The American Library Association held a one-day virtual conference, “Recharging in Challenging Times,” on February 10. The winter event replaced ALA’s discontinued educational conference, LibLearnX, and drew more than 1,100 livestream attendees. Throughout the day, the ALA emphasized self-care and strategies for persistence, while considering the stresses of library work in the current political climate and the daily struggle with limited resources.
In his opening remarks, ALA executive director Dan Montgomery welcomed attendees, “including international guests from Bermuda, Honduras, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Jamaica, China, Germany—it’s like the Olympics, almost.”
Montgomery said the day’s sessions were meant to support library workers. “We’ve got to recharge,” he said, because “the times we’re in are really trying. That’s what today is about—it’s not about doing more or fixing everything, it’s about creating a space to pause, reflect, and reconnect with what sustains us in this important work.”
Montgomery introduced opening keynote speaker and clinical social worker Emely Rumble, author of Bibliotherapy in the Bronx, who said, “The library doesn’t just offer refuge, it offers a call” to “the active defense of intellectual freedom, community safety, and democratic values.” But that relentless call to action, she said, can become draining.
Rumble told listeners that library workers’ community service is a form of “responding normally to an abnormal moment in history,” and it’s emotionally and physically overwhelming.
“Responsibility has outpaced resourcing, and that is not a weakness of yours, that is a systems problem showing up in your body,” she said. She pointed to fiction about libraries as a source of rejuvenation, naming Kate Quinn’s The Astral Library and Emily Austin’s Is This a Cry for Help?, and recommended Amanda Jones’s That Librarian for its account of leadership. When listeners asked how to bolster morale, she suggested a neutral ombudsperson could be a sounding board for staff, if resources permit.
For the virtual sessions, ALA designed three concurrent tracks: Strengthening Leadership, Preserving Intellectual Freedom, and Sustaining Well-Being. Rumble’s keynote touched on each area, with insights on burnout and conflict. Christina Fuller-Gregory, a librarian and founder of Fuller Potential Consulting, led a session on active listening, and Darcy Lipp-Acord, collection development manager for the Laramie County (Wyo.) library system, addressed the angry rhetoric that censors use to unsettle library workers. Cathi Furhman, project director of Pennsylvania’s nonprofit Read for Liberty PA, and Erin Jones, editor of the 11th edition of ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Manual, spoke on “building censorship-resistant library policies.”
Eric Stroshane of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, who maintains the book résumés established by Unite Against Book Bans, hosted three sessions, including a policy discussion with ALA OIF deputy director Sarah Lamdan and a panel with Texas FReadom Fighters co-founder Becky Calzada, advocate Leila Green Little, and YA author Ashley Hope Pérez (Banned Together) of the Unite to Read Project. Calzada, Little, and Pérez spoke about forging coalitions and taking a long view, acknowledging that it's not an easy task.
Little told listeners about the weight of being a key plaintiff in the Little v. Llano County lawsuit, which the Supreme Court declined to hear. “The fight came to me and I just couldn’t ignore it, as a public library patron and a parent of two public library patrons,” Little said. But “it was extraordinarily stressful. This has been the most stressful four years of my life, bar none.” Little, a former speech-language pathologist turned stay-at-home parent, earned her MLS degree in 2024, mid-trial. She credits her library network with sustaining her through the complaint and appeals process.
Calzada, who appears in Kim A. Snyder’s documentary The Librarians for her work in Leander (Tex.) Independent School District, talked about equipping librarians with talking points and protocols to defend the right to read. She said building trust among staff, patrons, and students “should be ongoing, because when there’s a crisis, if advocacy is needed, those relationships are established.” At school board meetings in Leander ISD, “librarians were targets, and they didn’t want to speak up, but they had a network of people that understood the role of the library” and had their backs.
Pérez spoke about the “real heartbreak” of having her YA novel, Out of Darkness, viciously targeted by censors in more than 100 school districts. She encouraged the audience to engage with banned authors about “what reaching readers means to them,” agreeing with Calzada and Little that “even in a place that’s ground zero for book banning, people are advocating for access to literature.” Having received hate mail, she pointed out that “people are saying that they are concerned with the content young people are exposed to, and yet they're sending profanity-laced hatred and directly threatening messages. We know this behavior is not in good faith.”
For the virtual event’s closing keynote, acting librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen spoke with 2025–2026 ALA president Sam Helmick. Newlen has spent his 46-year career at the Library of Congress, and he became the nation’s librarian when Carla Hayden was fired without cause in May 2025.
Newlen observed that as the Library of Congress prepares for America’s semiquincentennial and the 150th anniversary of ALA, it celebrated its own 225-year birthday in 2025.
“We’re planning a big America 250 exhibit, and we’re pulling out all the stops,” he said, acknowledging that he planned to realize Dr. Hayden’s vision of a “treasure gallery” in the Jefferson Building. “We’re reaching far back in the vault and bringing out Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. We’re also going to pull out the Gettysburg Address,” plus recent acquisitions including a drawing that’s “the first known image of Yosemite” and selections from Stephen Sondheim’s papers.
The nation’s acting librarian acknowledged the pressures of the profession, the subject of the virtual conference, while modeling a diplomatic position. “My favorite thing to say across the street, when I’m talking to members of Congress and congressional staff,” he said, “is that we’ve been around for 225 years, and we're going to be around for another 225 years, as a great legislative branch organization.”
