assignment x — transparency: a library of flows

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).

References

Bibliotheca. (2021, March 2). Customer story: Gwinett County Public Library \ Open plus [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAQxJw2H_tw&t=9s

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).