Public Libraries in the 21st Century presents a comprehensive analysis of the impact of recent policy initiatives directly targeted at public libraries along with broader developments in the public sector environment within which they operate. Key features include: • An exploration of the context within which public libraries are operating and analysis of their role in local and national life; • Examples of best practice in service delivery; • Evaluation of the challenges and opportunities confronting public library managers; • Wide ranging coverage, including information from published and unpublished sources, supplemented by interviews with key stakeholders in the public library sector. The book provides a unique and thorough guide to the contemporary discourses surrounding issues of identity, social purpose, value and strategy facing the public library service.

Freckle Report 2021 follows the Freckle Report 2020. It is an analysis of the performance and funding of public libraries in the United States, in Australia and in the United Kingdom It assesses the problems facing the service, the decline in use; the apparent denial of that problem; how library services can sensibly be measured; the pursuit of digital material and the increasingly diverse audiences. The reports contain original research of the most recently available figures about how the public make use of public libraries and how the libraries have responded to the demand for them in recent years In particular it reports how successful the library service in the United States has been in providing digital books, as audio and eBooks, during the Covid 19 Pandemic

The Digest of Education Statistics provides a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field of education from prekindergarten through graduate school. It includes a selection of data from many sources and draws especially on the results and activities carried out by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).