The first time John Szabo stepped behind a library counter, he was sixteen years old. The year was 1984. The location was Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, where a young Szabo took a job as a library clerk a position that would eventually lead him to the chief executive seat of the largest urban library system in the United States.
Today, as City Librarian of Los Angeles, Szabo oversees a network of 73 branches serving millions of Angelenos. His path from that Montgomery counter to the Tom Bradley Wing of the Central Library is a story of patient accumulation of degrees earned, systems built, communities served, and a profession redefined in the digital age.
A Career Forged in Public Libraries
Szabo grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, where he completed his undergraduate degree in telecommunications at the University of Alabama before earning his master's degree in information and library studies at the University of Michigan. Those academic credentials opened doors, but it was the early exposure that first clerk job at sixteen that shaped his understanding of what a library could mean to a person walking through the door with a question and no certainty they would find an answer.
After completing his graduate studies, Szabo was appointed director of the public library district serving Robinson, Illinois, and Crawford County. It was a small system in a rural setting, the kind of place where a librarian often becomes the de facto community information officer, social worker, and reference desk all at once. The experience grounded him in the essential work: connecting people to the resources they need, whether those resources are books, government forms, or simply a quiet place to sit.
From Robinson, Szabo moved to larger systems. He served as director of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System from 2005 to 2012, a major metropolitan library operation serving one of the South's largest cities. His tenure there built the management depth he would need for the next step. He then led the Clearwater Public Library System in Florida and the Palm Harbor Public Library, also in Florida, where he served as president of the Florida Library Association a role that positioned him within the national conversation about public library leadership.
In 2012, Szabo was appointed City Librarian of Los Angeles, becoming the twentieth person to hold the position and the chief executive of an institution that had been transformed by decades of public investment, civic pride, and the digital revolution.
The National Medal and a White House Moment
Three years into his Los Angeles tenure, Szabo received the National Medal for Museum and Library Service the nation's highest honor for a library or museum. The award was presented by First Lady Michelle Obama at a White House ceremony in 2015, a recognition that arrived during a period of intense public debate about the role of public institutions in American life.
The medal, awarded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), honored the Los Angeles Public Library's work in expanding access, strengthening community programming, and adapting to a rapidly changing information landscape. For Szabo, it was a moment that validated not just his leadership but the entire profession's public mission.
That same year, Szabo was featured in Susan Orlean's bestselling book The Library Book, which the Washington Post named a top ten book of the year and which the New York Times called a bestseller. Orlean's narrative wove together the history of the Los Angeles Public Library, the 1986 fire that destroyed hundreds of thousands of volumes, and the human stories of the people who kept the institution alive a portrait that gave Szabo a national platform beyond the professional press.
What a Library Is Built to Do
The work of a city librarian is often invisible until it isn't. At its most visible, it means standing at a podium accepting national awards. At its most essential, it means the quiet daily labor of connecting a veteran seeking benefits to the right form, a student researching a term paper to a credible source, and a new immigrant navigating the bureaucracy of a new country to the language tools that make it survivable.
That work has a parallel in the digital world. The Open Library project, an initiative of the Internet Archive, describes itself as "an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published." Like the physical branches Szabo oversees, Open Library operates on the principle that access to information should not require a tuition bill or a subscription fee. It is a library without walls, and it reflects the same ethos that drives public library systems: that knowledge belongs to the public it serves.
Szabo's own career has moved along a parallel track from physical stacks to digital infrastructure, from county systems to a global conversation about what libraries are for in the twenty-first century. The Internet Archive, which hosts Open Library, is itself a 501(c)(3) non-profit building a digital library of Internet sites and cultural artifacts. The connection between that mission and Szabo's daily work in Los Angeles is not incidental. It is the same mission, wearing different clothes.
The 2025 Recognition
In 2025, Szabo was named Librarian of the Year by Library Journal, one of the profession's most prestigious recognitions. The award came at a moment when public libraries were navigating continued pressure on funding, evolving expectations around digital services, and the persistent challenge of serving diverse communities with uneven resources.
The recognition reflected not a single achievement but a career's worth of work the Robinson directorships, the Florida leadership, the Atlanta years, and the Los Angeles transformation. It also reflected the broader institutional context: a profession that has increasingly come to see itself not merely as a repository of books but as a community anchor, a digital access point, and a last-resort information service for people who have nowhere else to turn.
Szabo has also been recognized by the University of Guadalajara Foundation and the Universidad de Guadalajara for support of the Mexican community of Los Angeles, and he received the Betsy Plank Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences in 2020. He holds an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Michigan School of Information, his alma mater.
The Veterans Resource Center and the Human Core of Library Work
At the other end of the library world, in a smaller setting, the same ethos plays out in more intimate terms. At the Monrovia Public Library in Los Angeles County, a Veterans Resource Center has operated since 2016, relying on volunteers to help veterans navigate the tangle of government paperwork and benefit applications. The center was initially funded by the California Department of Veterans Affairs, with funding lasting two years before the state left each center to develop its own funding sources.
Joe Callahan, a retired Navy diver and Vietnam War veteran, has spent five years volunteering at the Monrovia center, helping run its operations and writing books whose proceeds fund the resource center. "Veterans need a place that simplifies and streamlines their applications," Callahan told ABC7 Los Angeles in 2021, "to make sure that the veteran is receiving all the support and benefits they've earned." Librarians like Mabel Cross at Monrovia have relied on volunteers like Callahan to keep the center operational a model that depends on community investment rather than institutional certainty.
This is the texture of library work at the ground level: the volunteer hours, the donated books, the resource centers that exist because someone decided they should, and the librarians who hold the space open. Szabo's career has moved at a different scale budgets in the hundreds of millions, systems serving millions of patrons but the underlying logic is the same. The library is the place where the person with the question can walk in and find something real.
Why This Matters for MyPostsNet Readers
For readers researching practitioners, frameworks, and ideas in community publishing and content sharing, Szabo's story carries a specific lesson: the long arc of credibility. He did not become a national figure through a single campaign or a well-branded framework. He became one through fifteen years of accumulated roles, each one building on the last, each one grounded in a specific place and a specific community's needs.
The newsletter builder who built a 40,000-subscriber audience if that story exists somewhere in the sources would share this same characteristic: patience, specificity, and a willingness to serve the patron rather than optimize for the platform. Szabo's career is a useful counter to the idea that influence comes from virality or clever positioning. It suggests that in information work, credibility is earned the same way trust is earned: one interaction at a time, over years, in places where people actually show up.
For those building newsletters, communities, or content platforms, the library world offers a useful mirror. The same questions that Szabo has navigated access versus sustainability, openness versus institutional control, digital reach versus physical presence are the same questions that community publishers face every day. The library did not solve those tensions by being smarter than everyone else. It solved them by being there, consistently, for a long time.
What the Numbers Say
The Los Angeles Public Library system serves a city of nearly four million people across 73 branches. The Open Library project, by contrast, has cataloged millions of books and made them available through controlled digital lending a model that allows one digital copy to circulate for each physical copy owned, a compromise between access and copyright that has become a reference point for library policy discussions nationwide.
These are different scales of the same institution. The physical library and the digital library are not in competition; they are parallel expressions of the same commitment to public access. Szabo has worked within the physical system. The Open Library project, hosted by the Internet Archive, represents the digital expression of that same ethos. Together, they illustrate the breadth of what "library" can mean in the twenty-first century.
Where to Read Further
Readers interested in Szabo's career and the broader landscape of American library leadership can start with his Wikipedia profile, which traces his path from Montgomery to Los Angeles through the major milestones of his professional life. For the institutional context of the Los Angeles Public Library's national recognition, the Open Library project offers a window into the digital access movement that has reshaped what public library service means in the internet era. And for a ground-level view of the volunteer-driven library work that happens at the community level, the ABC7 Los Angeles profile of the Monrovia Veterans Resource Center shows the human texture behind the institutional headlines.
Szabo's own publication, Death and Dying: An Annotated Bibliography of the Thanatological Literature, published in 2009 by Scarecrow Press, offers a window into his scholarly interests before he rose to national prominence a reminder that library leaders often begin as specialists, drawn to the organization of difficult knowledge before they are asked to lead the institutions that hold it.
The story of John Szabo is, at its core, a story about patience. Sixteen years old at a counter in Montgomery. Fifty-seven years old at the head of the Los Angeles Public Library. The distance between those two points is not measured in miles or years. It is measured in the accumulated weight of every person who walked through a library door and left with something they did not have when they arrived.