Libfocus Link-out for January 2026

Welcome to the January edition of the Libfocus link-out, an assemblage of library-related things we have found informative, educational, thought-provoking and insightful on the Web over the past while.

Images featured in this month's link-out articles

Prisoners face obstacles to library access despite 'life-saving' benefits, ACE report warns.
Lauren Brown writes for The Bookseller regarding a new report published by ACE – Raising the Profile of Prison Libraries – that has highlighted the barriers to library access facing UK prisoners, despite evidence of myriad benefits.

What happens when a university closes its library?
Richard Pine examines a controversial decision at Greece’s Ionian University to convert its traditional academic library — with some 110,000 volumes and study space — into “multipurpose” classrooms in this Irish Times article. They've also decided to abolish the head librarian role, sparking concern among students and staff about the erosion of a core scholarly resource and what it means for the intellectual heart of a university.

We All Have a Story to Tell: Why Librarians Should Write About and Share What They Do.
This practice-based article in the Health Sciences Libraries Journal by Martin O'Connor makes a compelling case for librarians across sectors to embrace writing—whether blogs, articles or reflective pieces—as a professional practice that builds confidence, fosters community engagement, and strengthens the collective voice of the profession by sharing lived experience and insight into our work.

How Nature Became a 'Prestige' Journal.
This Long Read from the Asimov Press explains how Nature became one of the most prestigious journals, and asks if this will continue in the 21st century.

5 things for University Librarians to think about when exiting a Read and Public agreement.
Anthony Sinnott, Access and Procurement Development Manager at the University of York, has developed five key considerations to help navigate the complexities of exiting an Open Access agreement in this article for the Librarianth blog.

The UK's Warm Welcome Spaces Campaign.
The Warm Welcome Campaign in the UK started as a crisis response to keep people warm through the winter. It has now grown into a movement to reconnect individuals and communities across the country all year round. Libraries, community centres, sports centres, businesses and museums are offering heated, safe and inclusive spaces that help reduce isolation in communities and boosting wellbeing.

“Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout”: The State of Librarian Mental Health.
In this book riot article, Kelly Jensen discusses the results of her survey of 213 library sector workers in the US. The survey centres around how much of a toll the job takes on their mental health. Library workers answered questions about what they perceived as the most significant stressors in the field, where and how they’ve managed their mental health in relation to their job, and what kinds of solutions they think would be helpful.

Emory libraries cancel Elsevier journals due to rising journal costs. 
Samara Goyal for The Emory Wheel, Emory’s student run newspaper documents the university’s library’s funding cuts and the resulting removal of access to Elsevier articles and their rising costs.

Library Marketing Tips.
Starting the year off right - Angela Hursh provides some practical tips and tricks to grow engagement with Instagram in this article for the Super Library Marketing blog.

The Death of Reading.
Are we living through the death of reading? James Marriott poses this question in a short audio piece for BBC.com.

Science Is Drowning in AI Slop.
In this article for The Atlantic, Ross Anderson traces the decline of journal-output quality due to AI generated garbage (fraudulent or lousy work and a rapid increase of paper mill submissions to already clogged up journals). Where will the epistemological pollution of the scholarly record lead us?

University journals: a semi-systematic literature review of trends, challenges and future research directions.
Maryna Nazarovets integrates theoretical, empirical and descriptive studies drawn from a range of disciplines to better understand the state of play of university journals.