I was perusing amongst the digital stacks in Module 6 for an adventure of my own choosing when my daughter walked through the back door, excited to tell me that inside Minecraft is an endangered library of banned articles, books, and reports. Then, most serendipitously, I saw at the bottom of the resource list a link to an archived post from a former Hyperlinked Library student, Martin Martinez: “The Metaverse, Minecraft, and the Uncensored Library.” This meta-library is such a profoundly beautiful and egalitarian idea that it chose me.
A Reader at The Uncensored Library
Minecraft is not just an environment for building with virtual blocks and minerals or for game play alone. Inside of the virtual world is also a protected archive, The Uncensored Library, created in 2020 by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) with the virtual architecture group BlockWorks. The library’s virtual books contain reportage censored by illiberal and authoritarian governments, in wings of the library curated by RSF for Mexico, Russia, Belarus, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Brazil, Iran, Eritrea, and — added in 2026 — the United States. The books are read-only, to protect their content from tampering. At first flush it seems in line with the spirit of the Hyperlinked Library model: meeting the users where they are, the gamification of learning, and a humanitarian focus on preservation. But the very restrictions that are necessary for user access and protection — one-way reading, top-down curation, and no librarians at hand — would seem to disqualify it as truly a Hyperlinked Library.
Virtual spaces could also preserve, as digital objects, institutions closed for political reasons, as with the Kennedy Center ; exhibitions under forced revision, as at the Smithsonian; or historic buildings we have lost to war, terrorism, or unrestrained capitalism. These virtual objects cannot just conquer space; through metaverse archiving, the fleetfooted librarian can also defeat time and the violence of entropy, and move out, toward an allotropic Hyperlibrarianship — one core communal truth manifest in a multitude of forms.
Mark Spusta .(2015). Pepperland [screen print]. The need for hyperlinked communities, to openly interface, to draw community together in informational communion, is the very substance at the core of LIS practice: not just connecting disparate communities internally and from afar, but preserving and providing free access to the endless modes of human creation — works made for and by the very same greater human community. Terry Cook, the Canadian archivist, in his 2012 article for Archival Science, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” describes how the transformation of the archivist into a “community facilitator” has met the “digital realities” and is opening wide alternative horizons. He writes:
The archivist has been transformed, accordingly, from passive curator to active appraiser to societal mediator to community facilitator. The focus of archival thinking has moved from evidence to memory to identity and community, as the broader intellectual currents have changed from premodern to modern to postmodern to contemporary. Community archiving and digital realities offer possibilities for healing these disruptive and sometimes conflicting discourses within our profession.
The newest form these “digital realities” have taken is Artificial Intelligence (AI), an exacting tool that is helping to offload non-human tasks. Ideally, greater focus can be redirected toward the humanness of our communities, into leisure activities and educational forums for personal and community growth. There will be an expanding need for meaningful community experiences as free time increases through the outmoding of jobs that no longer need humans to accomplish them. This ideal is not all Pepperland; there be Blue Meanies here too. Unfortunately, the genie that is AI has already left her bottle and is granting wishes willy-nilly.
Barbara Eden as Jeannie. (1965-70). I Dream of Jeannie. [television series]. Dr. Lili Luo’s 2025 study on the daily use of Generative AI (GAI) by library professionals showed that 66.5% of respondents use GAI and find it effective in improving efficiency and work quality. Their top three concerns were, first and foremost, the inaccuracy of the model’s outputs (41% of respondents); second, ethical risks regarding security and privacy (25.7% of respondents); and third, difficulty in composing effective prompts (21% of respondents). Along with these daily concerns, keep in mind this new technology’s environmental footprint coupled with the inherent bias ready-built into AI models’ ground-truth training, via a lack of diverse identities among the models’ original trainers and in the data they were fed — data based on works that are the human canon and carry all the fear and beauty represented there. There also is a need for creator compensation and usage rights, for which library science already has modes of mitigation through established frameworks, like licensing, fair use, and attribution, that can help guide towards fair remedies.
There will be a need for designing alternative, creative workflows to help in building community events and paths for individual self-improvement. In the past, self-directed community-based activities were primarily practiced by artists and artisans, farmers and contemplatives, both spiritual and philosophic, in media physical, in mediums electric. When more people are freed from the existential strictures of their day-to-day survival needs, the practice of integrating life and imagination, apart from work for work’s sake, will be crucial. With the freedom at scale that AI can enable, the influence of creative innovation won’t be restricted to the unworried wealthy and the starving artists, and that freedom will change the meaning of what is expressed. Hopefully, the proliferation of creative self- and community-based workflows can inform lifestyles that help ameliorate AI’s deleterious effects.
As Michael Stephens said in his lecture for Hyperlinked Communities, “Everything you do should involve your users every step of the way.” AI’s shocking gains in the intelligence and fluidity of information delivery are already making it much easier to connect with current and potential users to discover their needs and move forward as a humane community that becomes its own motile third place of pure imagination.
