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NEWS For Immediate Release July 25, 2003 Contact: Mark Gould, PIO Director312-280-5042 CIPA Decision/Response: A statement from ALA President Carla D. Hayden and the ALA Executive Board July 25, 2003 The American Library Association (ALA) has a long-standing commitment to ensuring access to information for all. It advocates for a free and open information society and for equitable access to knowledge and information resources in all formats for all people. In December 2000, Congress passed an appropriations bill that included a requirement that any library receiving federal E-Rate or Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) funds would be required to...

President Donald Trump fired Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, on Thursday. Hayden was informed of the president’s decision through an email from Trent Morse, the deputy director of presidential personnel. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately,” the email said. Hayden was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2016 to serve a 10-year term, which was set to expire next year.

Idaho librarian June Meissner was closing up for the day at the downtown Boise Public Library when a man approached her asking for help. As an information services librarian, answering patrons’ questions is part of Meissner’s day-to-day work, and serving the community is one of her favorite parts of the job. But when the man got close enough, “he took a swing at me and tried to punch me in the head,” said Meissner, a transgender woman. “I blocked it and he started yelling slurs and suggesting that he was going to come back and kill me.”

Police in Northern Virginia are investigating after a middle school librarian allegedly defended a pro-prostitution book by saying it belonged in the library because many of the school’s 11- to 13-year old students are sex workers, The Daily Wire has learned. A shocked Loudoun County teacher went to the police after the librarian, Stefany Guido, allegedly made the comment to her. The teacher had asked Guido about a book a parent had flagged on Twitter called “Seeing Gender,” which included a chapter titled “‘Sex Work’ Is Not a Bad Term.” The Daily Wire is withholding the name of the teacher,...

The Washington, D.C., public school librarian who made third graders reenact graphic scenes from the Holocaust is a Democrat who claims she ran for office in New Jersey, where she was convicted of defrauding the state through a tutoring scam and charged with several counts of animal abuse. Kimberlynn Jurkowski was placed on leave this week after parents complained to Watkins Elementary School that she made students role-play the Holocaust, assigning students to be Jews and pretend to die in gas chambers and dig mass graves, according to the Washington Post. One student was assigned to be Adolf Hitler, who...

ORANGE CITY, Fla. - New body camera video shows the intense moments after a Volusia County librarian was killed in an alleged road rage incident over the weekend. However, investigators have identified the victim as the aggressor.

BLACK HAWK, Colo. —A Harvard librarian attending a conference in the Denver area is facing multiple charges after sheriff's investigators say he tried to meet someone whom he believed to be an underage teen for sex. Authorities said an undercover investigator with the Gilpin County Sheriff’s Office posing as a teenager on a social networking site was contacted by Yahya Hussein Ahmad Melhem, 47. According to the arrest affidavit, Melhem said that he was a 39-year-old librarian from Massachusetts, and that he was in town for a conference. Investigators said Melhem's conversation with the investigator became sexually graphic, and he...

Gilpin County deputy posed as a girl as he corresponded with a Harvard librarian seeking sex. ... Yahya Hussein Ahmad Melhem, 47, was arrested for investigation of attempted sexual exploitation of a child, Internet sexual exploitation of a child, Internet luring of a child and attempted child sexual assault, all felony charges. ... Melhem wrote a message asking the "girl" to show him "her intimate body parts via webcam." He also displayed sexually graphic video of himself to the deputy believing he was a girl.

A high-ranking police official at a Massachusetts hospital and a former high-school librarian were charged on Monday in a plot to kidnap, torture and kill women and children, federal prosecutors said. Richard Meltz, the 65-year-old chief of police for the Bedford Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Massachusetts, and Robert Christopher Asch, a former librarian at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, were held without bail after appearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and charged with conspiracy to kidnap, torture, rape and kill women and children—including the wife and children of a cooperating witness. Peter Brill, an attorney for Mr. Meltz,...

A petition submitted to the White House demands the Librarian of Congress to rescind his recent decision which removed the unlocking of cellphones from the exceptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

This isn’t new … but it is awesome. Via Cam Edwards at NRA News, everyone’s favorite drill instructor has decided to mellow out in his golden years. R. Lee Ermey embraces the quiet life as a librarian, providing peaceful reminders on decorum and PDAs, for those of you who remember your high-school years. Gunny stays pretty calm and centered until he finds out that a gun-rights supporter hasn’t bothered to register as a voter, and then … all Kubrickian/Marine Corps hell breaks out in the library:

NEW YORK, - A 1992 survey of 5,000 U.S. librarians, long withheld by a professional journal, found one in five respondents had engaged in sexual trysts among the stacks. Will Manly, who said the New York-based Wilson Library Bulletin withheld the results of his survey in 1992, published results recently on his Web site indicating 51 percent of librarians in the early 90s were willing to pose nude for money and 61 percent of respondents admitting to renting an X-rated film, the New York Daily News reported Monday. Manly said the survey questions were printed in the now-defunct journal, but...

BEVERLY, Mass. -- The former director of the Beverly Public Library who pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography wants to keep his $31,000 annual public pension. Thomas Scully has filed a lawsuit in Salem Superior Court claiming the city Retirement Board has no right to revoke his pension on the grounds of "moral turpitude." Scully's suit filed Friday claims he would suffer "severe financial loss" if he loses his pension because he is unlikely to land another job in his field. Scully's pension was approved in May 2005, after his arrest, but his lawyer tells The Salem News the decision...

Alaska makes Craig an honorary citizen The Governor of Alaska sends Craig Ferguson a personal video offering honorary citizenship to the host.

WASILLA, Alaska- Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so. According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and...

WASILLA -- Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so. According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn’t fully support her and...

GALVESTON — A Scott Elementary School librarian has been charged with hitting a child with a stack of shelf markers. Lise Van Borssum, 64, is charged with assault by contact after she was accused of striking a child on the leg with a stack of six or seven of the markers, which are similar to bookmarks. The incident is alleged to have happened April 25. Shelf markers are thin, plastic strips that slide between shelved books to mark where material has been removed, according to a sales representative from DEMCO, a leading supplier of school library materials. The child did...

<p>The American Library Association (ALA) is under fire for inviting Cuban government librarians to its upcoming annual convention, while ignoring colleagues from independent libraries in Cuba who were recently sentenced to prison terms of up to 27 years. "After years of silence, double talk and coverups by the ALA, the current vicious attack gives the ALA no excuse for failing to take action," said Robert Kent, founder of Friends of Cuban Libraries and a librarian at the New York Public Library. Until a recent crackdown by the government of Fidel Castro, a network of independent libraries offered a variety of titles, such as George Orwell's "Animal Farm," that implicitly criticized Cuba's one-party communist government. The ALA — which represents public, college and other libraries in the United States and has 64,000 members — is run by an elected board of 175 councilors. The latest criticism of the group was triggered by a decision to invite Cuban government librarians to speak at its June 19-25 convention in Toronto. Betty Turlock, a professor at Rutgers University, a former ALA president and current international-relations chairman responsible for inviting the Cubans to speak, said the program was planned 18 months ago, before the crackdown in Cuba. "I have never known the ALA not to take the side of intellectual freedom," Miss Turlock said. In March, Cuba arrested 75 opposition journalists, librarians and dissidents. Many were sentenced to more than 25 years in jail. At least 10 were directors of independent libraries, who lent books from their homes. Among the books considered counterrevolutionary were "Animal Farm," biographies of Martin Luther King, collections of Pope John Paul II homilies, and books on entrepreneurship and free-market economics. In contrast to the ALA, most American and European journalist organizations produced resolutions and statements supporting their jailed colleagues. On Tuesday, Amnesty International condemned Cuba's crackdown on dissent and declared all 75 prisoners as "prisoners of conscience." And yesterday the European Union announced that it had decided unanimously to re-evaluate its relations with Cuba. Mr. Kent, and others, charged that the ALA has been hijacked by several of its board members, whom they say have close ties to Cuba's government. One of the board members, Mark Rosenzweig, is chief librarian of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, the archive of the Communist Party USA. He is also a leading figure in the ALA's Social Responsibility Round Table, one of the most vocal factions in the ALA supporting the Castro regime. "If justice is harsh in Cuba, it is because Cuban independence is threatened by the machinations of the hostile U.S. administration, trying to create the conditions for a puppet government to take over," Mr. Rosenzweig wrote in a recent e-mail. Mr. Rosenzweig made his comment in response to an e-mail campaign seeking support for the imprisoned Cuban librarians. He went on to call the imprisoned librarians "pawns," saying they "do not remotely qualify as librarians." Mr. Rosenzweig did not return calls seeking comment. Another ALA board member, Ann Sparanese, is a member of the Venceremos Brigade, a radical Marxist group that dates to the 1960s. "They are not librarians," she said of the imprisoned Cubans in a brief telephone interview yesterday.</p>

Librarian Ensnared in Privacy Conflict Saturday, July 1, 2006 By MERRY FIRSCHEIN STAFF WRITER Can a librarian withhold information from the police and claim the public's right to privacy trumps catching a potential criminal? That question is at the center of a debate raging in Hasbrouck Heights and is one that constitutional law and privacy experts, librarians and law enforcement authorities nationwide are struggling to answer. In May, Hasbrouck Heights library director Michele Reutty refused to turn over circulation records to local police seeking a man who had allegedly made sexually threatening comments to a 12-year-old girl outside the library....

Newton officials are calling their refusal to allow FBI agents access to library computers without a warrant during a terrorist threat last week “their finest hour.” Law enforcement officials say it’s a “nightmare.” Police rushed to the Newton Free Library after tracing a terrorist threat e-mailed to Brandeis University to a computer at the library. But requests to examine computers Jan. 18 were rebuffed by Newton library Director Kathy Glick-Weil and Mayor David Cohen on the grounds that they did not have a warrant. Cohen, defending the library’s actions, called the legal standoff one of Newton’s “finest hours.” “We showed...