One of the biggest challenges for libraries telling their story is that the library means something different depending on who’s in the room. For a student, it’s a place to study and a staff full of people who want them to succeed. For a faculty member, it might be the invisible infrastructure that delivers electronic articles or the subject liaison who visits their class each year. For a graduate student, it’s often something more: a research partner, a data collaborator, a guide through the methodological expectations of a discipline. And that’s before accounting for the larger information environment that those users are already swimming in, where disciplines publish at high rates; trade publications and newsletters and Substacks produce sense-making content daily; and social media, messaging apps, and community channels add still more. The information environment is a flood around us, and the library is one stream of that flow.
Because of this, and for my entire career, I’ve started from the question of what the typical user actually does when looking for information. That question should shape how we structure the materials we license and steward, how we design services that meet patron behavior rather than assume it, and how we think about instruction. It was the right question when search engines were starting to work well, when Wikipedia launched, and it remains the right question now.
Which is why I keep returning to Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera. They weren’t describing what libraries do. They were describing what knowledge requires, and they built that argument from inside library science. That distinction matters enormously right now, because it means the epistemic infrastructure libraries provide isn’t only a feature of libraries as institutions. It’s a feature of how communities actually come to know things.
When Shera and Egan introduced the term “social epistemology” in 1952, they were writing at a particular moment in information science history, when the field was working to establish its intellectual legitimacy. They were pushing against a narrower, technically retrieval-based conception of the field, arguing that the social dimension wasn’t supplementary to the epistemic function but constitutive of it. “Social” in this sense doesn’t mean communal or community-oriented in a casual way. What they meant was structural: knowledge is not produced by individual minds in isolation and then deposited into libraries for safekeeping. It is produced through systems of validation, circulation, critique, and preservation, and libraries are part of the infrastructure that makes those systems work. Shera would return to and refine this framework across the following decades, and the thread runs forward through Wilson’s work on cognitive authority, through Chatman’s research on information poverty, and eventually into the ACRL Information Literacy Framework, even when the explicit vocabulary of social epistemology wasn’t used. The social is epistemic.
I’ve been thinking about this framework for over twenty years, and I keep returning to the same question: why didn’t it take over the profession? The framework was there in 1952. Information literacy has been moving toward it for decades, most recently with the ACRL Information Literacy Framework document. And yet the dominant self-description of libraries remained access-delivery-focused for most of that period. Part of this, I suspect, is a cultural problem. Whenever I talk with someone about libraries, they want to reminisce about the last one they used in any significant way, which means the conversation often starts with card catalogs, or surprise that students can eat in the library now, or wondering where all the books went. When people carry such varying, yet book-based, memories, it’s hard to talk about where libraries are going without first establishing where they actually are. And when the people you’re trying to reach are administrators facing their own funding pressures and a desire for metrics, the epistemic argument can feel harder to make than an argument based in easy-to-report circulation counts.
What does it mean to be epistemic infrastructure rather than an information warehouse? The warehouse metaphor, which was easy to count in gate entries and items circulated, treats knowledge as something that exists prior to the library and gets stored there. The infrastructure metaphor treats the library as part of what makes certain kinds of knowing possible at all, not a convenience for accessing knowledge that would exist regardless, but a condition for the scholarly practices through which knowledge gets produced, validated, and preserved. The metaphor here is road versus car. The road doesn’t move the car. But without it, the car doesn’t go anywhere useful. The library is the road. But it might be even more accurate to say it’s the whole Department of Transportation, responsible not just for the surface you drive on but for whether the road reaches your neighborhood at all.
This is the frame through which I think the current AI moment becomes legible. The proliferation of AI tools in research and information seeking isn’t asking libraries to become something new. It’s asking libraries to be more fully what Shera and Egan described seven decades ago. As AI systems become embedded in how people search, synthesize, and evaluate information, the question of what epistemic infrastructure exists to support genuine knowing becomes more urgent, not less. The road matters more when the vehicles are faster and harder to steer. Libraries that understand themselves as epistemic infrastructure, as systems that make certain kinds of knowing possible for their communities, are positioned to do that work. Libraries that understand themselves primarily as access points to content are in a harder position to articulate why they matter when access has become frictionless and ubiquitous.
For the librarians reading this: this is why the work you’re already doing is philosophically serious, not just practically useful. For the administrators and institutional leaders in the room: understanding libraries as epistemic infrastructure changes what decisions about them actually mean.
This is a post in an ongoing project exploring libraries, knowledge, and the epistemic stakes of artificial intelligence. I’m drawing on social epistemology, feminist theory, and two decades of practice in academic libraries.