Catalog

Jessica Farrell’s guide, How to Publish Your Academic Paper without Publishers, Bosses, Gods, or Masters, details every step of the process of getting your work from idea to publication without depending on traditional publishing structures. From gathering and working with co-authors to designing your publication, Farrell provides instructions and examples that will help get your work written, published, and discovered on your own terms.

Thomas Gagnon-van Leeuwen produced “TRACK 10: a librarian’s journey beyond the algorithm” as part of the Library Futures internship program. Interweaving his research and reading on music algorithms, streaming services, and libraries with his personal musical journey, Gagnon-van Leeuwen offers new ways for listeners to experience music and examples of how libraries can offer an alternative to an increasingly corporatized and homogenized musical landscape.

Note: “TRACK 10” is a zine and is best experienced printed, folded, and stapled together. This e-book version is intended for those with visual impairments. Find the TRACK 10 playlist, resources, and more on the zine’s webpage.

Understanding Confidentiality and Risk Assessment: A Reference Guide for Everyone, Everywhere was developed by Library Futures Staff Attorney Layla Maurer as part of Library Futures’s work supporting libraries in contract negotiations. The guide gives librarians an understanding confidentiality in contracts, including an explanation of obligations and examples of language to look for in contract. The Risk Assessment guide provides a framework for understanding and evaluating risks in discussing contracts. Finally, a Sample Services Agreement provides readers with practice using their new skills when analyzing an actual contract.

The resources herein are meant to help librarians understand confidentiality and risk in order to empower them to read, understand, and negotiate library-vendor contracts. Nothing within this guide constitutes legal advice. Specific questions should always be addressed to qualified counsel.

A zine that highlights the lives of incarcerated library workers through their own writing and illustrations. Jarrod “Deuce” Williams, Knight, and George Coles-El, Mesro the Human Sun tell stories about their work that illuminate the similarities–and the differences–between information access inside and outside the walls. Visit the Library Futures website to download a PDF of this publication formatted as a zine.

Controlled Chaos is part of the work of the Library Futures Research Network and was made possible by a generous grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

As local news sources collapse due to corporate consolidation and the ever-changing nature of the media environment, how can access to vital local information survive? Library Futures and News Futures, two organizations dedicated to serving their communities with library and news resources in our increasingly digital future, wanted to figure out how librarians and journalists could work together to ensure the future of digital local news and to make it equitably available to the community it serves.

Library Futures intern Thomas Alexander interviewed eleven librarians and journalists over three months in the spring of 2025 to learn both what they saw as the obstacles to the future of local news and what opportunities partnerships between librarians and journalists could create to preserve and expand the availability of local news in the digital age.

Alexander presents key takeaways and themes that emerged from these interviews, discusses projects that could serve as models for library/newsroom collaboration, and outlines next steps for libraries and journalists interested in working together to serve their communities with local news production, access, and preservation.

Library Futures is the vanguard nonprofit organization uncovering and confronting the fundamental policy issues that threaten libraries in the digital age.

News Futures is a community of journalists, organizers, and civic allies working together in a “do-ocracy” to build a future for news that is service-oriented, participatory, and reparative.

What do our reading choices say about us–not just what we read, but how we do it? In My Consumer Autobiography, A.J. Boston examines that question by interweaving a log of the books he reads over the course of a year with observations about how he reads them–in print or in ebook form, and whether those titles are purchased, borrowed, or licensed.

My Consumer Autobiography is part of the work of the Library Futures Research Network and was made possible by a generous grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

Amanda Levendowski and Intellectual Property and Information Policy (iPIP) Clinic produced “Know Your Rights: Radical Digital Lending for Libraries.” In an increasingly digital environment that grows increasingly confusing, this zine helps librarians understand the ins and outs and the promises and potential perils of digital collecting and lending in libraries from a legalistic framework. To download the print format of this zine, visit Library Futures website.

Know Your Rights is part of the work of the Library Futures Research Network and was made possible by a generous grant from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.