Access Services – Libraries as Epistemic Institutions

I’ve been thinking about the individual experience of students who become scholars through repeated acts of recognition, and the necessity of scale. I’ve had the good fortune to have the experience of working in places that can be very high touch and in institutions where you have to start with scale first and find ways to come back to individual relationships. My experience shows there are things we all can learn from organizations facing different approaches to the scale challenge. What is true at all of these institutions is that the answer is never exceptional staff members or individual priorities, but rather the architecture of our approach. The infrastructure of belonging is based in how public services is organized, trained, and philosophically oriented. When I spoke at the 2025 Access Services conference my keynote was titled The Foundational Leadership of Access Services: How Service Builds Institutional Possibility and we reframed the precision, presence, and partnership that public services offer as acts of leadership, and today I am also thinking of them as epistemic practices.

The vocabulary problem: “support” obscures what’s actually happening

Public and Access Services work is often framed as support. As someone who started her career in this type of work, I don’t think most people were thinking of it as “supporting cast” but rather “critical support.” And yet I know that words matter and the work “support” is a word that can easily place these roles outside of the epistemic function they actually enable. Support can be seen as peripheral, supplementary, downstream. Infrastructure is load-bearing. The distinction matters institutionally because what you call something shapes what you’re willing to invest in, who you think can lead it, and how you measure its value. When I was thinking about the frame “warehouse versus infrastructure,” this is the way it can show up when talking with people who don’t understand the role of libraries in 2026. They’re busy thinking of books, gate counts, and the library as a place that takes resources and stores things. Anyone actually working in a library knows we’re enabling the work of learning and knowledge production. Yes, that is done through collections and useful spaces, but it’s also the consultations, services, collaborative environments that we create and a cultural position of valuing and amplifying our institutions’ scholarly contributions. The work that contributes to these, as the work of access services, is not support but strategic infrastructure.

Precision as epistemic practice

Precision in public services means knowing enough about what a patron actually needs (as distinct from what they asked for) to respond usefully. That’s not customer service; it’s a form of situated knowledge-making. The public services professional who anticipates the need behind the request, who knows the difference between a student who is lost in a database and a student who is lost in the institution, is doing interpretive work with real epistemic stakes. Library science programs teach the craft of the reference interview, a framework for understanding this interpretive work. Many access services staff have developed the same capacity through sustained attention to the people in front of them, arriving at the practice without the vocabulary for it. The work is the same; the paths to it are different. When this work happens in access services, staff document procedures, preserve institutional memory, and build systems that help others know what the answers are (and maybe even where they came from and why). This is Haraway’s situated knowledge in organizational form.

Presence as epistemic practice

Presence is the capacity to actually see what’s in front of you, to read uncertainty in real people rather than in abstracted queries. AI performs retrieval and synthesis, and it can be very good at this. It cannot perform presence in the way the work requires. It cannot notice that someone is overwhelmed rather than confused, or that the real question is different from the stated question, or that this moment calls for de-escalation rather than information. What access services professionals do when they read the room, as they adapt, calibrate, and respond to what is actually happening in front of them, is precisely the thing AI cannot do and performs as though it can. AI’s performed epistemic humility responds with certainty. Even when it expresses doubt, it does so in a way that is overconfident. I routinely find myself getting a reasonable answer but knowing it’s wrong, reporting that it is, and getting an answer that says something to the effect of “oh, of course! now that I think of it…” but I only had the certainty to push back because of decades of thinking about the topics we’re exploring. Students, in particular, don’t have that intellectual scaffolding in place quite yet, it’s part of why they’re there! The human that is present with them can see hesitancy and read the situation to adapt in a way that is genuinely useful for learning.

Partnership as epistemic practice

Partnership is the long-term orientation. It’s the understanding that creating a knower isn’t transactional but relational, and it happens across time and repeated contact. Pugh’s connective labor has become a really important framework for me. It’s the idea that there is important work in seeing another person in their specificity and forging emotional understanding with others. This is the work of building relationships through which inquiry becomes possible, and is what I’ve been talking about in the last few posts. In my broader epistemological frame, partnership also means something institutional: the library is a core partner in the university’s knowledge mission, not an auxiliary to it.

Precision, presence, and partnership happen all the time, in public services work. In every interaction, in observed interactions, in just the physical presence of a caring staff member this work impacts all students who pass through and use the library. The architecture of these service experiences is how this epistemic practice and leadership scale well beyond what one might otherwise expect. This work scales because of what surrounds each interaction: the hiring that selects for people who can read a room, the training that treats interpretive work as a competency, the documentation that lets one staff member’s insight become another’s starting point, the shared orientation that makes precision and presence feel like the job rather than extras added onto it.

If precision, presence, and partnership are epistemic practices, they require investment of a different kind than service competencies do. You don’t evaluate epistemic labor the same way you evaluate service provision. You don’t staff it the same way. The answer is hiring, training, culture, documentation, institutional memory, and shared philosophical orientation. And the shifts necessary to prioritize the epistemic frame may run counter to the efficiency answers that most institutions have been pushing toward over time. Every investment is an exercise in prioritization, and when determining how to support developing scholars and belonging, this should be an area to consider.

In my last post I was really thinking through what it means to create a knower. Today I’ve been thinking about the institutional infrastructure through which that creation happens not once but thousands of times, distributed across a function that has rarely been named in these terms in institutional leadership conversations. When universities ask what libraries do, access services is usually the last thing they think to examine; in reality it should be among the first.

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.

We’ve been there before, or we’ve known students who have been there: the student that arrives on campus, looks at the library, and isn’t sure where to begin or whether they belong. The building itself is imposing. The volume of materials is vast to sort through. I remember being so intimidated by the reference librarians that I went to the reference department to use chat instead of talking to a person face to face. (Thank goodness the NCSU Libraries were early chat adopters!)

When a student finally makes their way to the library, it’s more than a service transaction. We all know that a sense of belonging helps people feel comfortable using the library. Belonging as a student, a scholar, a researcher enables a person to produce, evaluate, and build on knowledge. The library doesn’t merely deliver information, but creates the conditions under which a person can become a knower.

Harding’s standpoint theory holds that where you stand shapes what you can know. Exclusion from epistemic communities isn’t just unfair, it’s a structural constraint on inquiry itself. A new student’s moment of recognition, feeling seen, that they belong here, is the moment that student gains a foothold in the epistemic community of the university. That’s not merely affective but rather it’s a structural shift. This is why Shera and Egan’s social epistemology has been so central to my thinking. It’s the social in social epistemology, and the architecture of belonging is part of the architecture of knowledge.

Epistemic belonging is not evenly distributed, and the uneven distribution is the structural consequence of what standpoint theory describes. First-generation students, students from under-resourced schools, students navigating institutional culture for the first time are precisely the people for whom the conditions of knowing are least present before they arrive. Libraries are one of the few institutions structurally positioned to address this, not by delivering more information, but by extending the conditions of inquiry to people who haven’t yet had access to them. This is what “epistemic infrastructure” means at the human scale.

The people doing this work are often public services colleagues. A lot of our profession’s training in this area is focused on customer service and user experience. And this is certainly part of the tool kit and expertise that access and public services staff provide! But I also think that on a more foundational level these colleagues are doing epistemic labor: creating, moment by moment and person by person, the conditions under which a broader range of people can become knowers. That labor takes the form of precision, presence, partnership. My library recently read Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job which has led to a number of thoughtful discussions about the importance of Connective Labor and the work that we do, especially in the context of AI. (More on that in the next post.)

AI can deliver information. But AI cannot see the student at the door, extend belonging, or create the felt sense of “I am someone who is allowed to ask questions here.” The epistemic function that most urgently needs doing right now is not synthesis or retrieval. It is the creation of knowers, and that requires a human who is paying attention.

When I used the new chat feature to connect with that reference librarian in college, she ended up being so friendly and helpful that I revealed that I was actually in the same room and could come over to talk in more detail. She didn’t shame me for that; she welcomed me. She made me feel like my question was interesting and welcomed me into a community of people interested in learning. And I returned again and again. All aspects of library work contribute to the learning and research mission of our institutions, but none of that will matter if people don’t feel that they are members of our epistemic communities.