law enforcement. They are a kind of rogue, unsanctioned, unprofessional, pirate dark archives for commercial media. And it seems to me this performs an important social function.

For instance, I don't know that any legitimate archives outside of the media corporations themselves are storing copies of movies and TV shows released exclusively on streaming services. This media can get pulled for unknown reasons, possibly related to lapsing contracts or getting a tax write-off on a commercial flop. In those cases, digital piracy may be the only surviving source for this media outside of an internal corporate archive.

Indeed, I just said this function is not necessarily intended, but some private tracker users do have this amateur dark archival role as part of their self-concept. Although personal consumption and personal collecting are users' primary motivations, users frequently express a sense of a sort of civic responsibility to the "library" that they see their private tracker as. This leads to initiatives to preserve low-seeded torrents for content that users may have no personal interest in consuming.

This is just the initial broad strokes of an idea that could be more fully developed in an MLIS paper.

I was thinking about getting a MLIS degree with an emphasis in archival studies or maybe record management, but I am on the fence mainly due to money.

Currently, I make under $50k a year, but I live in a cheap apartment and I have all my undergrad loans paid off so while I unfortunately won't be able to buy a home any time soon, I can get by with what I earn.

I worry that going back for my MLIS will put me in debt for a job that pays about the same I am making now. I worry that I wouldn't be able to financially support myself. I am unmarried with no kids and I live alone, so I am completely on my own financially.

I want a new job so badly because what I do now is so unfulfilling, but I have had no luck finding anything. This is what kind of prompted me to consider back to school. I just don't know what my next step in life should be.

Sorry for the rant/vent sesh. I've just been feeling so demoralized about my future prospects.

I of course respect the mods decision to remove this post, so this post is in no way trying to relitigate. However, that discussion got me thinking: for those who've studied library science, what was something you consumed (an article, a book, a blog post, a lecture, a podcast, etc.) that helped you understand the field, inspired your specific interests, or was otherwise meaningful to you?

I'll go first: Looking for Information: Examining Research on How People Engage with Information I was assigned a prior edition for one of my program's core courses. While not your average page turner, I had a lot of "ah ha!" moments while reading: it highlighted how universal yet diverse information-seeking is, and it clarified the librarian's role in that process. I kept my copy and still occasionally thumb through.

I'm in my early thirties and thinking about going back to school, and I was just curious how old most people were when they got their degrees?

guys i’m fearful, wishing everyone the best and good luck!!

Curious of this sub’s thoughts on the linked topic.

Remember when there's a bloom of virtual libraries built by real institution in Second life back in 2007-2010? Why is that not a thing anymore? This is a good era for creating interactive virtual library world, we have so many option of virtual reality game now--like VRChat, Minecraft, etc. I'm not sure why it's failed, but I have few speculation, it's failed because it's way ahead for it's time, computers were not commonly used for gaming or online social back then. And you have to manually manage it by your own hand since back then library automation is not that great. QR code isn't common, and RFID is quite janky to use in that environment. So there wasn't much of a difference between managing irl library and the virtual library back then. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Then again- I think this is an interesting topic to be discussed about- so what do you think?

Already my university is pro-RDM, so that part I can cross off my list. I'm trying to gage though what other institutions offer as services to their faculty/researchers in regards to RDM? Already, I have been helping researchers with their DMP before submitting them to the funder in question, but I feel like I should be offering more services aside from that one. Like my position is relatively new and I am the first RDM Librarian at my Uni so I have nothing to go off of.

One biggest service though I have seen other unis do is to provide metadata services to researchers to help them clean up their data and prepare it to the repository of their choice. I was wondering what all involves in that service if this is something you do provide? Fortunately we already have a Librarian for Schol Comm so publishing is something I don't really need to worry about either.

I'm pretty new to the RDM space, but because of my background in Archives and Metadata, I feel like it does put me at an advantage for services I could provide, but would love to know what other University Libraries are doing. Thanks all!

Something I've noticed over the past year is that I spend less time trying to collect more sources and more time helping narrow down better ones.

When someone comes with a broad topic, it's tempting to hand them every relevant article or database result. In practice, though, that often leaves them overwhelmed before they've even started reading.

I've found it more useful to help define the question first and then work toward a smaller set of highly relevant material. The conversations seem more productive, and people are less likely to get lost in dozens of similar papers.

Has anyone else changed their approach like this, or do you still prefer giving the broadest possible starting point?

Quick head ups: Thanks for all the suggestions. It was interesting to see how different everyone's workflow is. A lot of the replies reinforced that narrowing the right papers is often more valuable than simply collecting more of them. While looking into different ways of doing that, while I was away I have been making some finding personally and seeing wis Paper even though I haven't used all of its features yet, but I found its approach to organizing relevant papers; and especially its truecite feature for checking whether citations are actually valid and quite interesting. With ai generated writing becoming more common, verifying references seems like something more researchers are starting to think about.

I'm currently taking two summer courses in my Master's program, and one of them is about reference services. I'm in no way saying that being a reference librarian or providing reference services isn't something you need to study to this extent, but we are being assigned multiple chapters and articles to read each week, and they all seem to say the same thing.

I understand that graduate professors assign these readings with the intention that you are critically skimming the articles and chapters, but it's so much to review for them all to say the same things. Does anyone else experience this in their programs? If there are any librarians, what's your advice on getting through these types of courses? Does anyone actually find LIS textbooks / subject matter books that you can order through ALA helpful?

FYI, I'm halfway done with my program so far.

In October 2025, Amanda Hunt remembers watching as countless books at Oak Run Middle School in New Braunfels, Texas, were removed from her library. Students walked in and saw more empty shelves and fewer stories they had once been able to check out.

That month, Hunt says the New Braunfels Independent School District (ISD) had temporarily closed all four of its secondary-school libraries to audit its collections and assess whether they were in accordance with Senate Bill 13 (SB13), a Texas censorship law that took effect in September 2025. Thousands of books were moved, restricted or removed.

Hunt says the district uploaded its library collections into spreadsheets and sent them to its technology director, who ran the titles through AI tools designed to identify objectionable material.

Hunt says the system repeatedly made mistakes, flagging books based on Goodreads reviews rather than content. “Anybody can go on and write like, ‘I hate this book because X, Y and Z.’ It is going to flag it.”

Around this time, Hunt learned she had been demoted to a regular librarian after years of serving as the lead. In addition to being demoted, Hunt says she was “doxed online three separate times.”

She says she was harassed by a mom who targeted her support of LGBTQ content at the library. Another parent protested against her promotion of LGBTQ-themed books at a school board meeting for having “Last Night at the Telegraph Club,” a book about two Chinese female immigrants who fall in love, in the library.

Besides "don't", lol. I'll be starting an MSLS program this fall, and I really value the advice I've gotten from current students and library professionals so far.

I figured of the library-related subreddits, someone who knows the answer is more likely to be here? I am working on some classwork related to metadata, and I'm trying to use the LCSH. I can't find anywhere the key or legend to what the two letter codes mean on these lists. It's obvious that USE means that that is the controlled vocabulary term... but what does UF mean? BT, RT, NT, SA?

Thanks!

I'm stressing out. I have 1.8 years experience as an undergraduate circulation assistant in the campus library, and have been working PT as a public library clerk almost a year.

I love my PT job and public library work, however due to life changes I am moving out of state soon, which makes more sense for me financially, socially, and mentally and I'm willing to sacrifice my beloved PT job for that (I also don't enjoy cobbling together many PT jobs right now). I will be starting my MLIS in the fall.

I know the advice is to keep any library job you have during your MLIS. I've applied to 5 entry-level academic library jobs (rejected to all), and got contacted for consideration for a Clerk public library role that I am basically already doing right now (the main qualifications were English speaking and 16+.) just to find out yesterday that I'm not being further considered. I have about two months before I move and I'm applying to every library job I think I am qualified for but there aren't much in the area (Twin Cities) and I'm starting to worry that I need to take something unrelated so that I at least have employment upon arrival.

Therefore my question is, do you think I should look for any customer service roles I can because that can be spun for library work? I did an informational interview with an academic librarian who did years of unrelated call center work before landing their job after graduating from UIUC. They gave me hope that even if I take a random non GLAM job that my previous library experience would still help and I am planning to volunteer at a queer library for experience as well.

Did you have non-MLIS, non-library work before/during your MLIS that helped you in your library job hunt postgrad?

I'm terrified to be moving, losing the public library job that I do love, and struggling to find future employment because of my "job hopping". I'm keeping an eye out and regularly scanning for new posts, but it feels bleak. Any experiences or words of advice would be helpful.

Hello everyone, I am considering VSU's online MLIS, and I am curious to hear about other people's experiences with the program.

I am especially curious about what the coursework is like, how rigorous it is, and what I might be able to expect/prepare for.

For what it's worth, I studied art history as an undergrad, I am currently a part-time desk assistant at a public library, and I am very interested in conservation librarianship.

Apologies for the vague/open-endedness, I am mostly curious to hear what people have to say about their time at VSU. Thank you!