LJ's May 2025 print issue. Photo by William Neumann Photography

As with any large-scale feature, Library Journal’s Movers & Shakers—sponsored by Hoopla—is a long, multipart endeavor. From the submissions that pour in after Labor Day to many rounds of judging, writing, photography, editing, layout, and refinement, the Movers process spreads out over a good three-quarters of a year. A lot can happen in that time.

A lot has.

The library landscape today looks very different from how it did when the Class of 2025’s colleagues and coworkers were writing up their nominations last summer. The Institute of Museum and Library Services has been effectively dismantled and its grants terminated; academic institutions have had federal funding cut off on ideological grounds; critical data has been scrubbed from government websites; and attacks on freedom of information are becoming increasingly regulated in libraries, schools, and humanities programs.

The last major disruption to libraryland, the pandemic shutdowns of 2020, were unsettling and full of uncertainty, to be sure. But as the past five years have shown us, those challenges also produced new and creative ways of thinking about services, programming, instruction, and social justice. Celebrating those successes doesn’t minimize what—and who—was lost. But that resourcefulness deserves recognition, and that recognition is very much in the spirit of what the Movers & Shakers accolades are about.

This year’s Advocates, Community Builders, Change Agents, Innovators, and Educators are teaching future teachers, raising up immigrant communities, showing college students their library’s benefits, standing up to anti-library legislation, helping their communities recover from climate-impact disasters, providing access for unhoused and incarcerated populations, and using comics to teach civic literacy—to name just a few.

It’s hard to imagine, in this moment, what the next wave of advocacy, activism, innovation, and ethics will look like for libraries. But given the strength of what is being done now—a small portion of which we’re celebrating in these pages—we have to believe that these uncertain times will generate new work, and good work.

LJ would like to thank external judges Shamella Cromartie, Tyler Hahn, Jennie Pu, Marijke Visser, and Isaiah West for helping expand the reach of our in-house team: myself, Senior Tech Editor Matt Enis, and Editor-in-Chief Hallie Rich. Kudos to project manager Amy C. Rea for keeping the many parts of the process running smoothly, and for helping the profile writers bring our Movers and their accomplishments to the page—which pop thanks to our design team, Kevin Henegan and Irving Cumberbatch, and New York photographer William Neumann. A big thank-you to Movers sponsor Hoopla. And a special hat tip to New York Public Library’s Billy Parrott, director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL), and Lizzie Tribone, senior publicist, communications & marketing, for facilitating a lively photo shoot at SNFL; and to Virginia Stanley, HarperCollins director of library marketing, for lending us office space for some hands-on editorial work. As ever, our warmest thanks to our 2025 Movers for all you have done and continue to do—and to everyone doing the work, every day.

Onward.

PROJECT MANAGER Amy C. Rea

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Marlaina Cockcroft l Jennifer A. Dixon l Andrew Gerber l Todd Leopold l Amy C. Rea l Henrietta Thornton l Christina Vercelletto l April Witteveen

STAFF WRITERS Matt Enis l Lisa Peet l Hallie Rich