Throughout our time this semester I’ve been consistently moved by this idea: libraries are there to provide access to information in all its forms. This makes them a natural fit for continued learning, for thinking of the library as a classroom. For most people, formal learning ends with formal schooling, but surely actual learning doesn’t stop then. We learn every day from the media and information we consume actively or passively, the tasks of everyday life, interacting with public and private services, the people we know.
The library was once the place for the “I have an information need” kind of learning, the acquisitive, and it still can be! As Brian Kenney discussed in “Where Reference Fits in the Modern Library” most of these simple question and answer information needs are probably, for most people, fulfilled by a Google search. Maybe that Google search is good enough, maybe not, but ultimately maybe it’s just making space for the library to be something else. I think the attitude we should start having overall towards libraries is not, “how are we being replaced?” but instead how do we now have the time and space to do something new, different, and exciting!
The library as classroom is just that sort of thing! Looking at Digital Learn I’m thinking about that for some people, these very simple technology tutorials could make a world of difference. It can be fun and wild and exploratory like all these examples. I love the idea of librarians themselves being actively guiding curriculum and pedagogy, of librarians as teachers, like Joan K Lippincott describes in “The Future for Teaching and Learning” and like Michael discusses in “YLibrary”.
I’m especially drawn to Joshua Block’s notion of “Embracing Messy Learning”! What a beautiful idea, to let kids kind of feel it out for themselves, to go at their own pace and work things out. School settings and formal learning can sometimes feel restrictive, punitive even for kids, after all, they have to be there. I think that in order for libraries as classrooms to be successful, embracing messy learning needs to be a founding principle. Joshua observes how the kids’ focus and engagement comes in waves, but with a little guidance and support, their project materializes. I think that if kids feel that sense of ownership without being corralled, they learn so much more effectively.
I want to explore the idea of libraries as classroom for people outside of formal learning age or settings more. Åke Nygren’s conference paper “The Public Library as a Community Hub for Connected Learning” presents a model for not just libraries hosting classes, but for creating an entire network of information and resources that can be earnestly used for learning. Leveraging non-profit foundation support, other libraries, other local institutions, corporations, libraries can create lasting connections that can provide services for learning with more access, more resources, and that are likely more resilient and sustainable to shifts in funding. I think if people know that it’s not just some one-off course in a library meeting room, but instead a consistent year-round programming series, there will be a lot more buy-in.
I think library as classroom is also an excellent way to draw in volunteers and individuals with their own unique expertise. Librarians could be in more of a support role, coordinating events, while community members, maybe some with past professional experience in whatever their teaching, or just professional-level hobbyist experience in something, share their knowledge with the community. Honestly I think about how many people there are out there who have turned their hobbies into productive, cottage-industry qua influencer work, and how natural they would be at leading community classes in a library classroom.
I think libraries could even form some kind of parallel academia on some level. There’s a lot of people out there who want the kind of engagement with heady-academic material that can be hard to access outside PhD programs. These programs are expensive, exclusive, and also, probably you don’t need to complete a dissertation to satisfy your budding interest in contemporary philosophy! Could the library as classroom also be a library as upper-level course? Could be an interesting space for generating thought.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (Didion, 1979) — I thought a lot about this quote while exploring “The Power of Stories” module — the quote goes on:
“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
For me, this truly pins down the power of stories into a thesis. To put it differently than Didion, I would say this: life can be difficult, complicated, scary and vast. We need ways of ordering our lives and experience, and we do that through narrative, through the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
This is actually a skillset, I believe, a set of learned behaviors that may vary in their effectiveness. It can be inherited, from family or social circles — the way your parents might tell the story of your family and its history can have a big impact, as you might use it as the basis to start telling your own. It might have a massive impact on the way you approach the world!
For instance what if the story you heard growing up was: “The Johnson’s have always made it through adversity, no matter what we persevere!”
As compared to: “There’s been a curse on the Johnson family for generations…”
Or maybe you’re from a family that doesn’t tell any sort of story about itself – that might lead to a lot of confusion and ambiguity about your place in life. You might also take it as an opportunity to really have more control about how your story is told.
Either way you might develop these skills or not, I think hearing the way other people conceive of their own narratives, how they choose to tell a story about their life and experience, can have a profound impact on your own. I think that The Human Library for instance is an absolutely incredible idea that could bring one into contact with personal narratives and stories, and open one up to ways of living and dealing with life that you never previously considered. If libraries create a space for people to come together in non-judgmental open dialogue, I think there’s room for so much understanding and empathy, not just for others’ experience, but your own as well. The success of programs like The Human Library or StoryCorps should be our model to build on, maybe even hosting public events where people tell stories in a more performance style, like The Moth Radio Hour for just a small audience.
I’ve also been thinking about the possibility of the power of stories to truly heal people. What if we provided space at a library for people to come and bear witness for people who really need to share something, get something off their chest? I think this could have a genuine therapeutic impact. One model I’m thinking about is Mutual Aid Social Therapy (M.A.S.T.), developed by the Jane Addams collective, which aims to utilize a spectrum of mental health methodologies in small, anonymous community groups. It seeks to flatten the hierarchies of traditional mental health pathologies, instead relying on the knowledge of its community and a core of guiding literature to help give people the resources to process and heal trauma and grief, whether personal, or social.
I think the basis of all good therapy, and certainly for a M.A.S.T. community, is the simple act of getting to voice your problems out loud. Sometimes, just being given a space to do that can be the first opportunity someone has had to start understanding and processing what they’ve been through. This is the power of stories: what we hold inside as personalized cognitive experience, that “shifting phantasmagoria” can overwhelm us, but when we begin to give it form, externalize it, we can just maybe start to control it. Libraries, with their connection to knowledge resources on just about everything, seems to be a natural place for a M.A.S.T community to form. Librarians could assist in gathering literature resources for community members depending on what might be coming up.
I think that stories also connect us to the real root of all culture. In times before a system of writing or recording, all knowledge and information was passed through stories. As the written or recorded word has become privileged over the speaker, what have we lost? Even as we’ve reached a point in time where perhaps more people than ever are expressing their thoughts and feelings in posts on the internet, how is this different from hearing a story directly from someone in front of you. Libraries should continue using their unique place in our society and culture as a place where everyone belongs to recenter the power of the story.
“You can learn anything if you make it playful” – this quote from Pam Sandlian Smith’s Ted Talk What to expect from libraries in the 21st century (2013) really struck me. Taken from the end of this section about how the simple experiment of hiring goats to mow the library property opened up a flood of engagement with library patrons, it perfectly illustrates a lot of the themes we discuss in this course.
One of my favorite things from this module was the Insta Novels from the New York Public Library. When I first clicked through I didn’t know what to think — I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. Honestly, my first assumption was that this was some kind of condensed, abridged version of novels, put on social media for short attention spans. My immediate reaction was to get a little grouchy about physical books, about how no one wants to read anymore, yada, yada, yada cue old man yells at cloud.
Of course it took me about 3 seconds to realize that I was completely and entirely WRONG about this! I went to the NYPL Instagram page and looked to see if this project was still recent enough in their story highlight section. There it was: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. I clicked in, and sure enough, full-text, complete with illustrations and eerie, vibe-y music.
Utterly genius. Honestly I sat there and read a decent chunk of it before realizing that I did really need to finish school work! I genuinely think this is so brilliant — a lot of people must follow their local library system on Instagram, and it’s a good enough way of reaching people as it is to market services, programming, collection materials etc. But to actually bring the book right to my eyeballs via the Stories feature? What a perfect way to interrupt an activity that can sometimes become compulsive and passive. And while it can be compulsive and passive, I also regularly encounter information every single day via my Instagram stories that is of material impact to me, whether it’s an information need I knew I had or not. Sometimes a political or philosophical account I follow will post fairly long-form meme-essays in a series of stories, walls of text. If I read and click through dense media in that context, why not a book?
In “Scenario 5: Short Form” from the 2024 IFLA Trend Report, they discuss how platforms like TikTok have led to the rise of the short-form video format as the dominant language of social media. They weigh the potential consequences of reductive content against its utility for libraries and knowledge organizations, and I think that if the right people are using it, for something like disseminating literature, there’s a lot of room for growth and positivity. The ALA’s Center for the Library of the Future (n.d.) also highlights shortform and serialized reading as experiencing a resurgence.
While the format might be slivered into bite-sized pieces, some TikTok creators utilize it for serialized storytelling, like the infamous Who TF Did I Marry with over 50 installments. If you ask me, these storytelling TikToks rely on the same suspense and page-turning impulse as reading a good book. While they might capture a different immediate energy of something happening to real people, who’s to say we couldn’t adapt this to mirror what the NYPL has done with the Insta Novels? Imagine stumbling upon video 2,394 out of 50,400 of a TikTokker reading you Crime and Punishment? As best I can tell, no one is doing this yet, but probably they should! Or community reading marathon at the library on Instagram live?
I should follow another great piece of advice from Pan Sandlian Smith’s Ted Talk, and try and it myself. Like Walter Pulaski says: “who else is gonna do this?”
References
Center for the Future of Libraries (n.d.) Short Reading. ALA. https://www.ala.org/future/trends/shortreading
NLB Singapore (2023, March 23). Beyond books: An art studio in a library | The library report #29 [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VvOGviPic8
NYPL Staff. (2018, August, 22). Insta Novels: Bringing classic literature to Instagram Stories. New York Public Library. https://wayback.archive-it.org/18689/20220311170035/https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/08/22/instanovels
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. (2024). 2024 Trend Report: Facing the Future of Information with Confidence. Dezuanni, M. & Osman, K.
Tedx Talks (2013, December 16). What to expect from libraries in the 21st century [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa6ERdxyYdo&t=452s
Tom Scott (2019, October 14). Why Helsinki’s library robots aren’t important [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPb9o3uDF_Q&t=246s
Who TF did I marry? (2025, July 20). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_TF_Did_I_Marry%3F
Okay so here’s the idea — we’re going to take the idea of a tool lending library a step further. I promise I’ll get to the point ASAP but here’s a little preamble: a lot of people must know about tool lending libraries at this point, they’re absolutely fantastic and they make a lot of sense (Hamilton, 2021). If I have a DIY project around the house, do I want to go out to Home Depot and drop a few hundred dollars on a tool I may or may not ever use again? No. Maybe you have a family member, neighbor, or friend that might have the equipment or the know-how to help, but then again, maybe you don’t, or maybe they don’t have the exact thing you need. This is where tool lending libraries come in: you check the tool out, you use it, you bring it back, saving money on buying or renting a tool, and probably on the cost of hiring a contractor.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tool lending libraries and what other context they might be really impactful in as a library service. The other day I was procrastinating, on YouTube, and I stumbled upon a really great video about one of the all-time great radio shows: Car Talk.
In this video YouTuber Angela Collier does a fantastic job of explaining how Car Talk is actually a science podcast wherein the hosts, brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi address people’s car troubles with an investigative/scientific-method process — if you have the time I highly recommend a watch.
So what on earth does this have to do with libraries you might be asking at this point? Well, on a base level, the idea of providing information, expertise, and problem-solving to the issue of car repair, an infamously difficult realm of knowledge to master, serves a dire information need. Something else in the video really stood out to me — apparently one of Tom and Ray’s early ventures in the car repair space after graduating at MIT was creating a do-it-yourself auto repair shop called Hacker’s Haven. People could bring in their cars, use space and tools, as well as bounce ideas off Tom and Ray.
This got me thinking: what if we did that at a library?
The LAPL already has some resources available to users in this vein, making the Chilton Library available for free to all cardholders. The Chilton Library provides detailed technical information about many different makes and models of cars, and is searchable online. It even includes photographs, step-by-step guides, and detailed videos. Connecting users with professionals, alongside the Chilton Library, seems a natural extension of the library’s existing services. Other community-oriented spaces like the Pasadena Repair Cafe or the LA Fix-it Clinic already provide similar services, hosting repair days for small electronics, clothes, etc., and could also be partnered with.
In a city like Los Angeles, where everyone “has to drive” (they don’t, but that’s a different conversation) this seems like an absolute no-brainer. Hosted either in library parking lots or off-site on other municipal or county property, librarians could help connect users with car problem with a team of volunteer mechanics comprised of retirees, trade school students, amateur-experts, etc. and also help answer other inquiries about car repair in general. Donated parts and donated tools would help defray the cost of the program. Probably most of the issues would be simple, check-engine light, air filters, oil and other fluid changes, brake pads, the basic but absolute essentials of car maintenance.
So why should the public library provide this service? Well, aside from it being part of an information need for life mastery, whether or not one’s car works can make an absolutely life-changing difference in one’s employment and economic security. One study found that “owning a vehicle often doubles the probability of employment and the number of hours worked, increasing the probability of employment by roughly 30% points and work hours by about 13 per week” (Baum, 2009, p. 160). Not to mention the fact that car repairs and even routine maintenance are costly, and reduce the positive effect on economic mobility that car ownership can have. Fix-it tickets, failed inspections, impounds: all of these things might be a minor inconvenience, or a moment of absolute economic precarity, depending on one’s income-level
(Note: Anatomy of a Poverty Tow shows the cycle of economic impacts from vehicle impound. Reproduced fromTowed into debt: How towing practices in California punish poor people by Western Center on Law & Poverty. (2019).
Another reason, is community safety. I’m not talking about your being safer, although that’s good too. If people’s cars are in good repair, there’s probably less-likelihood of a police-interaction, which as we know all too well, can routinely result in other legal consequences, incarceration, or even death (Harris, 1999).
(Note: this chart indicates that half or more of all night time traffic stops are for non-moving violations, i.e. related to vehicle equipment issues. Reproduced from Racial Disparities in Traffic Stops, Public Policy Institute of California (2022).)
Really this service can reach anyone who has an information need about their car, wants to learn more about car repair, maybe wants to get their hands dirty and change their own oil for the first time, but above everything it’s about providing our community members who are in the most need with a little more support, materially, economically, and in terms of their safety.
Obviously there are some safety concerns to take in to account. We can’t just have library users sliding under cars on jacks and swinging socket wrenches around. Everything would need to be more or less monitored by select volunteers who would check-in on each project and enforce safety measures. Similarly volunteers would need to direct cars into designated areas and ensure a safe and effective flow of users and their vehicles. An additional concern would be the safety of the cars following the repair clinic, and any resultant liability for the library and its volunteers. This matter would need to be investigated and considered, but participants could also sign a waiver of liability in exchange for services. Volunteer mechanics with certifications would need to vet other volunteers for qualifications and safety.
As far as a timeline, organizing this event and service could take a long time. Between soliciting and vetting volunteers, securing space and materials, and figuring out all the logistics, it’s possible this could take several months.
Within our organization, we would try and stress the importance of connecting with our community of users, and view this as an opportunity to not only provide material support, but also introduce them to other aspects of the library. Library staff could help pull relevant materials and even design lib-guides around automotive history, or cars in fiction. There are many different ways for staff for engage with this service. Additionally, we would need to train and prepare staff for this even with regular meetings updating them leading up to the event, soliciting ideas and help as we go along.
As far as the community, posting notices in library spaces would definitely be helpful for marketing purposes, but a well-directed social media campaign, perhaps partnering with other local repair-clinic/fix-it organizations would probably be our best form of outreach. Additionally, repair shops might refer clientele that are having trouble affording repairs to the library’s automotive fix-it clinic day.
(Note: This example of community-organized LA Fixit Clinic’s social media marketing post from Instagram serves as a excellent example of how to advertise this service. Reproduced from LA FIX-IT Clinic Instagram Page https://www.instagram.com/lafixitclinic/?hl=en)
Expansion – I envision this service starting off as a an annual or bi-annual event, with the library attempting to accommodate as many people as possible in a truly large-scale event. Ideally, given enough interest, we would move to providing this service once every three months, or popping-up in different locations throughout the city. Finally, it would be incredible to have a permanently staffed or on-call repair clinic, were there to be enough sustained interest.
Hamilton, S. (2021). What’s mine is yours: The history of U.S. tool-lending libraries. School of Information Research Journal 11(1). https://doi.org/10.31979/2575-2499.110104
Anyone remember this ad? I was young when this aired, sure but I’m definitely dating myself here, anyway — THIS is what PSAs USED to be like back when TV still ruled the media landscape for the most part — straight-up bone-chilling.
It frames the idea of how library privacy intersects with freedom of information, freedom of speech quite well. As an aside, the AD Council produced this in 2002 in a wave of nationalistic PSAs about “protecting” freedom and American Exceptionalism in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, which, is of course, incredibly ironic considering that the PATRIOT Act and NSA Domestic Surveillance Program ushered in our current era of warrantless and unprecedented mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, but I digress.
Or, well I guess maybe I don’t digress, it’s actually really, really important to understanding the content in this module.
All of these things are great, and they are, I think, also largely ineffectual. I would liken it to trying to put out a wildfire with a garden hose, or, a spray bottle, or a pipette. Even with terms and conditions, disclosures and cookies preferences pop-ups, etc., etc., the fundamental issue is that this current market, the actual set of relations between individuals and corporations and other organizations providing services in the digital space is predicated on the exchange, or rather, the extraction of some kind of data/information about you. The whole system has been gradually built around this, and in most cases, we’re freely volunteering it just through our desire to participate and exist on social media platforms and the broader web. What we search for, the videos we watch, how long you hovered on that tiktok before swiping up, it all makes up this “digital information, quintillions of bytes of data generated every day.” We don’t know how exactly any of it’s being used, and we don’t understand what we’re agreeing to when we sign up. I’m not going to sit and read a terms and conditions document written in legal boilerplate that I don’t understand, and neither are you. I’m not saying any of this is okay, I’m not one of those “privacy is a myth get over it” people, but it is where we’re at.
I’ll point out that even our most robust government regulatory agencies (which are being hollowed out by the second Trump-go-round) usually are only capable of enforcement to the tune of a few million here and there, which means generally very little to corporations with astronomical market-capitalizations. With the exception of the truly landmark, nationwide class-action lawsuits against, say, big-tobacco or opioid manufacturers, the consequences never seem bad enough for executives to not do a little cost-benefit analysis when they consider how much money they can generate for the shareholders when bending or breaking the law a little.
Aren’t we also past credulity at this point, post-shock, the news a perpetual stream of scandal and wrongdoing? Returning to the political climate that produced our AD Council library secret police surveillance nightmare, the revelations of NSA spying and the PATRIOT Act stirred us then, sure, but was this rolled-back? No. Big-tech has always been cozy with Federal law enforcement and the Intelligence Community, so who’s to say they wouldn’t just exigent circumstances their way past any US version of a GDPR??
My solution? A radical, personal re-ordering of one’s own participation in this system. We should know by now that the state will likely be ineffectual if not negligent in ensuring our protection from corporations, and we ought to take personal responsibility for our own willing participation in an environment that actually treats us like a resource to be extracted. Did big-tech and everyone else involved conceal what was being done with our data, trick us like big tobacco, big oil, big forever chemical? Yes. After the revelations started to come out did we stop what we were doing? Some of us probably did. I didn’t. We probably should.
While I do think that personal responsibility has a lot to do with it, I also think institutions like libraries, especially one’s working with the service style and model we discuss in this course, can be leaders and build community-oriented infrastructure to this effect. After all, one will still need to use the internet. In “Ethics, Encryption, and Evolving Concepts of Personal Privacy in the “Black Box Library” David Irvin discusses many possibilities for libraries to lead.
Irvin’s article engages with the issue of privacy as a key aspect of intellectual freedom. As library services become increasingly networked and integrated with the internet, data collection and data security has made library patrons’ privacy and by extension, their intellectual freedom, deeply insecure. Irvin surveys how in researching an intellectual curiosity we might have, it travels from its only place of true privacy (our interior thoughts) through different information systems (a library catalog, an internet search, etc.), leaving trace details as data that are tied to us and generally not frequently expunged from records.
He highlights that as data collection has become more ubiquitous, our consent has been gradually ceded to the point where it is taken as granted. This leaves us highly vulnerable to surveillance, tracking, and exploitation from a myriad of forces, whether private corporations, government agencies, or criminal actors. Aside from those dangerous consequences, the mere fact of being cognizant of being surveilled leads to an internalized self-censorship and compliance in advance.
What Irvin proposes is for libraries to become sites of extraordinary privacy. He lays out plans for libraries to train staff in the strictest possible information security standards, encrypting and anonymizing library search and circulation records, and routing all internet traffic through Tor browsers. He further suggests that libraries collectively bargain for these conditions by withholding contracts from vendors until they assure encryption and elimination of user data from external systems. By increasing data security and protection to extraordinary levels, libraries could set new societal standards for intellectual freedom and reposition libraries as being indispensable institutions, truly safeguarding knowledge and curiosity.
This American Libraries Magazine article is definitely in this ball-park, I was very happy to see VPNs and ToR mentioned!!! To wrap up this rant, we shouldn’t reasonably expect the government or corporate tech to do the right thing any time soon (or ever!) and accordingly, individuals making good choices, coming together in community at a place like a hyperlinked yet black-box library, just might be able to start shifting something, from the ground up.
here’s that article in apa reference if anyone needs:
There’s so much to take in w/r/t the different communities in the hyperlinked libraries sphere. So many obstacles between library systems and the people in most need, so many more between library systems and the people they haven’t even been able to reach yet.
This module was particularly revealing in just how much libraries are basically filling in the gaps of our increasingly porous social safety net. Increasing wealth inequality, the continued rise of corporate influence over public policy, and now, with the second Trump administration, an outright concerted campaign to disassemble the vast funding and services apparatus of the Federal government upon which an already fragile social system relies.
It’s all very unfair and makes me not feel so sunny about the future. I even get angry and protective about the idea of libraries in the first place (or rather, what my particular idea of libraries looks like in the first place). Aren’t they supposed to be for books? Libraries are serving as schools, public health centers, internet service providers, shelters for the unhoused — isn’t this all distracting from people who want to go there to read a good book??
The thing is, this is probably the gut-reaction of a lot of well-meaning folks, folks who probably consider them progressives. Even if you do feel this way, are having this emotional reaction, if you take a breath, and stop for a second, none of it is much of a speculative leap.
If the library is there to provide free and open access to just books, information bearing entities so that people might satisfy a need, for personal enjoyment, for education, for everyday life — doesn’t it stand to reason that there’s a lot more that comes along with it?
Information isn’t just in physical books anymore after all, in fact, quite a bit of it is not, it’s online, so doesn’t it stand to reason that the library should provide access to the internet?
Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you don’t have internet at home, or don’t know how to use it, the library might be the place to provide it, or to help you learn how to use it?
Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you need information to learn, to educate yourself, the library could take that a step further and actually connect you with resources to improve a resume, or even earn a GED?
Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you need information pertaining to your health, which is so often gate kept by a lack of insurance, or an abundance of judgment from healthcare systems, and that the library might have access to that, they could help you access and understand it?
Doesn’t it stand to reason that if you are unhoused, and the shelters are full, or just don’t exist, and you have nowhere else to go, the library is actually the one of the only places indoors and climate controlled where everyone is allowed to just be?
The library is in many ways and many places, the last vestige of the true commons, and if government and society fails, or is limited in so all these ways and so many others, who else is going to provide? Everything we fail to provide to one another is gradually taken over by capital, which will charge us for the privilege of something that was once, or should be, free.
It should also not go unmentioned that public libraries are governmental entities, shouldn’t they then provide as much support as they can?
Above all the reasons I’ve talked out above there’s one fundamental explanation for these non-book services: as information has become more accessible on the internet, and the nature of people’s media consumption habits have shifted, it is true that less people are using the library; but the people who still do, who still need it, really, really, really need it. While the library is still for anyone and everyone, it’s those that are in the most need of our help that should be the priority in shaping the future of libraries and their services.
It wasn’t until “Module 4: Participatory Service & Transparency” that I think really started to understand what this course is really all about. This is not to say that I was going into this course with no idea what to expect, of course, nor am I suggesting the introduction, foundational reading, and model modules didn’t do a good job! Something about participatory service & transparency just made it all click for me, in how I’m now able to explain or describe this course holistically in more or less one thesis statement: any and all barriers that get in the way of using the library should be done away with, expediently.
Do your users need to access library spaces and services when the library is not open because of their hectic life schedule? Economic or budgetary pressures forcing limited staff hours? Find a way to let them in! (Bibliotheca, 2021). Letting people into the library unsupervised inevitably sets off a wave of “but what about’s????” all motivated by some paranoid notion that the commons will be tragically ransacked and destroyed. Whither this expectation? Why not radical trust? “People are genuinely, usually good (hopefully)” (Stephens, 2019). Why not assume that people will just be happy they have another way to use their library? If you don’t trust your users, your users certainly aren’t going to trust you (Schmidt, 2013).
Of course (usually) the library is still standing in the morning — indeed we’re talking about a service model that is already free and open to the public as it is, watchful eyes of librarians, or no.
As another barrier to using the library, late fines, have been eliminated, there haven’t been mass reports of pillaged collections, and some 25% of libraries reported increased circulation (Gerber, 2022). While people should understand and respect that library materials are everyone’s to use and enjoy, the idea of disciplinary, punitive fines is no way to build that respect. Anyone who still has misgivings about this should let this sit with them: “families who don’t want to borrow books because of the fines…show that it is an equity issue—perhaps those who could benefit from the library the most are the same people who fear they will have to pay fines” (Gerber, 2022).
K.G. Schneider’s non-manifesto-manifesto “The User is Not Broken” still resonates some 20 years later. Libraries would do well to consider one of her aphorisms in particular: “Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it” (Schneider, 2006). That was certainly true then…in 2006…now we have seemingly nothing but least resistance information seeking! AI LLM summaries at the top of search results are as far as many people go.
If this is the competition, libraries need to be innovating; opening doors, windows, tearing down walls! AI searching the whole internet and coming up with iffy answers from some less-than-reputable blogs? Why not an LLM trained on just the library collection itself? (O’Brien, 2025). If the library is our treasured, ivory tower of protected, sanctified, authoritative knowledge, what if we made it hyper searchable? What if this LLM could respond to a natural-language-query-search-qua-question and give you a range of information pulled directly from the digitized books in the stacks? Could it even demonstrate a network of relationships between information? Now that’s a hyperlinked library, an ontological rhizome, to turn a phrase (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013).
In “Libraries, AI and Training Collections” Lorcan Dempsey, (2024) former chief strategist of OCLC and Professor of Practice and Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Information School at the University of Washington is cautious and optimistic about “letting” AI into the stacks. He prefers a definition of AI as a “cultural technology” not unlike the library itself, something which “provide ways of communicating information between groups of people” (p. 22). Linking these two cultural technologies might be more difficult than we think, as Dempsey poses:
a community grand challenge…As a community, we are not good at sustaining large scale infrastructure as a community asset…one could imagine some income from licensing a resource like this to the foundational LLM providers, it is unlikely to sustain an operation over time…a discussion about this might be advanced by several key national organizations (p. 24)
This debate mirrors Ted Fons’ (2016) article “Making Libraries Visible on the Web” from ten years ago, or even Sarah Werner’s (2015) “How to Destroy Special Collections with Social Media” Rare Book School lecture, also from 10 years ago. Back then it was gatekeeping special collections material and library catalogues from being used in search engine results or sharing special collections content via the still fairly new social media. A combination of obstinacy, fear and ignorance drove attitudes then and still drives it now.
Maybe, just maybe, the biggest obstacle, the biggest barrier towards providing library users what they want isn’t physical constraints of time and space or institutional bureaucratic inertia. Maybe it’s a basic resistance, on the individual level, towards change. Maybe if we tear down the walls as they exist in our own mind, the path towards the new model for libraries wouldn’t be so opaque.
Returning to that idea about the path of least resistance for information (Schneider, 2006) we tend to think of information as lack and acquisition. An information need and its fulfillment, its resolution. But really, it’s a state of flow, with fits and starts, for sure, but the library should be the last thing stopping up the current (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press
Dempsey, L. Libraries, AI and training collections. (2024). Against the Grain, 36(3), 22-24.
Fons, T. (2016). Making libraries visible on the web: To ensure that library content is conveniently accessed, libraries must give search engines what they want. (2016). Library Journal, 141(13).
Werner, S. (2015, July 31). How to destroy special collections with social media. Wynken de Worde. https://sarahwerner.net/blog/2015/07/how-to-destroy-special-collections-with-social-media/
My name is kevin glass, or kg, and I am in my second semester of MLIS at the SJSU iSchool. I have an academic background in critical theory/contemporary philosophy, historical research, as well as film and performance studies.
I was drawn to MLIS studies through my intellectual curiosity of how knowledge is produced in our society through documents and information, and how the institutions and systems that legitimize (or don’t legitimize) documents and information play a role in that process.
I see the online and digital space as an increasingly complex zone for the interplay of these ideas. The proliferation of the ability to distribute information and generate documents/digital objects has radically altered the knowledge regimes/cultural hierarchies of power that previously ordered and controlled the flow of information and documents, and the reality consensus that came with it.
Given this “infodemic” we currently inhabit, I am looking for what’s next, what are the new ways in which we’ll reconstitute reality consensus and find mutual agreement on what is legitimate or not. I think the concept of hyperlinked libraries, of accelerated access to a wide-range of materials and perspectives through networked systems is a solution with tremendous potential. Something that has the quality of the constantly connective and branching ways of interacting with information that has taken shape in internet users, but is backed by the ethos of library systems seems the perfect way to rebuild. In other words, can hyperlibraries build hyperliteracy?
