Overdrive founder and CEO Steve Potash details his lifelong love and support of libraries and his role in celebrating ALA’s 150th anniversary this year, including the announcement of a $500,000 donation challenge.

Before women were allowed to vote in U.S. elections, the American Library Association (ALA) found its leadership in Theresa West Elmendorf. In 1911, more than 30 years after the founding of ALA, Elmendorf was elected the first female president of the Association.

In a special episode of ALA’s “How I Library” podcast, show host and I Love Libraries editor Phil Morehart speaks with library historian and author Wayne Wiegand about the beginnings of ALA as the Association celebrates its 150th anniversary.

On May 14, 1969, Carrie Coleman Robinson, a Black school librarian in Alabama, brought a landmark case to the US District Court. After being passed over for a promotion, Robinson sued Alabama’s Department of Education alleging that she had been denied equal protection as a department employee because of her race. Robinson’s case, and long career as a librarian, reveals much about the Jim Crow South and librarianship in the civil rights era.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is the higher education association for academic libraries and library workers. In 1940, it also became the American Library Association’s first formal division. But the road to unlocking division status was longer and more winding than you might imagine.

The Woman’s Building and its library at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago stood as shining examples of what women could accomplish.

ALA’s Public Programs Office empowers libraries to create vibrant hubs of learning, conversation and connection in communities of all types. We take a look at its beginnings and legacy.

“Librarians We Have Lost Initiative (1976–2026): A Sesquicentennial Memorial Project” is a crowd-sourced initiative developed to honor the memory, service, and professional contributions of librarians, educators, and library workers over the past 50 years.

The Woman’s Building Library at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition achieved a milestone and was an impressive harbinger for the intersection of librarianship, women’s history, community service, public policy, and international relations. And it was only the beginning.

The 1960s and 1970s were a time of great societal change in the U.S., and especially so for women. The rebirth of feminism led to a greater desire to invest in a thorough examination of women and their erasure within the historical canon. These ideals spread to librarianship and ALA, where the Feminist Task Force was established in 1970, Women Library Workers in 1975, and the creation of the ALA Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship in 1976.

On Sunday, June 24, 2018, the governing Council of American Library Association passed a historic resolution that “apologizes to African Americans for wrongs committed against them in segregated public libraries” and commends those “who risked their lives to integrate public libraries for their bravery and courage in challenging segregation in public libraries and in forcing public libraries to live up to the rhetoric of their ideals.”

Throughout his life of activism and public service, Rev. Jesse Jackson consistently championed libraries as centers of knowledge where individuals and communities can learn about their past, present, and future.

During the 1975 American Library Association Annual Conference, Clara Stanton Jones was announced as the vice president and president-elect of the American Library Association. Her term as president would start during ALA’s 1976 Centennial Conference, a fitting celebration for the first African American President of the Association.