(R)evolving Libraries

Recognizing diversity of perspectives, the complexity of technology

For this week’s Choose Your Own Adventure format, I read some recent research from Pew on the state of technology usage and perception. I also read through Pew’s collection of thoughts from futurists on their predictions for how technology use will change and affect us in coming years. One fact that stuck with me was the huge diversity of perspectives on issues including social media’s effects on democracy and people’s awareness of artificial intelligence in everyday life, (Anderson et al., 2021; Silver & Clancy, 2022). 

The questions Silver and Clancy asked focused on people’s perceptions and attitudes. This led me to wonder what recent research has been done to assess causality between technology use and real world outcomes or other social indicators. I then thought about how broad and interdisciplinary this area of research is. For example, I did a quick keyword search for articles on social media usage’s effects on mental health in SJSU’s OneSearch, and the results yielded articles from journals in communications and media, human-computer interaction, education, political communication, medicine and more. 

Given the complexity of the social and political effects of emerging technologies, how can public libraries make informed decisions about how to integrate them into their services? I’m primarily referring to more consequential players in our information ecosystem like privately-owned social media sites and generative AI. This module prompted me to reflect on the feasibility of devising a completely informed strategy within the time constraints of everyday public service. (For example, the library where I work hired a consulting company to help our library system create a Technology Roadmap. Due to budget and staffing issues, very few points in the plan have been achieved.) Many of our readings for this course so far have touched on frameworks to approach this issue, like listening to the interests of the community and the expertise and lived experiences of staff at all levels of the library system.

How can public library workers balance the need to meet people where they’re at – scrolling on platforms and dialoging with AI chatbots –  with the mission to teach the public about the social and political facets of information search in the internet age?

With these technology perception statistics percolating in my mind, I came across a Linkedin post by Lauren Pressley, the Dean of Z. Smith Reynold’s Library at Wake Forest University, (2026). Pressley argues the role of libraries today is no longer to provide access to information, as internet-equipped smartphones fill that need. Instead, libraries’ role today is to promote discernment, “knowing what to ask, noticing what a confident answer leaves out, and sensing when something is wrong.” She continues, “When you know something the challenge is being able to say with clarity why you think what you think.”

Though I’ve always recognized that libraries play a role as educators, Pressley frames education as libraries primary responsibility, not access. This conceptualization helped me better understand how libraries should approach emerging technology. It’s not necessarily a question of how to adopt the technology into library services. It’s a matter of how to teach people how these technologies affect our information landscape and the  ability to discern. For me, thinking with education and discernment as the goal instead of centering on the technology itself can be a more useful framework for approaching library service.

References

Anderson, J., Rainie, L., & Vogels, E. (2021). Experts say the ‘new normal’ in 2025 will be far more tech-driven, presenting more big challenges. Pew Research. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/apa_style/apa_formatting_and_style_guide/reference_list_electronic_sources.html 

Pressley, L. (2026, June 30). Building the conditions. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/building-conditions-lauren-pressley-gxsoe/ 

Silver, L and Clancy, L. (2022). In advanced and emerging economies, similar views on how social media affects democracy and society. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/06/in-advanced-and-emerging-economies-similar-views-on-how-social-media-affects-democracy-and-society/ 

What is the digital divide today?

This week’s readings prompted me to think about how the concept of the digital divide has evolved in recent years and how it takes shape today. Though written a decade ago, Boyd’s (2016) description of the lack of diversity in computer science education and its effects on oppressive, exploitative digital systems rang true, “If people don’t understand what these systems are doing, how do we expect people to challenge them?”

In my mind, there are two key components to the digital divide today. First, people are practicing sustained reading less than previous years (Bone et al., 2025; Iyengar, 2024). Significant disparities persist in reading achievement levels between racial groups, (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). This is compounded by the fact that in many places, public library open hours are declining due to budget constraints, (Lauersen, 2025), and the price of living continues to rise, encroaching on people’s ability to pay for accurate or editorially-produced information. 

Today’s most popular internet-connected devices support platforms that are designed to keep people scrolling for as long as possible to maximize ad revenue. App-based companies coerce people to see an onslaught of short form videos and images accompanied by brief texts. Much of this content provokes fear and anger, a stress response that can become addicting. People less frequently engage with longform print materials for sensemaking and entertainment and instead tend to reflexively turn to fragmented and sensationalized forms of information.

So I see one side of today’s digital divide as the lack of multiple literacies among the general public — digital as well as traditional information literacy — that are necessary to be critical, informed citizens. The other side of the issue, in my view, is the myriad of negative outcomes associated with our built information systems, primarily in the form of internet centralization, a term used to describe the consolidation of information dissemination and the internet’s physical infrastructure, (Internet Engineering Task Force, 2022). To echo Boyd’s sentiment, how can people fight the root of this problem without being able to understand what’s happening?

The two parts of the problem as I see it are reinforcing each other. To even frame the issue as having two parts is probably an oversimplification. It unevenly equates the agency of everyday people to improve their reading and computational comprehension with the consequences of entire economies and infrastructure systems. It’s more broad and complicated than what some scholars call “the digital divide,” and that’s why I’m skeptical to use that term. 

It’s also why I’m skeptical of technosolutionist ideas for libraries like book vending machines or bookmobiles. Of course, this doesn’t mean that some good can come from these creative ideas. Similar to calls to fight the “digital divide” by lending out hotspots or teaching computer classes, these moves are probably not getting at the root of the problem.

So how can public libraries address people’s waning attention spans and the dumpster fire economy? I definitely do not know. The first step may be leaning into our uncertainties and admitting that we don’t know. Maybe we should stop talking about library services and programs as a silver bullet for our communities and instead recognize that there are real limits to the impact we have.

I really do not mean to be a downer this week! Part of my thinking around this issue stems from the dynamic in my department at my current library system. My goal in future weeks is to explore the role that workplace culture and management styles play in library services and programs. I think some inward reflection and learning in this realm will be insightful for me.

References

Bone, J., Bu, F., Sonke, J., Fancourt, D. (2025). The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American time use survey. iScience, 28(9). 

Boyd, D. (2016). What world are we building? https://medium.com/datasociety-points/what-world-are-we-building-9978495dd9ad 

Internet Engineering Task Force. (2022, July 9). Centralization, decentralization, and internet standards. https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-nottingham-avoiding-internet-centralization-05.html 

Iyengar, S. (2024). Federal data on reading for pleasure: All signs show a slump. National Endowment for the Arts Blog. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump 

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019). Indicator 10: Reading achievement. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rca.asp 

Lauersen, C. (2025). The necessary nearness – an ode to bookmobiles. The Library Lab. https://christianlauersen.net/2025/02/05/the-necessary-nearness-and-ode-to-bookmobiles/ 

West, J. (2014). 21st century digital divide. https://www.librarian.net/talks/rlc14/ 

I’m interested in many of the topics discussed in the early modules, but one theme that stood out to me was library architecture and design and the idea of the library as a third place. For context, I’m very interested in architecture and design. I read about the Bay area’s architectural heritage in my free time, and my fiancé is a graphic designer and works in museums. This interest probably stems from my fiancé constantly exposing me to design concepts coupled with the fact that I grew up in the Phoenix’s master-planned tract-home suburbs, a place devoid of context and aesthetic meaning. 

Arial view of Phoenix suburbs

 

The idea of third places, or places where people can spend time outside of work and home that don’t require spending money, is not new. More people are talking about this concept as inflation diminishes people’s economic security and ability to spend leisure time in a communal space. This discourse often points to public libraries as a respite in the onslaught of consumer capitalism, (Mattern, 2014). 

Since the internet has provided people with remote and near instant access to a vast amount of information, library and information scholars have started to question how libraries can adapt to peoples’ evolving information needs. (An obvious answer in this course so far has been to actively seek feedback from your library’s unique community!) In addition to being a space for community events, research, technology classes and makerspaces, public libraries have increasingly asked to provide services other public agencies aren’t able to continue to provide due to budgetary constraints.

So how do libraries design and construct a physical space to meet all these needs and be an intermediary for knowledge creation in today’s social and technical landscape? For Assignment X, I delved a bit deeper into what’s happening in the realm of library architecture and design in the modern age.

I found a great article that got me thinking, (Buschman, 2022). It’s authored by John Buschman, Dean of University Libraries and Associate Provost for Research and Innovation at Seton Hall University. He conducted a simple discourse analysis of 32 articles published about library renovations, about half of which described renovation projects at public libraries. 30% included academic libraries and 18% included special libraries.

He found that the discourse describing library renovation projects tended to reflect the vision-driven master planning method used by architects rather than the design theory, iterative-based, problem solving approach often used by librarians. This reflects a top-down way of thinking about library renovation instead of one designed collectively and collaboratively by librarians and how patrons actually use the libraries’ spaces. 

Recurring themes Buschman identified include framing the projects as consisting of “challenges” and “opportunities.” Challenges referred to library buildings in their previous state, which was described as being traditional, uninviting, dark, wasted or “dead” space. Opportunities were conceptually more broad and described as open up spaces, market the library, guide and control collection use and access, and bring together old and new. 

Buschman writes, “with numbing regularity, the write-ups valorized access to light and, subsequently, to comely views within and without the buildings, consumer-like choice in spaces (flexibility), collaboration, and retail or consumption spaces … Technology is nearly ubiquitous as an opportunity, with the stand-in phrase ‘21st-century library’ repeated frequently,” (2022). 

In short, he argues the conceptualizations of these projects in the challenge/opportunity dichotomy reflects a reimagined space for reimagined people for the imagined long term. This is the architects’, master-planned view, rather than problem-solving for actual use, the design-centered, librarians’ view. 

The architects’ view, he argues, is neoliberal. It invokes the twenty-first-century library as a determined, visioned future that contrasts with an unattractive present or past. This view is an oversimplification of how cultural change happens, and it’s not grounded in the reality of libraries today and how people actually use them. Buschman also notes the majority of articles about library renovations were written by architects, and when librarians wrote the articles, they often mirrored the architects’ language.

Last week at work, while I was developing the scope of this project, I stood in and looked around at a space in the library that I personally dislike. (For context, I work at the Central public library for an urban system in the Bay area.) The space is on the ground floor, but it actually sits just below street level, so it receives almost no natural light. The walls are a putrid light gray, and black-and-white hexagon-shaped acoustic panels hang throughout the room. The temperature of the lightbulbs is so blue look like they belong in a hospital. There’s also brightly-colored modular furniture and tables and chairs. That’s really it. I hate it.

“The Commons,” a space that could be improved at the library where I work.

I turned to my colleague next to me, who was accompanying me during the library’s closing procedures. I asked, “Has this space looked like this since you started working here?” He said yes, it had. I asked, “ What was the purpose of designing the space like this?” He shrugged, said he didn’t know and reciprocated my disdain for it. 

After reading Buschman’s piece, I researched the history of that space in my library. Ultimately branded as “The Commons,” it was renovated in 2018 with a $75,000 grant from the library’s foundation. A library press release and local newspaper article about the project tick many of the boxes Buschman describes: centrally featuring quotes from the architects, technosolutionist rhetoric and minimal input from library staff or patrons.

References

Buschman, J. (2022). Of architects and libraries: A simple discourse analysis. The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 92(3). https://doi.org/10.1086/719911 

Mattern, S. (2014). Library as infrastructure. Places Journal. https://placesjournal.org/article/library-as-infrastructure/

Hi, class!

My name is Molly AKA DJ Crumbo and I’m a library specialist at a mid-sized urban library in the East Bay. I currently work in the adult services department, where I teach digital literacy skills and develop educational programs for the public. I run a monthly lecture series featuring research scientists from the nearby university.

I’m almost done with the MLIS program, and I’ve taken a considerable amount of courses focusing on emerging technologies. I’m interested in the social, ethical and political issues associated with implementing emerging technologies within the LIS professions and in our broader world. Prior to working in libraries, I was a journalist and wrote about national politics and education. After graduation, I hope to continue writing about how people and organizations are harnessing new technology and these changes’ many effects on society.

I chose to take this class because I’d like to continue exploring how libraries can adapt to today’s rapid technological evolution. There’s already so much that’s changed in the last decade: consolidation of major platforms and transformation of their user interfaces, continued expansion of cloud-based services, integration of AI tools into a great deal of major sites, etc. I hope to learn skills on how to manage projects and make decisions in uncharted library territory. I already appreciate this course’s emphasis on creativity and unconventional thinking.

Outside work and school, I love to hike with my dog around the Bay Area. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and moved to the East Bay in 2021. I’m still in shock at the greenness of the landscape, the walkability of neighborhoods, and the mild weather. I like to peruse book and vintage furniture stores, try new restaurants, read books and magazines, attend shows, bike around town, and write about my observations. I’m a very curious person, and I love chatting with people and learning new things.

Looking forward to this semester!