Alabama Public Library Service

07/21/2026

It's that time of year again... School's almost back, and so is the nightly homework scramble.

Here's the thing a lot of folks don't know: Homework Alabama offers free, live tutoring for any age, any subject, any time — not just for kids stuck on fractions, but for adults working through a GED, brushing up on job skills, or picking through a tricky writing assignment. It's backed by your library card, and it's already paid for.

So next time someone in the house groans over a worksheet, you've got an easy answer: pull up Homework Alabama and let a real tutor take it from there.

Who in your house could use this the most right now — the kid with the math homework, or the parent trying to remember how to do it?

www.homeworkalabama.org

07/15/2026

The Alabama Public Library Service Executive Board meeting scheduled for Thursday, July 16, 2026, at 1:00 p.m. has been cancelled due to a lack of quorum. The meeting is tentatively rescheduled for Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026.

07/09/2026

Old Cahawba — now an archaeological park in Dallas County — was Alabama's capital from 1820 to 1826. By the end of the Civil War it was abandoned, left to the rivers and the kudzu and the stories. It's the kind of place where you walk streets that no longer exist and feel the full weight of how much Alabama history has disappeared into the ground. There's also reportedly a glowing orb wandering the ruins of an old garden maze.

Kathryn Tucker Windham wrote about it.

If you haunted your school library in the right decades, you already know the name. Windham — journalist, folklorist, and one of the greatest storytellers this state ever produced — published "13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey" in 1969, and kicked off a book series that introduced generations of Alabama kids to the many ghost stories found in their own backyards.

Jeffrey was her own house ghost in Selma. Mischievous. Never scary. Blamed for slammed doors, moved furniture, and anything else that went wrong. "Nobody has ever been afraid of Jeffrey," she said.

Windham died in 2011 at 93, buried in Selma in a pine casket she'd been keeping in her backyard shed. Her books are still in print. Jeffrey's presumably still around. Somewhere.

Oh — and if you want to borrow a Windham title, APLS maintains a wide collection of Alabama authors available through interlibrary loan. Just ask your local public library.

Did you grow up reading Kathryn Tucker Windham? Which story stayed with you? (My favorite will always be Huntingdon College's Red Lady)

07/08/2026

For 30 years, E-Rate has been the reason most school and library internet connections exist at all. Right now, the FCC is asking whether it should continue.

On June 25, the commission voted to open a formal review with a direct question buried inside it: should E-Rate be "limited or sunset?" The argument is that the program succeeded — nearly every school and library now has broadband — so maybe the job is done.

But the job isn't done. A network isn't a one-time purchase. Bandwidth needs grow every year. Equipment ages. And the discount structure that makes E-Rate work is tied to need, which means the communities that depend on it most are the ones that would feel it first if it went away.

In Alabama, that's a lot of communities. Many public libraries serve areas where the library's internet connection is the only reliable one for miles. This isn't a bureaucratic funding question. It's a question about who gets access.

Public comments on E-Rate will open in August at fcc.gov/ecfs. This one is worth paying attention to.

For more information on what's at stake, Ars Technica has a great article: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/fcc-may-kill-2b-program-that-connects-schools-and-libraries-to-internet/

What would it mean for your community if your library lost its internet connection?

07/07/2026

The most checked-out book in New York Public Library history isn't Shakespeare. It isn't the Bible. It isn't Hemingway.

It's "The Snowy Day" — a 32-page picture book about a little boy playing in the snow. Checked out more than 485,583 times from one library system dating back to its release in 1962.

Most of the all-time top ten looks the same. "Where the Wild Things Are." "Charlotte's Web." "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." The books people return to again and again aren't typically the ones they were assigned in school. They're the ones someone first put in their hands when they were young.

What's a book you've borrowed more than once?

07/06/2026

The image is almost a cartoon at this point: the librarian with the bun, the glasses, the finger raised to pursed lips. 𝑺𝒉𝒉𝒉𝒉.

Here's something most people don't know about that image: the enforced silence of the library was never a natural feature of the institution. It was engineered — deliberately, over time — and for reasons that had as much to do with architecture and institutional control as they did with reading.

Early American libraries were not uniformly silent places. In the nineteenth century, many functioned as social and instructional spaces, hosting lectures, readings, and discussion groups. Noise existed alongside study, and supervision mattered more than silence. The hushed library came later, as a product of deliberate design choices — reading rooms built for solitary study, rules posted on walls, staff authorized to enforce quiet as a condition of access. Silence came to signify seriousness and legitimacy, distinguishing libraries from other public spaces where noise was tolerated.

And now? Libraries have largely walked it back on purpose. Noise in a library is not disruption — it is evidence of engagement. The squeal of a child during storytime is the sound of early literacy taking root. The animated debate in a teen book club is the sound of critical thinking and social connection. The chatter around a group study table is the sound of collaboration.

Most libraries today offer designated quiet spaces for patrons who need them — and they still know how to give a look when someone takes a call on speakerphone. But silence is no longer the default mode, the measure of whether a library is doing its job. A noisier library says children, teens, language learners, and anyone who processes information out loud are welcome too.

The shushing librarian isn't gone. She just doesn't run the place anymore.

What's your mental image of a library — quiet and hushed, or something livelier?

𝑃ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑜 𝐶𝑎𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛: The stereotype is real. The history behind it is more interesting than you'd think.

07/02/2026

We're right in the middle of summer. And something is quietly happening to a lot of kids — something measurable, something real, and something that's still not too late to do something about.

Researchers call it the summer slide. Over the course of a typical summer, children who don't read lose an average of two to three months of reading progress. That might not sound like much until you see where it leads. A landmark study from Johns Hopkins found that by the end of fifth grade, students who didn't read during the summer lagged two full years behind their peers who did — and that summer learning loss accounted for most of the reading achievement gap between kids from lower-income families and those who were better off. School Library Journal
Two years. Not from a difference in school quality, or in how hard a child worked during the school year. From what happened — or didn't happen — during summers.

Researchers have concluded that two-thirds of the ninth grade reading achievement gap can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities during the elementary school years. Two-thirds of it, accumulated not in classrooms but in the months between them.

Here's the thing: many Alabama schools go back in the first week of August. That means summer is shorter than it looks on the calendar, and there are only a few weeks left to make it count. Public library summer reading programs exist precisely for this moment. They are not just a way to keep kids busy or hand out prizes — though they do both. They are a direct, research-backed response to a documented gap in opportunity. A child who walks into an Alabama public library right now and reads — any books, as many as they want — is doing something the research says matters enormously for where they land academically when they walk back through those school doors.

The library is free. The summer reading program is free. The books go home free.

If you have a child, a grandchild, a niece, a nephew, or a neighbor kid in your life, there is still time. Find your nearest Alabama public library and make a trip before August gets here.
Did you do summer reading at the library as a kid? What do you remember about it?

𝑃ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑜 𝐶𝑎𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛: Every book read this summer is a head start on September. Alabama public libraries are open now — and there's still time to make these weeks count before going back to school.

07/01/2026

If you wanted to understand America — not the mythology of it, but the actual shape of it, the arguments and ideas that built it and broke it and rebuilt it — where would you start?

Librarians just answered that question. To mark the country's 250th anniversary, OCLC — the nonprofit organization that manages WorldCat, the world's largest database of library collections — released what it's calling America's 250-Year Bookshelf: 250 nonfiction books about America, one for every year since 1776, identified not by a panel of critics or a committee of academics, but by data. Specifically, by what libraries collect. The list reflects, in aggregate, what librarians across the country have decided is worth preserving, worth having on hand, worth making available to anyone who walks through the door.

That's a different kind of cultural authority than a bestseller list or a prize committee. A bestseller list tells you what sold. A prize tells you what a jury valued. A library collection tells you what a community decided its members should be able to access — and over time, across thousands of institutions, that accumulation of decisions adds up to something like a collective judgment about what matters.

The list draws from WorldCat, the world's most comprehensive source of information about library collections — which means it's not any one library's opinion. It's the sum of what public and research libraries across the country have chosen to hold.

Two hundred and fifty books. Two hundred and fifty years. The whole American story, as told by the institutions most committed to keeping it available to everyone.

Your Alabama public library is part of that story. Every collection on every shelf is a version of the same question: what does this community need to know, remember, and understand? The answers add up.

If you were adding one book to America's 250-Year Bookshelf, what would it be?

Find the bookshelf here:

Spanning two and a half centuries, these 250 books offer a unique view of America through the lens of library collections. Together, they reveal the ideas, discoveries, histories, and lived experiences that have endured across generations. More than a reading list, this collection tells the story of...

06/30/2026

There is a card in millions of American wallets that has never charged anyone a dollar, never sold anyone's data, and has been quietly doing its job since before most of us were born.

The library card.

It is, by most measures, one of the best deals a person will ever get. For free, it grants access to physical and digital collections worth thousands of dollars, research databases that would otherwise cost a fortune, interlibrary loan networks that can summon a book from across the state, and — increasingly — passes to museums, tools to learn a language, and help finding a job. No subscription fee. No upsell. No renewal notice trying to get you to upgrade to premium.

It is also one of the oldest continuously functioning pieces of social infrastructure in the country. The first library card systems in America date back to the 19th century, built on a simple promise: if you live here, this belongs to you too. That promise hasn't changed, even as almost everything else about how we access information has.

Here's what's easy to forget: that card doesn't just open a door. It is a kind of civic membership — proof that you belong to a community that has decided, collectively, that access to knowledge shouldn't depend on what you can afford. Every Alabamian who walks into a public library and signs up for one is participating in something older and steadier than almost any other institution still standing.

It costs nothing. It expects nothing back except that you bring the books home and bring them back.

When's the last time you used yours?

06/29/2026

This Fourth of July, as the country turns 250, here's something worth knowing about how we got here.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights — these were not the spontaneous products of brilliant minds working in a vacuum. They were the product of one of the most reading-intensive generations in recorded history.

By the time of the Revolution, nine sizable college libraries existed in British North America, and more than sixty subscription libraries had formed across the colonies — several of which, like Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia Library Company, boasted that tradesmen and mechanics considerably outnumbered "gentlemen" among their users. Ordinary working people were borrowing books and reading political philosophy. The ideas that became America weren't handed down from on high — they were read, argued over, borrowed, and returned.

On everyone's list of indispensable books was John Locke's "Second Treatise on Civil Government." As Madison said of Locke's work, it was "admirably calculated to impress on young minds the right of nations to establish their own governments and to inspire a love of free ones." The founders didn't just believe in liberty — they read their way to it.

Here's the part most people don't know. When the town of Franklin, Massachusetts was incorporating and asked Benjamin Franklin if they could name the town after him, he said yes — and instead of sending a bell for the town steeple as tradition dictated, he sent books. Franklin called on Welsh philosopher Richard Price to help choose the reading material with specific instructions: "It is to request from you a list of a few good Books, to the Value of about Twenty-five Pounds, such as are the most proper to inculcate principles of sound Religion and just Government." The books selected included works by Locke and Montesquieu — the same ideas that undergirded the founding documents. "What better foundation can you give a new town," as one historian put it, "than think for yourself?" That collection became the first public library in America funded by a donation rather than a subscription fee.

A founding father quite literally chose books over bells. That collection still exists. Those books are still on display at the Franklin Public Library today.

As America marks 250 years, remember that the democracy you're celebrating was literally built in libraries. The freedom to read — freely, without permission, without cost — is not separate from the American experiment. It is the American experiment.

𝑃ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑜 𝐶𝑎𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛: "Benjamin Franklin, Printer, Philadelphia" — an illustration by S.M. Arthurs (c. 1914) depicting Franklin in his Philadelphia print shop, reviewing printed sheets alongside a female customer and a press operator. Franklin's work as a printer, publisher, and founder of the Library Company of Philadelphia placed him at the intersection of ideas, commerce, and civic life that would help shape the American founding.