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MAALL Book to Action

MAALL Book to Action is a service project that brings MAALL together to read a common title and benefit the community in which the Annual Meeting is hosted by providing books to those who need them.

Please support MAALL Book to Action 2025:

Our 2025 book selection is Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann. Heumann, who passed away a few years ago, was one of most influential disability rights activists in U.S. history. This book tells her personal story, including how she fought from a young age to get an appropriate education and how she fought to find meaningful employment. It also describes in vivid detail how she fought for changes in our disability rights laws in an era when having a disability was too often a prescription for being pushed aside and ignored by society. Please join us as we read this moving and powerful story.

Our 2025 charity is Kids’ Book Bank. The mission of the Cleveland Kids’ Book Bank is to foster literacy and a love of reading by distributing free books to children through collaboration with community partners. Please support this worthy organization with your book purchases this fall.

You can purchase donated books from Cleveland independent bookstore Loganberry Books. Use this link to place your order: Loganberry Books MAALL Book Drive

History

MAALL was inspired to begin the Book to Action program in 2014 by our MAALL Annual Meeting keynote speaker, Steve Bogira. When asked what law librarians can do to help those in prison situations, Mr. Bogira suggested that we work on providing reading material for the incarcerated. Cindy Bassett announced the first Book to Action project in her Letter from the President in the September 2015 MAALL Markings (pages 7-8). In 2019, Gail Wechsler, Library Director at the Law Library Association of St. Louis, joined Cindy as co-coordinator of Book to Action. At Gail's suggestion, the book drive began working with local, independent book stores in the host city.

In 2023, Cindy Bassett stepped down as co-coordinator in order to fulfill her new responsibilities as Library Director of the University of Missouri-Columbia Law Library. Matt Timko, Academic Technologies and Outreach Services Librarian and Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law, became the new co-coordinator. Also in 2023, Cindy Bassett and Gail Wechsler were recognized for their work on the Book to Action project as recipients of the inaugural MAALL Service Award.  

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