Dua Lipa Is Fighting Book Bans with a New 'Manifesto Library' She Calls a 'Shrine' to Banned Books; People, June 29, 2026

Desiree Anello, People; Dua Lipa Is Fighting Book Bans with a New 'Manifesto Library' She Calls a 'Shrine' to Banned Books

"Dua Lipa is taking her book club to the next level. 

Three years after she founded Service95, a book club dedicated to "serving up insider recommendations and global stories featuring some of the world's most compelling voices," the pop star and bookworm, 30, celebrated the opening of her very first physical library. 

"This library is a shrine to books that have disappeared, to authors whose courage unmasks structures of power and control, and to readers who refuse to be told what book they're allowed," Lipa wrote in an Instagram post shared by Service95 Book Club and Livraria Lello. 

In her Manifesto Library, which opened on June 27 as part of the new BABELL - City of Books literary festival, Lipa will stock a diverse collection of books — including banned books — that relate to the themes of power, control, voice and memory. The permanent library resides inside the historic Livraria Lello Bookshop in Porto, Portugal."

Book Surfaces 120 Years After a San Francisco Library Lost Almost Everything; The New York Times, June 1, 2026

 Adeel Hassan, The New York Times; Book Surfaces 120 Years After a San Francisco Library Lost Almost Everything;

"Randall Tarpey-Schwed, a book collector and library member, found the book on a website that deals in, among other things, rare books and collectibles. How it reached that previous owner is unknown.

Mr. Tarpey-Schwed said he was curious whether any books had survived the 1906 earthquake and fires, by virtue of having been checked out.

“There was no place to return the book, at least for a while, or to reapply Gertrude Stein’s famous quote, there was no ‘there there’ to return the book to,” he said.

“The book is not worth much monetarily,” Mr. Tarpey-Schwed said. “It is, after all, a soot-stained book with a lot of old library stamps. But as a survivor, it is priceless, and I knew immediately I wanted to return it to the library.”

The book’s author, Bret Harte, might have been a library member, Mr. Cooper said. Many writers and artists have been members, he said, but full membership records from before the earthquake are gone."

Sergeant Bluff library utilizes virtual reality to showcase preserved Holocaust survivors’ stories; KTIV.com, January 21, 2026

 Taylor Deckert , KTIV.com; Sergeant Bluff library utilizes virtual reality to showcase preserved Holocaust survivors’ stories

"The Sergeant Bluff Public Library is preserving one of history’s darkest chapters for a generation that will never meet a Holocaust survivor face-to-face. 

They’re using virtual reality. The headsets are from the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, a trunk full of technology that brings history to life with a 360-degree view...

When visitors come to try the virtual reality experience at the Sergeant Bluff Public Library, they have multiple options of stories with different time lengths for different experiences...

“We’re at a time where most of the survivors are gone. And we’re really down to very, very few. And we are at a desperate place where we need to remember what happened because it’s so easy to repeat the past,” Torgerson said. “So it was really important to me because I feel like we are, it’s so easy to forget what has happened in the past.”

While the library has a selection of books on the Holocaust, it’s hoped the virtual reality experience will bring a new perspective on this time in history."

Smithsonian removes Trump impeachment text as it swaps his portrait; The Washington Post, January 10, 2026

 

Samantha Chery

, 

Janay Kingsberry

 and 

Kelsey Ables

, The Washington Post; Smithsonian removes Trump impeachment text as it swaps his portrait

[Kip Currier: Trump 2.0's efforts to censor, distort, and propagandize history, as these Smithsonian instances illustrate, are appalling; but they're nothing the world hasn't experienced before from other despotic rulers throughout history who have striven to falsify and hide their conduct and crimes. 

The good news is that people like these reporters are documenting as many of these examples as possible and, at some future point, the historical record can be restored.

Moroever, as the article's comments frequently note, many, many people already know the truth about Trump's two impeachments, arraignments in four separate criminal cases, conviction for 34 felonies, etc. That knowledge can't be purged from the minds of the people who already know his character and actions.]

[Excerpt]

"The National Portrait Gallery removed a swath of text that mentioned President Donald Trump’s two impeachments and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as it swapped out a prominent photo of him this week."

Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’; The Guardian, January 8, 2026

 Charlotte Higgins , The Guardian; Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’

[Kip Currier: Informative reporting by The Guardian on Trump 2.0 efforts to whitewash and erase centuries of history and culture by imprinting one man's and one movement's views on the Smithsonian museums.

Share this with as many people as possible to raise awareness and promote advocacy for the historical integrity and unfiltered authenticity of museums within the Smithsonian Institution system.]

[Excerpt]

"Lonnie Bunch, in the meantime, is holding a delicate line. On 18 December, a new letter from the White House arrived for him. The Smithsonian had fallen short in providing the information requested on 12 August, it said. “We wish to be assured,” it continued, “that none of the leadership of the Smithsonian museums is confused about the fact that the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world. The American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history.” Then came the threat. “As you may know, funds apportioned for the Smithsonian Institution are only available for use in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,’ and the fulfilment of the requests set forth in our August 12, 2025 letter.”

Bunch wrote a note to all his staff the following day, quietly affirming, once more, the organisation’s autonomy. “For nearly 180 years, the Smithsonian has served our country as an independent and nonpartisan institution committed to its mission – the increase and diffusion of knowledge – for all Americans. As we all know, all content, programming, and curatorial decisions are made by the Smithsonian.”

With JD Vance on the board of regents, along with Republican members of Congress, the question hovers: how long will 73-year-old Bunch survive in his position? “Lonnie knows his time is short,” one DC museum director told me. “It’s a question of how he decides to go, and of which hill he chooses to die on.”"

NASA says historic materials will be preserved as Goddard research library shuts down; WTOP, January 5, 2026

 Mike Murillo, WTOP ; NASA says historic materials will be preserved as Goddard research library shuts down

[Kip Currier: Multiple concerns with even this statement by NASA head Jared Isaacman, responding to concerns about the preservation and accessibility of historic NASA archival records, data, and documents.

Who will be making the determinations as to what is and isn't preserved? Are there trained staff involved in this process, i.e. persons with expertise in archival practices, collection development, document/data retrieval, etc.?

Keeping these records and data doesn't have to be an either/or choice. Isaacman said "preserving history is important, but NASA’s focus remains on future missions, including sending astronauts farther into space and returning to the moon to stay." We can do both: "preserve history" and advance work on "future missions".

Who knows today what seemingly inconsequential data in a notebook, or sound on an audiocassette recording, or document from the early days of space exploration may be key to solving an engineering design challenge or shedding light on a scientific conundrum at some later time that we can't foresee now. Watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)! 😏]

[Excerpt]

"The library at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, home to thousands of books and documents chronicling America’s space history, is closing in the coming months, raising concerns that rare records could be lost.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on X that every item will be reviewed before the closure as part of a facilities consolidation plan approved in 2022 under the Joe Biden administration.

“The physical library space at Goddard is closing as part of a long-planned facilities consolidation,” Isaacman said. He added that the goal is to digitize materials, transfer them to other libraries, or preserve them for historical purposes.

Isaacman pushed back on reports suggesting NASA might discard documents, calling that characterization misleading. Critics have warned that historic and technical records could disappear.

“At no point is NASA ‘tossing out’ important scientific or historical materials, and that framing has led to several other misleading headlines,” Isaacman wrote.

He said preserving history is important, but NASA’s focus remains on future missions, including sending astronauts farther into space and returning to the moon to stay. Researchers will continue to have access to the resources they need, he said."

NASA Reportedly Shutting Down Its Largest Library, Throwing Materials Away; Futurism, January 2, 2026

 Victor Tangermann , Futurism; NASA Reportedly Shutting Down Its Largest Library, Throwing Materials Away

"This week, news emerged that the Trump administration is even shutting down the center’s library — NASA’s largest — and threatening to destroy an undetermined number of books, documents, and journals in the process.

As the New York Times reports, many of these invaluable artifacts haven’t been digitized or made available elsewhere. While a NASA spokesperson told the newspaper that the agency will review what to keep and what to throw away over the next 60 days, it’s a sobering glimpse at a federal agency in crisis.

After the NYT story ran, the agency’s freshly-minted administrator Jared Isaacman pushed back against its claims.

“The [NYT] story does not fully reflect the context NASA shared,” he wrote on X. “At no point is NASA ‘tossing out’ important scientific or historical materials, and that framing has led to several other misleading headlines.” 

That claim seems to contradict the NYT, which reported that a NASA spokesman named Jacob Richmond had told it that the agency would “review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away.”"

National park to remove photo of enslaved man’s scars; The Washington Post, September 16, 2025

 

Jake Spring

 and 

Hannah Natanson

, The Washington Post ; National park to remove photo of enslaved man’s scars

[Kip Currier: I will be posting commentary about this deeply troubling development by Trump 2.0.]

[Excerpt]

"The Trump administration has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, according to four people familiar with the matter, including a historic photograph of a formerly enslaved man showing scars on his back.

The individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, said the removals were in line with President Donald Trump’s March executive order directing the Interior Department to eliminate information that reflects a “corrosive ideology” that disparages historic Americans. National Park Service officials are broadly interpreting that directive to apply to information on racism, sexism, slavery, gay rights or persecution of Indigenous people."

Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past; Library Journal, September 2, 2025

 Lisa Peet, Library Journal; Archiving projects protect the future by preserving the past

"The practice of saving and safekeeping documents is nearly as old the written word. But lately archiving—choosing what to save, preserving it, and making it sustainably findable and accessible—has also become an act of responsive resistance in a world that may use erasure as a weapon.  

Safeguarding endangered material is a widespread concern—but the definition of “endangered” can be a broad one. The Data Rescue Project (DRP) has been in the news this year as it works to collect data sets from government websites before they can be taken down. The DRP has deeper roots, however, such as the Internet Archive (IA), End of Term Web Archive, EDGI (Environmental Data & Governance Initiative), and SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online, which has digitized and preserved Ukrainian cultural heritage sites since 2022. These groups are the Monuments Men of the internet age. 

Yet culture and history are threatened by more than war and federal orders. The call to preserve starts with the awareness that memory is fragile, and that forgetting—and the subsequent erasure of stories, languages, culture, and information—can be institutionally driven as often as it is inadvertent.

With the future of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and other mainstays of support for preservation uncertain, the question remains: where will the resources and leadership—and the body of knowledge that stems from years of grant-making and collecting—come from? In the absence of concrete answers, a range of initiatives offer inspiration and hope."

The future of history: Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous US president; Associated Press, May 18, 2025

 Will Weissert , Associated Press; The future of history: Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous US president

[Kip Currier: Every information center (e.g. libraries, archives, museums) and cultural heritage and higher education institution should think hard about the questions raised in this article. Like this glaring one the reporter raises:

"How will experts and their fellow Americans understand what went on during Trump’s term when those charged with setting aside the artifacts documenting history refuse to do so?"]

[Excerpt]

"For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected, from the era of quills and parchment to boxes of paper to the cloud, safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity. 

Now, the Trump administration is scrubbing thousands of government websites of history, legal records and data it finds disagreeable. 

It has sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view the government-slashing efforts of Elon Musk’s team and other key administration initiatives. Officials have used apps such as Signal that can auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for recordkeeping. And they have shaken up the National Archives leadership and even ordered the rewriting of history on display at the Smithsonian Institution.

To historians and archivists, it points to the possibility that Trump’s presidency will leave less for the nation’s historical record than nearly any before it and that what is authorized for public release will be sanitized and edited to reinforce a carefully sculpted image the president wants projected, even if the facts don’t back that up.

How will experts and their fellow Americans understand what went on during Trump’s term when those charged with setting aside the artifacts documenting history refuse to do so?"

Israel’s National Library Reopens After Delay Caused by Hamas Attacks; The New York Times, December 26, 2023

 Gal Koplewitz, The New York Times; Israel’s National Library Reopens After Delay Caused by Hamas Attacks

"“The library has been able to play a tremendously therapeutic role,” said Raquel Ukeles, head of collections at the library. She said that many visitors have been evacuees from the country’s borders with Gaza and Lebanon, where communities are regularly targeted with rockets and shells, or reservists on leave from the Israeli military.

The library has helped stock mobile libraries that travel the country. Its staff members have also assisted in setting up a “pop-up” school in the previous National Library building for roughly 100 children displaced from their homes by fighting along the Lebanese border.

In the library’s reading room stand scores of chairs, each one holding a book chosen to represent one of the hostages taken on Oct. 7...

The library also has found new ways to serve its core mission as a custodian of collective national memory — painful as this new chapter is.

Library workers are salvaging and digitizing local archives from the ravaged communities overrun on Oct. 7. And staffers like Ms. Cooper are gathering and archiving WhatsApp conversations, in recognition of their documentary value. In Kibbutz Be’eri, the site of some of the worst atrocities on Oct. 7, one the more reliable logs of the day’s events are the messages sent on the community’s group chat."

Roland Pattillo helped keep Henrietta Lacks' story alive. It's key to his legacy; NPR, November 14, 2023

 Walter Ray Watson, NPR; Roland Pattillo helped keep Henrietta Lacks' story alive. It's key to his legacy

"Dr. Roland Pattillo and his wife Pat O'Flynn Pattillo paid for Henrietta Lacks' permanent headstone, a smooth, substantial block of pink granite. It sits in the shape of a hardcover book...

Pattillo, an African American oncologist, stem cell researcher and professor, died in May at age 89. His death went largely unreported. The New York Times ran an obituary last month. The Nation published the news in September...

He protected and elevated Lacks' memory for decades. A Louisiana native, Dr. Pattillo is often described as a quiet, determined man, and a major reason why millions know Henrietta Lacks' story.

He befriended the Lacks family and protected them from reporters and other people. He was aware of the HeLa cell line story, the medical discovery that Henrietta Lacks' cancer cells successfully grew outside her body, but he learned more about the donor when he worked with biologist George Gey, his mentor at Johns Hopkins. Gey was responsible for harvesting her biopsied cancer cells and successfully growing them in culture, the first human cells to do so. They were put to use for medical research in labs around the world...

Henrietta Lacks left behind five young children in 1951.

She was treated at Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore charity hospital that cared for Black patients during the Jim Crow era. Her tumor cells were taken without her knowledge. Her cells became the first successful "immortal" cell line, grown outside her body and used for medical research. They have been instrumental in breakthroughs ever since.

Patients rights and the rules governing them were not like today.

HeLa cells were used to understand how the polio virus infected human beings. A vaccine was developed as a result. More recently, they played a significant role in COVID-19 vaccines.

Pat Pattillo says her husband wanted to share how Lacks' gift benefitted humanity since her death at age 31. But he also hoped to extend empathy for the family she left behind...

Skloot says she and Pattillo first had a mentor and mentee relationship, but it blossomed into a collegial one, especially when they formed the Henrietta Lacks Foundation.

"So, it provides financial support for people who made important contributions to science without their knowledge or consent," she says. "And their descendants, specifically people who were used in historic research studies like the Tuskegee syphilis studies, the Holmes Burke prison studies, and Henrietta Lacks family.""

Our History Is Our Protection; American Libraries, November 1, 2023

Tracie D. Hall, American Libraries; Our History Is Our Protection

"Before his own death, another civil rights crusader, US Rep. John Lewis, presciently asserted that in his estimation, access to the internet (and information more broadly) would be the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Lewis’s words demonstrate uncanny foresight. In this moment where disinformation and information disparity have become normalized, many libraries are forced to fight defunding when they should rightfully be advocating for increased funding to provide the growing educational and social services they are being asked to take on.

We are indeed in the midst of a civil rights movement. Libraries are called to face this moment just as we have in times before, with an indefatigable commitment to information access and the unequivocal belief that right of access applies to everyone.

That legacy, that history, is our protection." 

Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war; The Guardian, February 28, 2022

Yuval Noah Harari, The Guardian; Why Vladimir Putin has already lost this war

"Nations are ultimately built on stories. Each passing day adds more stories that Ukrainians will tell not only in the dark days ahead, but in the decades and generations to come. The president who refused to flee the capital, telling the US that he needs ammunition, not a ride; the soldiers from Snake Island who told a Russian warship to “go fuck yourself”; the civilians who tried to stop Russian tanks by sitting in their path. This is the stuff nations are built from. In the long run, these stories count for more than tanks."

‘Inconceivable’: why has Australia’s history been left to rot?; The Guardian, May 22, 2021

Elias Visontay The Guardian; ‘Inconceivable’: why has Australia’s history been left to rot?

Historians are aghast that the National Archives have had to resort to crowdfunding to protect irreplaceable historical records

[Kip Currier: This report on the deplorable state of archival management and preservation by Australia's National Archives is a call-to-arms case study exemplar of abject information preservation dereliction of duty and responsibility. Kudos to those who are mobilizing to endeavor to avert this archival dis-management catastrophe.]

"The Guardian requested an interview with director-general David Fricker or another member of the National Archives. A spokeswoman said no one was available."

Our greatest libraries are melting away; The Washington Post, April 7, 2021

 David Farrier , The Washington Post; Our greatest libraries are melting away

 

"Spending time in the library of ice reminds us that our history is bound up with that of the planet. As that library comes under ever increasing risk, we should remember the fate of another great library. Legend tells that the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground, but the truth is less spectacular. As the Roman Empire fell into decline, people simply neglected to protect and preserve the fragile papyrus manuscripts that were stored in the Library of Alexandria. Gone with it were the greatest treasures of the ancient world: hundreds of years of civilizations’ stories, memories, knowledge and wisdom.

The greatest library in history was lost to neglect. Unless we act now, the library of ice will meet the same fate."

It wasn’t just the National Archives. The Library of Congress also balked at a Women’s March photo.; The Washington Post, January 31, 2020

Joe Heim , The Washington Post; It wasn’t just the National Archives. The Library of Congress also balked at a Women’s March photo.

 

"The Library of Congress abandoned plans last year to showcase a mural-size photograph of demonstrators at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington because of concerns it would be perceived as critical of President Trump, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post...

 

Slayton said the decision to remove the photograph was made by leadership of the library’s Center for Exhibits and Interpretation. “No outside entities reviewed this exhibition’s content before it opened or opined on its content,” the spokeswoman wrote.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was informed of the decision soon after and supported it, Slayton said. Hayden, who is in the fourth year of her 10-year term, was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2016 and confirmed by the Senate."