When I started blogging, I was in library school. I continued to blog into my first librarian position and into my first managerial role. I shifted away from rough-draft public thinking and into more formal presentations and service work as I moved further into administration. For one I was learning a new organizational culture and didn’t want to represent my team poorly. But I was also aware that the hierarchical asymmetry meant people within my organization might not feel they could easily push back which meant I might not know if something landed incorrectly. Given my interest in social epistemology and understanding of how positionality shapes the feedback you receive it felt that the thinking in public was in tension with my institutional role. The cost I felt from that shift wasn’t just reputational caution, I lost touch with the writing practice that kept me engaged in the intellectual work.

And now that I’m back at Wake Forest, with my feet under me, it felt like the right context to try again. This is a smaller organization in which I can know everyone that works in the library, some of whom remember my earlier blogging practice. I know the University very well, across decades. I also think that there is enough trust that people would tell me (or they would tell someone who could tell me) if something I wrote made their lives harder.

I started this blog because I had accumulated a lot of thoughts about AI and librarianship: threads of ideas that I hadn’t yet woven together. I thought I could write about them publicly, hear responses, evolve my thinking, and find people interested in the same slice of the issue I can’t stop thinking about. If it went well, maybe the content would find its way to an article or a presentation.

I’ve been at it long enough now that I’m beginning to remember what blogging meant to me professionally. Ideas lead to more ideas. Each time I post something I find three more tangents that I want to pin down. I’m reading less out of obligation and more because something might connect to what I’m already thinking about. Giving myself permission to write is also giving myself permission to think seriously about things that don’t have an obvious deliverable, and it’s also a way to give the people I work with a window into that thinking if they want one. I’ve worked in enough organizations in which I wanted to know a bit more about how people in leadership were thinking about issues that were emergent that I know it can be helpful to have access to some of that interior process.

So the practice is good for me whether or not it finds a reader, though I do have a reader in mind. This blog is my attempt to translate the critical AI literature for people with institutional power to act on it: whether that’s a librarian working directly with a patron, or a dean, or a provost making decisions about how their institution engages with these tools. There are thoughtful people focused on the practical dimensions of AI use, and equally thoughtful people working on the theoretical and critical dimensions. I find myself most interested in bridging those two areas. The critical literature exists, the practitioner literature exists, and there’s a space between them, and that’s where I’m trying to work. And that’s shown up across posts, whether it’s exploring how AI’s authoritative tone obscures what it returns, or how a broad view of information literacy points the way towards what AI literacy may be.

Most people doing this work have never needed the word “epistemic” to do librarianship well, and that’s exactly the point. The framework isn’t new vocabulary for new work. It’s a way of seeing what was already there. That’s what’s happening here: naming what librarians have always known how to do, so that knowledge doesn’t get lost in the moment that most needs it.