Years ago I kept a blog (at this URL, even!) where I thought out loud about libraries, knowledge, and the profession I’d built my career around. I was good at it for a while, and then I wasn’t, and then I stopped for all the usual reasons: changing life phase, less personal time to spend on it, increasingly demanding institutional role, the way the platforms evolved from places of earnest and open discussion… I drifted so far away from blogging and this website that when a back up didn’t capture all the files I wasn’t even all that disappointed.
But lately I’ve really missed thinking in public with other colleagues interested in exploring the same ideas. And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about academic libraries, our information environment, and the ways we talk about and use artificial intelligence.
AI is reshaping how people find, evaluate, and trust information. Within libraries we have people all across the spectrum: from those who fully embrace it to those who believe it has no place near our work. One of the dominant narratives outside of the profession treats libraries as information retrieval systems and concludes that AI makes them redundant. This framing mistakes the symptom for the disease. Libraries are epistemic infrastructure. They are the mechanisms through which communities organize their relationship to knowledge. AI doesn’t replace that, but it does make that role all the more urgent.
This lens keeps coming up for me in conversations in varied spheres. Jesse Shera and Margaret Egan’s social epistemology, which understands libraries not as warehouses but as institutions that shape the conditions under which knowing is possible, is foundational to how I think about this work. So is feminist epistemology, particularly Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges and Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory. These frameworks were built to interrogate science. But it turns out that they are extremely useful when interrogating AI as well.
I’m writing as a person who has spent two decades in academic libraries and who has been thinking about knowledge, power, and institutions since an undergraduate philosophy degree made those questions unavoidable. At this URL, I am not writing as an institutional voice. This is a thinking space. I’m hoping that arguments will develop, get complicated, and occasionally get revised. I expect to adapt to new information.
What follows this post is the first real argument: why the obsolescence narrative has it backwards, and what a clearer account of libraries and knowledge reveals about the epistemic stakes of this moment.
I’m still trying to understand where people talk about these things today. In some ways everything was a lot cleaner when the answer was a blog with open comments, an RSS reader, and Twitter. The messiness of our knowledge environment today (LinkedIn? Bluesky? Mastodon? SubStack? Chat threads? Everywhere?) resonates with the messiness of the information ecosystem I’m trying to write about.