News Roundup- Gov. shuts library, trashes books

This story was posted three weeks ago by several newsoutlets. With the daily barrage of unsettling news, sometimes important stories get lost in the shuffle.

Here is an important one you may want to give your attention:

NASA shut its biggest library and trashed priceless materials

Photo Courtsey of Library Journal

NASA has quietly shut down its largest research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center, a decision that will see unique books, reports, and technical records tossed into dumpsters or warehoused out of reach. What sounds like a bureaucratic reshuffle is, in practice, the dismantling of a core piece of the agency’s institutional memory, with scientists warning that priceless material is being lost faster than it can be digitized or saved.

The closure, carried out under the Trump administration as part of a broader reorganization of labs and staff, has stunned researchers who relied on the Goddard collection to reconstruct past missions and design new ones. Instead of a carefully planned preservation effort, they are watching shelves cleared in a rush, with irreplaceable documents treated as surplus property rather than as the raw material of future discovery. Read more

NASA Closes Goddard Campus Library

by Lisa Peet

Jan 22, 2026

The NASA Goddard Information and Collaboration Center (GIC2) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, MD, closed on Friday, January 2, by order of the Trump administration. In-person services and checkouts had ceased on December 9, 2025.

The facility—formerly known as the Homer E. Newell Memorial Library—was the largest of NASA’s research libraries, serving as a resource for NASA engineers and outside researchers. It housed some 100,000 volumes, including technical manuals, mission data, engineering documentation, and historical research materials used by scientists and engineers to support significant missions such as the Hubble and the James Webb space telescopes. GIC2 had also maintained the collections of the NASA HQ library since 2023, when the HQ library was converted to a visitor center, and hosted the Space Science Data Coordinated Archive, which was taken offline in mid-2025. Read More