Following Election Day 2022 earlier this month, the balance of power in Washington, DC, has moved toward divided government. Democrats remain the majority in the Senate, while Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives in January.

Voting trends at the state and local levels suggest that books bans and public school teaching restrictions remain hot button issues, according to Andrew AlbanesePublishers Weekly senior writer.

“John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, was busy on Election Day tracking the fate of some 55 library initiatives across 16 states,” Albanese tells me. “General support for libraries remains high overall. However, at least two libraries were ‘defunded’ following significant censorship and book ban campaigns.”

Click below to listen to the latest episode of the Velocity of Content podcast.

In Arkansas, the Craighead County Jonesboro Library was defunded by 50% in the wake of an 18-month campaign to ban LGBTQ books. Despite a quickly organized “Save the Library” the library levy will be cut from $2 million to $1 million.

In Jamestown, Michigan, the Patmos Library lost its 10-year levy renewal after a group of citizens organized a “no” campaign in the wake of a long-running effort to remove books involving LGBTQ themes pulled from library shelves.

“The levy loss will almost certainly force the library to close its doors sometime in 2023,” Albanese says. “The Michigan Library Association called the vote, ‘a local tragedy with national implications.’”

Topic:

Author: Christopher Kenneally

Christopher Kenneally hosts CCC's Velocity of Content podcast series, which debuted in 2006 and is the longest continuously running podcast covering the publishing industry. As CCC's Senior Director, Marketing, he is responsible for organizing and hosting programs that address the business needs of all stakeholders in publishing and research. His reporting has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Independent (London), WBUR-FM, NPR, and WGBH-TV.
Don't Miss a Post

Subscribe to the award-winning
Velocity of Content blog
https://www.copyright.com/blog/in-arkansas-and-michigan-voters-defund-public-libraries/
www.copyright.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-49
207587
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XD3XVAIBLWR63SJS363D7EA4U47D2R7Q
<urn:uuid:333d945c-21ea-48f8-b152-60ae85811af7>
2022-12-03T05:39:54Z
34.192.111.60
text/html
sha1:HF67MBHXNZJ273NZ3IGWIDDRGNJXOK5I
<urn:uuid:31b846fc-81ea-4fc8-b8ac-b2646b9b8963>
https://www.copyright.com/blog/in-arkansas-and-michigan-voters-defund-public-libraries/
response
<urn:uuid:49dbe7a9-529f-4640-bb6d-80641198f66c>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-49
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November/December 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-182
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/