Maria has been a school librarian for 22 years. She knows every student by name. She knows which reluctant reader just needs the right graphic novel, and which advanced student is ready to be challenged. She knows the exact shelf where the book lives that could change a kid's life.
She also spent 14 hours last week on compliance documentation.
At Bookmarked, we believe the right book in the right hands can change a life. And we believe great librarians are the ones who make that happen — when we get out of their way.
Texas Senate Bill 13 didn't just create more work for librarians — it made book compliance a board-level liability. Every title in every school library must now be analyzed against community standards, documented, and defensible at a moment's notice. The stakes are real: districts that get it wrong face legal exposure, public scrutiny, and the kind of headlines no superintendent wants.
So librarians like Maria are doing what professionals do when the stakes are high: they're being careful. Methodical. Thorough. They're building spreadsheets, running manual checks, writing justifications, attending compliance trainings, and documenting everything.
And somewhere in those 14 hours, a student who needed her didn't get her.
Early conversations about book compliance framed it as a content problem — figure out which books are "safe" and which aren't. But that framing misses what's actually happening in schools.
Librarians don't need someone to tell them which books are acceptable. They've spent careers developing that judgment. What they need is for the compliance infrastructure to stop consuming the time and expertise they've built.
The bottleneck isn't knowledge. It's capacity.
Bookmarked was built to handle the compliance layer so librarians don't have to. That means:
When the compliance work is handled, Maria gets her 14 hours back. She uses them the way she was trained to use them: connecting students with books that matter.
We track a lot of metrics at Bookmarked. But the one that keeps us honest is simple: are librarians spending more time with students?
Districts that implement Bookmarked report that librarians are spending significantly less time on compliance tasks and more time on collection development, student engagement, and reading programs. That's not a side effect of our platform. That's the point.
Great librarians change lives. We built Bookmarked to make sure they have the time to do it.
Ready to give your librarians their time back? Schedule a conversation with our team.