September 2026

There were 2 posts published in September 2026 (this is page 1 of 1).

Reading Together

Most of my working days are spent on questions about systems: how the library supports student success, what faculty need for their research, and what our community will need from our library as AI reshapes the way people find information, process it, read, and write. I love that work and know it can be transformational for the university. This past weekend, though, gave me a chance to spend time on the literature and books side of the work. And even so, I was reminded of what all of it is ultimately for.1

At Bookmarks, Winston-Salem’s book festival, I heard John Green in conversation with Angie Thomas and Jodi Picoult interviewed by Winston-Salem’s own Virginia Evans. In the middle of all of this my husband and I drove to Raleigh for a stage reading of new work by Hannah Reynolds, a Winston-Salem playwright and ZSR colleague, at the Carolina Playwrights Lab.

What I keep returning to is how much of the weekend was about reading together. We think of reading as a solitary act, one person in a quiet chair with a book, perhaps in an internal conversation with an author. But all weekend reading was something shared, with authors talking through their work in front of thousands of people who were familiar enough with the author to be excited about their next books. The stage reading made this especially vivid. With actors at music stands and no sets or costumes, the audience conjures everything the script leaves open, and we arrive at its meaning together in a shared experience.

Reading is one of the ways we learn and understand what is true, and one of the best ways we have of understanding lives unlike our own. It struck me afterward that the work at the center of the weekend kept circling the boundary between what we process on our own and what we share. John Green’s Hollywood, Ending explores the pull between a public life and a private one, and the search for someone to navigate things with together. Jodi Picoult’s Hollow Bones looks at the stories we tell ourselves as we make sense of our own lives, including ones that may be harder to know as true. And Hannah’s Roses Fading reinforced how much of who we are is in in our minds and memory. We come to make sense of and understand our own lives, and the lives of others, through shared stories.

Those encounters become more meaningful when they are shared, because we test our readings against other people’s. Through bookclub conversations and book talks we are exposed to something someone else noticed that we missed. We might discover that what moved us didn’t affect someone else the same way, and why it was so different. There is also joy in this. Delight sustains us and can help us be open to new perspectives. As Picoult and Evans shared, it can be easier to learn about an issue from fiction than a dry report. I think a lot about how communities seek truth and build empathy. Literature is one of the places where we do this work together.

That conviction connects to how I think about the library’s work right now. AI promises to make reading faster, more personalized, and more summarized, and some of that will genuinely help our students and researchers. Anticipating what our community needs also means protecting the conditions for the slower, shared encounter with ideas I witnessed this weekend. Libraries have always been places of, and created opportunities for, practices through which people learn things together. That purpose feels even more urgent to me now than it did a few years ago.

I saw that purpose on the festival grounds, too. Walking among the tents at Bookmarks, I kept finding Wake Forest librarians at tables ranging from Special Collections to Read Free NC to Bookish Birds. I was able to stop by and talk literature and libraries with the Wake Forest University Press. Seeing colleagues spread across so many corners of the festival was a reminder that a library’s part in the literary life of its city reaches well beyond its own walls, as well.

A city in which people fill rooms to hear authors, and one in which people travel to cheer on their own writers, already understands something important about what literary life is. I’m grateful to live in such a city, and I am excited to see its development since the last time I was part of the Winston-Salem bookish community.2

  1. I am with authors Jodi Picoult and Virginia Evans in enjoying ending sentences with prepositions at times! ↩︎
  2. Back in 2008 I managed the website for the festival! ↩︎

Crossing Thresholds in an Age of Answers

My first library staff role allowed me to focus on technology. I was interested in how search, “web 2.0,” and ecommerce changed people’s expectations of engaging with the library through web browsers. Then I moved into my first librarian position and focused on instruction. I taught classes, I offered instructional design support for faculty across campus, and I eventually managed our credit-bearing instruction program. Because of this I spent a lot of time with the ACRL Information Literacy Standards and then the Information Literacy Framework.

And as with any foundational introduction that shapes your mental models and worldview, I come back to these lenses that shaped me as a librarian pretty routinely. In the AI conversations I keep finding myself in, I return to these two questions: how does this tool change people’s expectations of the library? How does the ACRL Information Literacy Framework support our communities in navigating this evolving world?

The ACRL Information Literacy Standards were a set of skills that a student could demonstrate. This was extremely useful when building a program and assessing the impact of library instruction. But the standards also felt like they didn’t capture the entirety of what was happening in teaching students to navigate the information environment. In 2016 ACRL adopted the Framework for Information Literacy. This was a new way of explaining what we were teaching our students to do: a framework based on the idea of Meyer and Land’s “threshold concepts.” These are central ideas in a field that permanently change how a learner understands the subject and views the world. Meyer and Land described them as transformative, irreversible, integrative, bounded, and troublesome. The information literacy concepts are: authority is constructed and contextual, information creation as a process, information has value, research as inquiry, scholarship as conversation, and searching as strategic exploration.

In 2023 ACRL launched a Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education Review and Revision Task Force to “review the current Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education to determine if it still reflects current thinking, theory, and practice on information literacy. Review lenses could include equity, diversity, and inclusion, and the emergence of generative AI.” In 2026 a draft was shared for comment, in which the concepts remain (though “scholarship as conversation” moves to “knowledge systems as conversation”) and much of the explanatory text is updated. The revised draft went to the ACRL Board for consideration this summer, and a final version hasn’t been announced yet.

The details of the process matter less than what it signals: librarianship treats its own understanding of information literacy as unfinished, and it is revisiting that understanding because the information environment has changed again. That seems right to me, and is a part of the ethos of the field. In an interview, Sara Miller, one of the leads for the project, shared “[a]t this juncture, the concepts expressed in the Framework still seem to provide enough context for framing and informing an IL-based exploration of technologies like AI.”1 I’d agree and go a bit further. AI makes these concepts more urgent, because it smooths over the places where students used to struggle in their search and use of information.

“Troublesome” is the quality I keep coming back to. Meyer and Land meant that these concepts resist easy understanding, and that the resistance is part of how the learning happens. A student who wrestles with why one source carries more weight than another comes out the other side seeing information differently. Generative AI is remarkably good at removing that resistance. It answers fluently, attributes selectively or not at all, and hands over a finished synthesis where a student once had to build one. Each frame names an understanding that grows out of the friction an AI answer smooths away.

So how does a student come to understand:

  • That authority is constructed and contextual when output has no visible author?
  • That information creation as a process when production is hidden?
  • That information has value when the people whose work fed the model go unseen and uncredited?
  • Research as inquiry when they simply ask a question and receive an answer?
  • Scholarship as conversation/knowledge systems as conversation: when sources dissolve into a synthesis?
  • Searching as strategic exploration: when it’s just a matter of designing a single prompt returning a confident answer?

Of course there are cases when AI can also support threshold crossing. It’s been clear to me in my own use that having a knowledge base when working with AI can be generative and useful. But when I’m thinking about working with a student who is just forming their foundational knowledge of their discipline and is making sense of new information, the encounter should produce enough friction for the learning to stick. AI is most useful to people who have already crossed these thresholds and is riskiest for those who haven’t (a theme I find myself ruminating on a lot these days).

Libraries have spent decades teaching toward these exact understandings, and we have long known that struggle is part of the lesson. I remember debates in my graduate program about whether to teach with a live search or a carefully planned one, and they resolved quickly: students learned more from watching someone conduct a search and evolve their thinking in the process than from a smooth, canned demonstration. That lesson feels newly relevant. People increasingly expect information to arrive polished and finished, and part of our work is to help them notice what that polish disguises. The emphasis in our teaching should be shifting from finding the right sources toward thinking well about whatever information arrives, and the Framework holds up for both.

  1. Miller, Sara, Ross, Leslie, & Maye, Kay. “The Framework’s Next Chapter: An Interview with ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education Review and Revision Task Force Leaders Sara Miller and Leslie Ross” College & Research Libraries News [Online], Volume 87 Number 4 (31 March 2026). https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/27281/35079 ↩︎