Against the Grain V37#5 November, 2025 Full Issue

AI in Libraries a Year In: Real World Implementations and Implications

Guest Edited by Gwendolyn Reece, PhD (Director of Research, Teaching and Learning, American University Library) Begins on Page 14

Image created with Canva AI using the prompt: “A futuristic AI librarian stands amidst towering bookshelves holding a book and radiating a soft glow.”

If Rumors Were Horses

Updates from Katina

Thank you to all of you who have called, emailed, texted or wrote to wish my family good luck in WinstonSalem. It is indeed a great town, and our daughter Ileana Jacks has thought of anything and everything we will need! It’s also really great to be so close to some of the grandchildren! Of course, we miss all our friends in Charleston and Sullivan’s Island, but, hey! we’ve got email and text to keep in touch!

It’s amazing to see all the changes that are still happening in Charleston. We have subscribed to the Post & Courier online so we can try to keep up! I also send much thanks to everyone who helped with the move especially Sharna Williams, my long-time right-hand assistant! To all y’all — please come and visit in person or virtually! All the email and virtual addresses still work! 2828 Wesleyan Lane, Winston-Salem, NC 27106, katina.strauch@gmail.com, kstrauch@comcast.net

And talk about indispensable, Leah Hinds is keeping it all going — ATG, Rumors, etc. the Conference in Charleston and Charleston in Between in Berlin and a new conference next year in Bangkok, not to mention Katina Magazine! Whew!! Gosh! Do y’all know that between all this, Leah’s two children, Maddie and Jacob, are both getting ready to graduate from college, and Maddie got married last December and Jacob got engaged in April! What a whirlwind!!

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Against the Grain (ISSN: 1043-2094), Copyright 2025 by the name Against the Grain is published five times a year in February, April, June, September, and November by Annual Reviews. Mailing Address: Annual Reviews, PO Box 10139, Palo Alto, CA 94303-0139. Subscribe online at https://www.charleston-hub.com/ membership-options/

Editor Emerita:

Katina Strauch (College of Charleston, Retired)

Editor:

Leah Hinds (Charleston Hub)

Manager:

Caroline Goldsmith (Charleston Hub)

Research Editor: Judy Luther (Informed Strategies)

International Editor:

Rossana Morriello (Politecnico di Torino)

Contributing Editors:

Glenda Alvin (Tennessee State University)

Rick Anderson (Brigham Young University)

Sever Bordeianu (U. of New Mexico)

Todd Carpenter (NISO)

Ashley Krenelka Chase (Stetson Univ. College of Law)

Eleanor Cook (East Carolina University)

Kyle K. Courtney (Harvard University)

Cris Ferguson (Murray State)

Michelle Flinchbaugh (U. of MD Baltimore County)

Dr. Sven Fund (Fullstopp)

Tom Gilson (College of Charleston, Retired)

Michael Gruenberg (Gruenberg Consulting, LLC)

Bob Holley (Wayne State University, Retired)

Matthew Ismail (Charleston Briefings)

Donna Jacobs (MUSC, Retired)

Ramune Kubilius (Northwestern University)

Myer Kutz (Myer Kutz Associates, Inc.)

Tom Leonhardt (Retired)

Stacey Marien (American University)

Jack Montgomery (Retired)

Lesley Rice Montgomery (Tulane University)

Alayne Mundt (American University)

Bob Nardini (Retired)

Jim O’Donnell (Arizona State University)

Ann Okerson (Center for Research Libraries)

David Parker (Lived Places Publishing)

Genevieve Robinson (IGI Global)

Steve Rosato (OverDrive Academic)

Jared Seay (College of Charleston)

Corey Seeman (University of Michigan)

Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus)

Lindsay Wertman (IGI Global)

Graphics:

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Send correspondence, press releases, etc., to: Leah Hinds, Editor, Against the Grain <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

Authors’ opinions are to be regarded as their own. All rights reserved. Produced in the United States of America. Against the

AGAINST THE GRAIN – ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS

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From Your (Off to Start a New Adventure!) Editor Emerita:

Whew, moving is NOT for the faint of heart! But we’re looking at it as the start to a new adventure, one with the kids and grandkids just down the street with the ability to spend more time enjoying the family. Now if only we could find a few of those misplaced boxes that we so carefully labelled so they wouldn’t get lost ... writing from my still-notset-up home office!

This issue will be the final one with me (Katina) writing “From Your Editor” and “If Rumors Were Horses.” It’s the final issue for 2025, and a new volume will start in February 2026 with a few changes. I’ll still be writing my “Tea Time” column on the Charleston Hub website, and I’ll still contribute in other ways to the Charleston Conference and ATG. It’s been a good, long run and I’m looking forward to seeing how things continue into the future!

It’s hard to believe that only a year has passed since our first AI-themed issue. In that time, what once felt speculative has become daily reality in libraries large and small. Our guest editor, Dr. Gwendolyn Reece, opens with “AI in Libraries a Year In: Real World Implementations and Implications,” reflecting on the growing pains and possibilities of integrating AI responsibly across academic institutions.

Letters to the Editor

In “Libraries and GenAI: Ethics, Advocacy, and a Call for a Humanistic Approach,” Reece urges librarians to keep human judgment and our shared values at the center of the conversation. Katie Hut then shares a lively, candid account of “Building an AI Plane While Flying It,” describing what it’s like to support a business program that went “All in on AI” and to weave AI literacy into instruction on the fly.

Joelen Pastva and Maranda Reilly take us into the decisionmaking trenches in “Navigating Complexity,” a thoughtful look at how librarians can evaluate the growing wave of AI tools now embedded in vendor platforms. That thread continues with “Embedded AI in Practice,” where Anne Grant (Clemson University) and Beth LaPensee (JSTOR/ITHAKA) describe a partnership between libraries and platforms that keeps innovation grounded in transparency and collaboration.

Finally, Aaron Krebeck of the Washington Research Library Consortium gives us both a smile and a shiver in “Crisis at Isla Nublar.” Drawing inspiration from Jurassic Park’s Dr. Ian Malcolm, he recounts how a massive metadatastandardization project raised timeless questions about technological limits and human stewardship. Enjoy! Love, Yr.Ed.

Send letters to <editors@against-the-grain.com>, or you can also send a letter to the editor from the Charleston Hub at http://www. charleston-hub.com/contact-us/.

Hi Leah,

I hope this finds you well! I’m sure things are busy as you gear up for the conference. Do you need any extra volunteers — whether to moderate sessions or help with networking events? I’m a trained group facilitator, so I’d be happy to structure a session or support wherever needed. I remember attending the Charleston “First Timers” in my first year and wondered if you already have

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someone set to host or facilitate that. If not, I’d be glad to help.

Funny story: this event is very memorable for me. I was introduced to a librarian there, and as we spoke, we slowly realized that we lived in the same small town in suburban Maryland... one street away...and belonged to the same pool. That night happened to be her birthday and we celebrated in style. We are still good friends today! It would be fun to tell this story at the breakfast. You never know who you’re going to meet at the Charleston Conference...;)

Thanks for keeping this in mind as things develop!

Genevieve Croteau (Founder & Principle, Theory Y) <genevieve@theory-y.io> theory-y.io

Dear Genevieve,

Thanks for reaching out and hope you’re doing well! I’d love to have your help as a volunteer. We don’t have anyone taking point on the first time attendee breakfast yet and it would be great to shake up the format a bit from what we’ve done in the past. That’s such a great story about your experience there! Let’s set a time to talk soon.

Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Hub) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com>

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Rumors continued from page 1

Looks like the 2025 Charleston Conference will be a mustattend event online and virtually. I am so excited that long-time colleague Lorcan Dempsey will be the keynote speaker! And Frances Pinter, founder of Knowledge Unlatched and more, will be headlining the virtual week. I will be joining virtually for sure! I am looking forward to following the full program! Dispatches from Frankfurter Buchmesse

Speaking of Frances, Leah Hinds reports on a positive meeting that was set up between representatives from the Ukrainian Publishers and Booksellers Association (UPBA) and several Charleston Conference directors at the Frankfurt Book Fair. There is interest in publishers working more closely with libraries and understanding how this is achieved elsewhere is something that could be helpful and lead to further collaborations. Frances also reminds us of the importance of letting the Ukrainians know they are not forgotten. She founded Supporting Ukrainian Publishing Resilience and Recovery (SUPRR) shortly after the war began. A sobering reminder of the ongoing conflict, the Ukrainian national stand at Frankfurt included a display of books that were recovered after a bombing took place at the Factor Druk printing house in July 2024.

The Charleston Conference hosted a micro-conference event on Friday morning, October 17, our 4th time participating following a virtual conference in 2020. This year’s event featured two panels: The AI in Academic Libraries & Publishing session, featuring Emre Danisan, Carsten Borchert, Max Mosterd, Viktoriya Vasilenko Stærbo and Tiago Barros, moderated by Sven Fund, showed how real-world AI projects are shaping smarter, more ethical workflows. “US Funding Cuts Imperil Open Infrastructure Globally” featured Frances Pinter, Dean Smith, Emily Poznanski, Nasra Gathoni and Leah Hinds for a discussion on how libraries and publishers can sustain critical knowledge systems and services through policy shifts and resource strain.

Also, while in Frankfurt for the Buchmesse, Leah says she enjoyed some time before the meeting sightseeing with Heather Staines! The two went to the Palmengarten botanical gardens for a lovely afternoon wandering to see the plants, flowers, and butterflies.

Other Conference & Event News

IFLA announced recently announced that their 2027 World Library and Information Congress will be held in London. “2027 is IFLA’s Centenary year, marking 100 years since the original 15 library associations came together to create the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.” https:// www.ifla.org/news/ifla-selects-london-united-kingdom-tohost-the-2027-world-library-and-information-congress/

The 26th Fiesole Retreat will be held in Tubingen, Germany, this coming April 13-15. https://www.fiesoleretreat.org/ tuebingen_2026 The retreat will be held in memory of our friend Ward Shaw, whose support, wisdom and friendship accompanied and enriched the Retreat for over a quarter of a century. May he rest in peace! A very warm thank you to Prof. Karla Pollmann, President of the University of Tu bingen, for her generous invitation to host this year’s event.

And hot off the presses!!! The Charleston Conference Asia preliminary agenda was announced today. This exciting new event is shaping up to take our trademark mix of informal conversations and debates with librarians, publishers, and vendors “across the pond” (and then some) for a new gathering devoted to global collaboration and the future of scholarly communication. Just like our Charleston home base, the conversations will be lively, the questions will be big, and the community will be the star.

My namesake, Katina Magazine, will be celebrating its oneyear anniversary at the 2025 Charleston Conference with a drop-in reception on Tuesday following the Vendor Showcase. The publication was officially launched during last year’s Charleston Conference. Since then, thanks to editor in chief Curtis Brundy, senior editors Jill Emery and Kate McCready, the 25 editorial committee members who steer the three sections,

and an amazing production team, we have published 140 articles by 180 authors from 25 countries! Stop by the “Katina Cantina” to enjoy a toast with the editors and some of the informal vibes that Charleston is known for. We have some fun surprises planned and hope you’ll join us to celebrate and share your thoughts, ideas, and questions!

Organizational Updates

On a sad note, ALA has announced a widespread workforce reduction as part of their ongoing “ALA Forward” initiative. “These decisions were not made lightly,” said ALA President Sam Helmick. “They represent difficult choices made with deep care for the people and mission that define ALA.

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Change of this magnitude carries real weight for colleagues, for the work we share, and for the communities we serve. As we approach ALA’s 150th anniversary, we are facing these challenges with honesty and resolve, preparing the Association to stand strong for generations to come. We hold profound gratitude for those whose service has shaped this organization, and we carry that legacy forward with humility and purpose.” https://www.ala. org/news/2025/10/american-library-association-implementsworkforce-changes-strengthen-organization

Cambridge University Press released a a report calling for coordinated global reform to ensure that academic publishing becomes more open, equitable, and sustainable. The report, titled “Publishing futures: Working together to deliver radical change in academic publishing,” warns that without urgent sector-wide action, the global academic publishing ecosystem could face collapse due to increasing structural pressures. The study draws on a global survey and review involving more than 3,000 researchers, funders, librarians, publishers, and publishing partners from 120 countries.

Wrapping Up

I have a sort-of antiquing story that I relayed in a recent “Tea Time” column. I used to travel around SC setting up libraries in hospitals. I always gravitated to the family-run shops and would sometimes buy things that tickled my fancy. I bought a set of household dishes that I took with me when we moved to Winston-Salem. And! At a small shop on King Street, I bought the famous Charleston Conference bell that Anthony Watkinson

used to ring regularly to bring sessions to order! By the time this issue is published, the secret will be out, but I’m presenting that antique conference bell to Anthony this year (via proxy) in honor of his years of service as a Charleston Conference Director and conference emcee. This will be my first time ever not attending the conference in person, and it will be Anthony’s last year as a director. The times they are a’ changing! But onward and upward, we’ll keep “Sailing into the Wind!”

It’s time for me to hang up my editorial hat and let others carry the reins. What a ride it’s been! From typewriters to AI, from the College of Charleston library basement to the bright lights of our global community, I’ve been lucky enough to see librarians, publishers, and vendors build bridges, share ideas, and prove time and again that kindness and curiosity still matter in this world. Keep asking hard questions. Keep sharing your stories. Follow your instincts! And if you hear a rumor worth spreading, whisper it for me, won’t you?

Love always, Yr.Ed. Katina

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Bet You Missed It — Press Clippings — In the News

Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths

Column Editor: Bruce Strauch (The Citadel, Emeritus) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com>

Hiking Austen History

The author does an exhausting 8-day Austen pilgrimage hike from Oxford to Bath. In Oxford, the Bodleian Library has a big collection of her letters. From there, walking by footpath, it was blooming daffodils, new lambs, rolling hills. Pub meals, night in the Close Hotel, a 16th century townhouse in Tetbury. The village of Luckington has the church of the double wedding in the Colin Firth “Pride and Prejudice.”

After 110 miles, arrived in Bath where Austen lived 1801-06. Saw Bath Abbey where the Austen family attended services. As Marianne Dashwood said, they had “the air, the liberty, the quiet of the country.”

See: Julia Flynn Siler, “Pride and Pilgrimage,” The Wall Street Journal, May 17-18, 2025, p.D9.

Become a Dentist They Said

Zane Grey went to college at UPenn interested only in baseball, but his father forced him into dentistry. For six dismal years, he filled teeth and wrote at night. His understanding wife urged him to ditch dentistry and make literature a full-time endeavor.

Broke and in despair, he sold Riders of the Purple Sage to Harpers in 1912. The railroad and barbed wire had ended the Old West, but the nation was nostalgic for the past. The book hit big. It sold three million copies and was filmed three times.

Pairing with the emerging Hollywood, he was soon making a half-million dollars a year. His ensuing career was not matched until Stephen King in the 1980s.

He loved fishing, bought a yacht, sailed the Pacific, and set world records with his catches. His sporting books popularized big game fishing. Grey liked the ladies, and Hollywood brought them in swarms. He was always seen with some young thing he identified as a niece or secretary.

The Great Depression and the IRS clobbered his finances. His wife left him and came back. She put him on a salary and advised on warding off money demands from other women.

Drowning in debt, he forged on with writing, fishing and girlfriends. In Australia, he hooked an 831-pound great white shark, had a heart attack, and died at 67.

Hello? Information Desk.

In 1953, the dean of students at Auburn U opened an information desk to serve students and the public. It was named the Foy Desk for him and still exists, still manned by students. Of course, three iMacs have replaced encyclopedias, Guinness Book of World Records, The Farmers’ Almanac and all the other old stand-bys of the reference librarian in days of yore.

Along with some real brain teasers, they get cranks, frat party drunks, and lonely hearts just wanting to talk to someone. The lines are never quiet.

See: Emily McCrary, “No bad questions,” The Week, May 30, 2025, p.36 (published with permission of the Oxford American where it first appeared).

From Congress to a Bookstore Sanctuary

After 16 years in Congress, Steve Israel soured on the pursuit of donor money and the media-driven culture that prized performance over policy. Independent bookstores became his therapy.

Now he owns Theodore’s Books on Long Island, where he escapes the sound-bites and encourages the “slow, deliberate experience of reading books.” His store is in Oyster Bay, former home of Theodore Roosevelt, hence the name.

See: Steve Israel, “I Thought I’d Love Being a Congressman. I Prefer Owning a Bookshop.” The Wall Street Journal, May 17-18, 2025, p.C5.

Let’s Read Courtroom Drama

He lamented the plight of the American Indian, foresaw the automobile’s destruction of the wilderness and the drastic decline in gamefish from commercial harvesting. He wrote eighty books and sold 132 million copies. He reaped more money from any one title than Hemingway made in a lifetime.

See: Roger Pinckney, “Zane Grey – High Seas Prophet,” Sporting Classics Daily, May 28, 2025, https://sportingclassicsdaily. com/zane-grey-high-seas-prophet/.

(1) Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (1958) (real murder defense by Traver with the theory of “irresistible impulse.” Otto Preminger movie 1959); (2) Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853) (indictment of British legal system with the endless wills case Jarndyce and Jarndyce, where the costs consume the money at issue); (3) Steve Coll, The Taking of Getty Oil (1987) ( Pennzoil v. Texaco with billions at stake); (4) Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action (1995) (environmental contamination case with big emphasis on discovery process. Became John Travolta movie); (5) Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (2009) (trial of Philippe Petit who traversed the Twin Towers on a tightrope).

See: Michael F. Williams, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, May 17-18, 2025, p.C8.

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Due to generous library support, Michigan Publishing continuously adds content (much of it Open Access) to various hosted and publisher collections. Explore some of the largest collections below.

Fund to Mission

The University of Michigan Press converts 75% of its frontlist titles within the ebook collection to open access through the Fund to Mission monograph model. Libraries that purchase the collection receive perpetual access to approximately 80 frontlist titles as well as term access to a growing backlist of over 2,700 titles.

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These collections are fully accessible on Fulcrum, a leading open-source platform for digital scholarship developed by the University of Michigan Press and Library. Fulcrum places a strong emphasis on durability, accessibility, flexibility, discoverability, and integrity.

B ig Ten Open Books works to provide vital-subject collections to everyone. This mission would not be possible without the collaboration between the University Presses of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and supporting academic libraries. Two 100-book subject collections have already been published, and three more are underway.

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To learn more, visit the sites above or go to publishing.umich.edu to see all the ways your library can support humanities ebooks and open access through Michigan Publishing.

Semicolon on Life Support

The semicolon has been around since 1494 and has always had fans and haters. But now a study has found it’s dying a hard death. Students don’t use it and many don’t know how to use it.

This useful little punction mark “separates independent clauses, but establishes a relationship between them. It suggests that the statements are too closely connected to stand as independent sentences. For example, ‘Speech is silver; silence is golden.’”

Journalist James Kilpatrick called it “girly” and “odious.” Kurt Vonnegut said using them just “showed that you went to college.”

Yet Virginia Wolf used them to show stream-of-consciouness. Salmon Rushdie, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were all ardent defenders. Theater critic Kenneth Tynan called it “the prize-winning supporting-crutch of English prose.

Harvard professor Louis Menand noted a subway placard telling riders to not leave newspapers on the train. It had been amended by hand.

“Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everybody.”

See: Roslyn Petelin, “Semicolons Becoming Increasingly Rare; Their Disappearance Should Be Resisted,” StudyFinds, May 21, 2025. Article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Let’s Read Classical Music in Novels

(1) James Joyce, The Dead (1914) (with Joyce, the music is the language, but “The Lass of Aughrim” plays in another room during the wake; (2) Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913) (Swann associates a violin sonata by a composer friend with early days of his love for Odette, a former courtesan whom he marries); (3) Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915) (Cather loved opera, and the heroine is described as a portrait of a Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad); (4) Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928) (much discussion of writing a novel being like composing music); (5) Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe (1904-12) (1,000 pages of ten short novels published over several years; based loosely on life of Beethoven; recommended for young music lovers).

See: Tim Page, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, June 21-22, 2025, p.C8. Tim is the author of a memoir, “Parallel Play.”

James Frey Is Back

As you know, James Frey (pronounced “fry”) wrote a pretend memoir, A Million Little Pieces,” about his life as a drug addict. And it was exposed as fake.

Oprah lambasted him live on air, and his agent fired him. He seemed to be cancelled in disgrace.

He lives in New Canaan, CT, so he has money from somewhere.

And he knocked out a new book in 57 days, Next to Heaven, about wife-swapping among the Connecticut rich and opulent. Well, with a topic like that, a bidding war broke out over the TV rights, so he’s definitely in the money.

He says the problem with Million Little was purely labeling. Today, there’s an actual genre mixing memoir and fabrication. It’s called “autofiction.”

See: Ellen Gamerman, “Infamous Author Has a New Novel. His Neighbors Have Questions,” The Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2025, p.A1.

Micronation Building

In 1964, Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother Leicester declared his own sovereign micronation on a 30-foot bamboo raft floating 8-miles off the coast of Jamaica in international waters. The U.S. Guano Islands Act of 1856 gave citizens the right to claim for America any “island, rock, or key” where valuable guano was found. Presumably, passing birds would poop on the raft.

He called it “New Atlantis” and copied the U.S. Constitution, just changing names. His wife designed a flag, and shark teeth were declared currency called “scruples.”

His intention was to print postage stamps and use their sale to promote marine protections in his waters. The Universal Postal Union declined to recognize them so there was no flood of revenue. Plus the raft came loose in a storm and floated away.

See: “Ernest Hemingway’s brother established his own micronation,” Interesting Facts , June 17, 2025, https:// interestingfacts.com/fact/ernest-hemingways-brotherestablished-his-own-micronation/.

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AI in Libraries a Year In: Real World Implementations and Implications

By Gwendolyn Reece, PhD (Director of Research, Teaching and Learning, American University Library) <greece@american.edu>

The theme of this issue is to explore some practical issues about AI in libraries, roughly a year from the first issue of Against the Grain dedicated to GenAI.1 During this past year, more libraries have direct experiences addressing AI while simultaneously still trying to develop theoretical frameworks for how we should be thinking about AI.

The institutional policy framework addressing AI, both within academic libraries and their parent institutions, is not yet mature. While many institutions are in the process of developing institution-wide guidance, the market is moving swiftly. I consider the role librarians can play as advocates for a values-based, humanistic approach to AI, including advocacy within policy development discussions.

Most subject librarians who offer information literacy instruction are currently including some level of AI literacy instruction or incorporating AI into their information literacy instruction sessions, based on the approach the academic units they support have adopted. Katie Hut, the Business & Economics Librarian at American University, shares her experience supporting AU’s Kogod School of Business. Kogod publicly embraced AI and incorporated it throughout its curriculum. Her article shares reflections on emerging AI Literacy frameworks, her experience using the ACRL framework in addressing AI, and teaching prompt engineering. The emergence of fully developed AI literacy frameworks, such as Lo’s AI Literacy for All, is a significant recent development.2

Early discourse around generative AI was focused on assumptions that users would be entering questions directly into large language model chatbots. Within libraries, vendors have placed restrictions on placing their content into these models and, at the same time, many of our platforms now have AI tools embedded within them. Some tools require the institution to enable them, while some are automatically enabled. There are varying levels of transparency about how a user’s interaction is or is not saved or fed into a training set. The complexity of this situation requires changes to our collection evaluation models. Joelen Pastva and Maranda Reilly offer some thoughts on evaluating AI tools, including those embedded in existing platforms.

The AI tools that are embedded within library platforms vary in their design and intention. Some of these tools are essentially augmented search and others allow for summary or some level of textual analysis. JSTOR, which is a nonprofit with a long history of collaboration with academic libraries, has been beta testing its own embedded AI tool with partner libraries. Anne Grant from Clemson and Beth LaPensee from JSTOR / ITHAKA share their findings from the beta testing from both the instruction librarian and vendor perspectives.

One of the great promises of GenAI is that it can be a useful tool for time-consuming and/or tedious tasks such as mass metadata standardization. Aaron Krebeck of the Washington Research

Library Consortium shares his process for standardizing metadata across the WRLC schools using ChatGPT and his reflection on the ethical implications of using GenAI for this type of work.

There are a few other developments in the past year that are not included in the selections but are worthy of comment.

The ACRL AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers Task Force has created a draft of “AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers.”3 At the time of this writing, the draft has not yet been approved by the ACRL Standards Committee. Once it is accepted, there will likely be more structured continuing education programs and formal alterations of job responsibilities.

Different institutions are taking different approaches to academic integrity and AI.4 Some institutions are using AI to detect AI. Other institutions are embracing use of AI within certain parameters or are leaving it up to individual faculty members to set expectations. For instruction librarians, it is essential to understand their institutional policies and processes — which are almost guaranteed to be in flux.

There is currently a lack of good models for institutional security vetting of AI tools. While some institutions state that any licenses for AI must go through security and privacy review, when I contacted their respective procurement offices searching for a contributor to this issue, I discovered that the processes were still in development. This is an area where best practices should be developed and shared.

Endnotes

1. Vessela Ensberg and Peter Brantley, “AI in Libraries,” Against the Grain 36, no. 3 (2024).

2. Leo S. Lo, “AI Literacy for All: A Universal Framework AI Literacy for All: A Universal Framework,” preprint, University of New Mexico Digital Repository, n.d., accessed September 26, 2025, https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1216&context=ulls_fsp

3. AI Competencies for Library Workers Task Force, “Draft: AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers,” ACRL, March 5, 2025, https://www.ala.org/sites/default/ files/2025-03/AI_Competencies_Draft.pdf

4. Shushanta Pudasaini et al., “Survey on AI-Generated Plagiarism Detection: The Impact of Large Language Models on Academic Integrity,” Journal of Academic Ethics 23 (2025): 1137–70, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-02409576-x

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Libraries and GenAI: Ethics, Advocacy and a Call for a Humanistic Approach

By Gwendolyn Reece, PhD (Director of Research, Teaching and Learning, American University Library) <greece@american.edu>

While there is some debate about the empirical validity of the Gartner Hype Cycle, the role of hype in the technological lifecycle and the general stages are at least heuristically useful.1, 2 In the five stages outlined by Fenn and Raskino, (Innovation Trigger, Peak of Inflated Expectations, Trough of Disillusionment, Slope of Enlightenment, and Plateau of Productivity), Generative AI probably remains somewhere between the stages of inflated expectations and disillusionment.3 Generative AI has rapidly become a ubiquitous part of the information landscape, but the development of ethical, legal, and social frameworks that allow for the responsible use of AI are lagging behind. Combined with the opacity of how many of the tools operate, privacy concerns, some spectacular instances of toxic and biased content, and an explosion of AI related academic integrity violations, this situation is increasing disillusionment.4, 5 Simultaneously, there are growing demands that libraries address AI in information literacy instruction, take on the mission of AI literacy, and change our workflows to incorporate AI. A strong sense of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is prevalent.6

Perhaps the most powerful thing librarians can do is to constantly re-center our mission and resist uncritically giving in to FOMO. Librarians have always been early adopters of new technologies that aid us in sharing and preserving information and helping the public transform information into knowledge. I have yet to see evidence that librarianship is a change-resistant profession. However, librarians are not motivated by profit. The good we provide to the community is different than the good provided by the market, and librarians are, therefore, resistant to being driven by the market. Our mission is significantly educational; it is about supporting knowledge creation, including the creation of knowledge that will never be profitable; it is about preserving the knowledge of the past so that it can be available to generations in the future; and, in a democracy, it is about ensuring that citizens have access to information they need to be sufficiently informed for effective self-governance, that they know how to use it wisely, and that they can use it safely and privately. Ethics are not tangential to librarianship, they are central. Therefore, I believe librarians are an essential counterweight to the powers that prize profit over other values. Librarians have a long history of thinking critically and carefully about the information landscape, and I encourage as many as possible to be brazen in getting seats at the table in every discussion they can find about how we should be developing our sense of responsible use of AI. Our voices are needed.

A Humanistic Approach to Assessing Uses of AI

As we are considering how we may best take advantage of the opportunities that GenAI presents but in ways that are responsible and ethical, I believe it is beneficial to flip the script. Rather than immediately considering what AI can do and letting technology set the agenda, I believe we should first deeply consider the question, “What is human work?” This is a question I encourage libraries to debate internally, but

it is also a question that can lead students to deepen their reflections. Understanding which parts of our work are inherently “human” is a necessary prior condition to being able to identify aspects of work for which AI is an appropriate tool. For the use of AI to be responsible, the tool would have to be effective for its chosen purpose, and its use would have to be ethical. The user of a tool always remains responsible for the outcome of their work.

What are some examples of human work? Making judgments, especially value judgments and ethical judgments, is human work. Nurturing human thriving through activities such as mentoring, coaching, and (I would argue) education, is human work. Exercising critical thinking is human work. Aesthetic appreciation is human work. Creativity — including creating meaning — is human work. These are a few examples. Additionally, humans are social animals, so there may be instances in which the social aspect of interacting with another human is important to the work, even if the content of that interaction does not necessarily require a human. Ideally, outsourcing work that is not inherently human work to AI could free up time for people to be more deeply engaged in work that is truly human work.

This type of analysis is not always straightforward. For example, coding research interviews requires critical judgment, which is human work, but transcribing the interview may not be human work and could possibly be outsourced to AI. However, if it is human subjects research and the participant has been promised confidentiality, or if identifying information is being stripped in the process of transcription for the protection of the subject, then that interview transcription requires judgment. It would be human work in that instance, and perhaps inappropriate for AI.

Once we see what, out of the work we are trying to accomplish, is human work, then we may see aspects of the work that are not inherently human work — where using AI as a tool could be desirable. However, knowing that AI might be useful is not the same thing as determining whether its use is ethical. I have written elsewhere presenting an ethical framework for assessing potential uses of AI.7 I argue that rather than making summary judgments about the ethics of AI, it is best to treat the use of AI as an intervention and assess the ethics of a specific use of a particular AI tool. I draw on the three ethical principles that guide all human subjects research. “Respect for Persons” includes autonomy, informed consent, and privacy. “Beneficence” demands that the benefits outweigh the risks. “Justice” requires equity and fair compensation/ attribution. When considering whether to use AI in a particular instance, careful analysis of the risks and thinking through any strategies to mitigate risks are necessary for making an ethical determination. Risk assessment should consider both individual risks and systemic risks.

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To conduct this type of analysis, we need to have a good understanding of how the tools we are considering are working. This requires us to continuously learn about the tools but also about the IT environments in which the tools operate. Opacity renders this type of analysis impossible. As a profession, we should strongly advocate for transparency and for privacy protections. We also need to promote evolving norms of transparency in the use of AI in the production of knowledge — both as a matter of policy and cultural norms.

Institutional Policy Creation and AI

One year further into addressing AI within libraries, most institutions are still in the process of developing policy frameworks for AI. For libraries who are embedded within larger institutions, such as universities, it will be necessary to align library policies with those of the parent body. I believe librarians should strive to become active participants in the policy formation for their institutions as well as being active participants in any university-wide discussions of AI.

At American University I was welcomed onto our university’s Responsible Use of AI Working Group and chaired the Ethics and Principles Subcommittee. This group is drafting university-wide guidance and creating structures for our collective approach to AI. The library’s head of acquisitions and eResources also served as a resource member to the subgroup working on procurement guidelines. The library has been central in leading numerous discussions in the university about AI and pedagogy. We are known for our thoughtfulness and have a collective reputation for being valued partners across the institution. Therefore, when we volunteer for committees, we are typically received with gratitude.

My review of publicly available information leads me to conclude that institutional policy frameworks addressing AI within higher education are still emergent. If you are just starting now, you are not far behind, but it is important to begin. There is significant danger of being driven by technological agendas rather than by our values and our mission if we delay.

Practical Recommended Steps

1. Consider creating “in-service” days to allow for deeper reflection and learning about AI. Include opportunities to have deep discussions about the mission of libraries and consider the question within your local contexts about “what is human work?”

2. Look for opportunities to participate in discussions about AI in your larger context (within the universities, within professional networks) and bring the values and mission of the library into those contexts.

3. Advocate for a seat at the table in any policy/guideline/ best practice conversation addressing AI.

4. Advocate with vendors for transparency and real choice in how their AI tools are working and whether they will be embedded in library tools.

5. Incorporate a humanistic and ethical approach to AI within instruction to students and library decisionmaking.

Endnotes

1. Ozgur Dedehayir and Martin Steinert, “The Hype Cycle Model: A Review and Future Directions,” Technological Forecasting & Social Change 108 (2016): 28–41.

2. Evvira Winraub Lajoie and Laurie Bridges, “Innovation Decisions: Using the Gartner Hype Cycle,” Library Leadership & Management 28, no. 4 (2014): 107.

3. Jackie Fenn and Mark Raskino, Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Press (2008).

4. Beth McMurtrie, “Cheating Has Become Normal,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 71, no. 7 (2024), https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828291408/ GRNR?u=wash11212&sid=summon&xid=34f02a91.

5. Zeynep Tufekci, “Musk’s Chatbot Started Spouting Nazi Propaganda. That’s Not the Scariest Part,” New York Times (New York), July 11, 2025, https://www.proquest. com/blogs-podcasts-websites/musk-s-chatbot-startedspouting-nazi-propaganda/docview/3229016866/se-2.

6. Adam Eric Berkowitz, “‘Slow-MO or FOMO’: AI Conversations at Library Conferences,” Public Services Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2025): 51–70.

7. Gwendolyn Reece, “We Already Have an Ethics Framework for AI,” Inside Higher Ed, April 25, 2025, https://www. insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2025/04/25/wealready-have-ethics-framework-ai-opinion.

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Building an AI Plane While Flying It: A Liaison Librarian’s Experience Supporting a Program That’s All In on AI

By Katie Hut (Business & Economics Librarian, American University, Washington, DC 20016) <khut@american.edu>

The Takeoff

In December 2023, David Marchick, the Dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University, called for a complete overhaul of the school’s curriculum and coursework. Marchick’s realization that a sweeping change was necessary happened earlier that fall semester, when Brett Wilson, a partner at the venture capitalism firm Swift Ventures, told an audience of Kogod students they wouldn’t lose jobs to AI, but they would lose jobs to someone who knows how to use AI. (Ellis, Lindsay, 2024) This ignited Marchick and other Kogod faculty members, who were quickly able to see how profoundly AI was going to change both the jobs landscape as well as that of education. Kogod wanted to ensure that its students were at the vanguard of this change and prepared to meet the coming challenges and opportunities that AI would pose. In Spring 2024, the school answered Marchick’s call and proposed a revised curriculum that integrated at least some aspects of AI within all courses. The new curriculum was set to launch during Fall 2024. There were meetings, trainings and a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm. At the same time, there were also questions as to what this would actually look like and how it might change the way faculty approach teaching, creating assignments, and grading.

As the business librarian, responsible for teaching students about both information literacy as a concept and how to do research as a practice, it seemed as though I might have to completely overhaul how I approached my job. Would the availability of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots trained on large language models (LLMs) obviate the need to teach information literacy concepts and how to use specific business research tools?

The Equipment

Endeavoring to learn how to use various GenAI chatbots so that I could keep a pace with the curricular changes, I began to find some more suitable to academic work than others. I found the free versions of Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity superior to ChatGPT (or at least were at the time of writing this article, in Summer 2025) because they cite their sources. Moreover, it seemed Perplexity cited academic sources more frequently than the other options. Perplexity uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a framework that enhances an LLM’s neural network by bringing in new and recently updated information and explicating how its output was generated. (Hendrick, 2024) According to Choice 360, RAG “is the difference between generative AI for fun and generative AI as a legitimate research tool.” (Hendrick, 2024) Thus, Perplexity quickly became my favorite GenAI chatbot for research and the one I recommended that students use. Luckily, in Spring 2025, Kogod entered into a partnership with Perplexity, through which every student, staff and faculty member at Kogod was granted access to Perplexity

Enterprise Pro. (Kogod School of Business Partners with Perplexity to Provide Enterprise AI Access to All Students, Staff and Faculty, 2025)

The pro version of Perplexity includes unlimited searches, image generation, stricter data privacy controls than the free version, and the ability to create personalized knowledge hubs called “Spaces.” These knowledge centers allow users to upload documents, limit searches to retrieve information from only those uploaded files, and share access with others in the institution, which makes them highly usable in an academic class setting. In an effort to become more facile with Spaces and Perplexity in general, I created an APA 7 Citation Generator Space. I instructed the tool to search the following sources: a library guide that I created with examples of how to cite business sources using APA 7, Purdue’s OWL site on APA 7, and the APA Style Blog. While these upgrades found in Pro are certainly helpful, the free version is still useful for academic work.

Flying Instruction

Despite its advantages as compared to other GenAI chatbots, as I used Perplexity in the classroom and in research appointments, it became apparent that no GenAI tool could replace learning concepts regarding information literacy. I found that certain frames from ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education remained extremely relevant, perhaps more so than ever. The need to reinforce the ideas behind the Authority is Constructed and Contextual frame, in particular, grew in importance as students who used AI for research often encountered text and responses with no identifiable author. Yet the responses were extremely confident in their assertions and bore none of the markings of the unreliable sources of yesteryear, such as weird browser extensions or misspellings.

In addition, in order to use GenAI, users have to craft prompts. The most effective prompt frameworks, such as C.L.E.A.R. (Concise, Logical, Explicit, Adaptive, Reflective) emphasize the nonlinearity of search, as is covered by Searching as Strategic Exploration. (Lo, 2023) Prompts generally need to be adjusted and revised along the way, much in the same way that keyword searches do.

Alongside the ACRL framework, I found myself returning to the C.R.A.A.P. (Currency, Relevancy, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose) test for evaluating sources and began reviewing this approach during one-on-one student meetings. I put particular emphasis on the currency, authority and purpose components of this method. It was helpful for students to pay attention to the recency of the data used to generate a chat response. While Perplexity and other tools that use RAG are continually updated, the older, free versions of ChatGPT

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are not. Currency and recency are of the utmost importance in much of business research. In addition, the authority and purpose of the sources used to craft the chat response need to be evaluated by a critical eye.

While I was reviewing best practices for using AI for research during my instruction sessions, I was simultaneously on the lookout for research and literature about best practices for teaching about AI. I hoped to find something akin to the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy but for AI. In my search for solid instructional content on AI, I came across several frameworks for teaching and understanding AI, including the excellent “AI Literacy for All: A Universal Framework” by Leo Lo. Lo’s framework is not only very approachable, it’s also extremely practical, with learning outcomes, content, and activities for each of four levels of the five components to AI literacy that Lo outlines. The foundations of this knowledge framework are: technical knowledge; ethical awareness; critical thinking; practical use; and societal impact. (Lo, 2025)

Other helpful AI literacy frameworks that are geared specifically toward an audience in higher education include Stanford’s (Understanding AI Literacy | Teaching Commons, n.d.) and the one from the University of Adelaide (Artificial Intelligence Literacy Framework, n.d.).

When taken together, the AI and ACRL Information Literacy frameworks constitute an actionable plan for equipping students with the skills to use AI in a way that will help and not hinder their education. For example, a lesson plan could be composed of having students think critically about using an AI tool by examining the authorship of the text response to a prompt. This involves both Lo’s critical thinking component as well as the ACRL frame, Authority is Constructed and Contextual. As another example, an instructor could have students compose prompts to use with a generative AI chatbot and continually refine them as they receive feedback from the chatbot. This would combine technical knowledge with Search as Exploration.

I have found that combining actionable guidance on using AI for research with theoretical ideas about information literacy has given me the ability to teach AI literacy with confidence. With said assurance, I have been able to meaningfully contribute to how the business school teaches AI literacy. Together with teaching faculty, I helped to create an AI exercise for one of the introductory core business classes. I also review best practices for using AI in the research process in all of the business classes in which I’m embedded, and I emphasize the need to critically evaluate both GenAI chatbot responses in and of themselves, as well as the sources they site.

Flight Paths: Recommendations

While I may have been on the early side of AI adoption given the enthusiasm of the business school with which I work, all librarians who interact with students will eventually have to incorporate AI literacy into their information literacy overviews. What has worked well for me thus far is to combine AI literacy with the ACRL framework. Either of these on their own wasn’t quite prescriptive enough for me. I needed a decent amount of support as I felt I was still building the proverbial plane while trying to fly it. However, together, AI and information literacy make for a nuanced and informative path towards instilling AI concepts.

In addition, it’s crucial for librarians to have a seat at the AI table. While some librarians may not believe they have the technical expertise required to be at this table, we are among the

few in academia who understand critical information literacy and its importance in helping students become not just consumers, but contributors to the information landscape.

Lastly, while it feels like a Sisyphean task to stay completely current on AI given its rapid pace of development, it’s necessary to continue to learn about these technologies. In Summer 2025, I took ACRL’s course on “Exploring AI with Critical Information Literacy.” This was a great way to learn more about the ethical, societal, environmental, and practical issues surrounding AI and apply a critical lens to its use. I look forward to relaying this outlook to the business students with whom I work so that they encounter a nuanced view of AI. While AI offers great promise in terms of efficiency and new and exciting career paths, there is also much of which to be wary. As information professionals, librarians are uniquely well-positioned to help engender inquiring dispositions so that our students aren’t mere passengers but instead are pilots who are ready to fly their own planes through the ever-evolving airspace of AI. (Perplexity, 2025)

References

Artificial Intelligence Literacy Framework. (n.d.). University Library | University of Adelaide. Retrieved August 13, 2025, from https://www.adelaide.edu.au/library/library-services/servicesfor-teaching-staff/artificial-intelligence-literacy-framework. Ellis, Lindsay. (2024, April 3). Business Schools Are Going All In on AI - WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/generative-ai-mbabusiness-school-13199631

Hendrick, Rachel. (2024, May 8). Considering RAG when Evaluating Generative AI Tools—Choice 360 . https:// www.choice360.org/libtech-insight/considering-rag-whenevaluating-generative-ai-tools/

Kogod School of Business Partners with Perplexity to Provide Enterprise AI Access to All Students, Staff and Faculty. (2025, March 19). https://kogod.american.edu/news/kogod-schoolof-business-partners-with-perplexity-to-provide-enterpriseai-access-to-all-students-staff-and-faculty

Lo, L. (2025). AI Literacy for All: A Universal Framework. University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ulls_fsp/213

Lo, L. S. (2023). The CLEAR Path: A framework for Enhancing Information Literacy Through Prompt Engineering. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 49(4), 102720. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.acalib.2023.102720

Perplexity AI. (2025, August 13). I’m working on an article on teaching AI literacy to university students. I used the saying “building the plane while flying it” and have constructed a loose airplane theme around the article. I’m trying to think of a good ending sentence about teaching students how to navigate the various issues surrounding AI. Can you think of a good way to do this using an airplane theme [Generative AI chat]. Perplexity. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/i-m-working-on-an-articleon-t-MidbVh5EQwWSHQMzrWsvAg#0

Understanding AI Literacy | Teaching Commons . (n.d.). Retrieved August 13, 2025, from https://teachingcommons. stanford.edu/teaching-guides/artificial-intelligence-teachingguide/understanding-ai-literacy

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Navigating Complexity: Library-Centered Approaches to Evaluating AI Technologies

By Joelen Pastva (Director of Library Services, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, Pittsburgh, PA 15213) <jpastva@andrew.cmu.edu>

and Maranda Reilly (Electronic Resources Manager, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213) <mreilly@andrew.cmu.edu>

In an information landscape characterized by the exponential growth and rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) products within higher education, academic libraries are grappling with a rapidly shifting terrain. AI tools and new features that promise to enhance discovery, streamline workflows, and support research are being introduced by new and established vendors at a breakneck speed. Yet their rapid evolution and opaque mechanics often outpace the methods traditionally used for resource evaluation. Academic libraries, long-trusted stewards of information ethics and access, now confront a dual imperative: to assess the utility of AI tools and to critically examine their broader impact on information literacy and retrieval. This article explores the challenges posed by evaluating AI technologies through traditional frameworks, proposes new strategies aligned with the mission and strengths of libraries, and offers actionable takeaways to support ongoing engagement with this transformative technology.

Since the release of GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT in late 2022, AI has swiftly moved from a peripheral concern to a ubiquitous presence in library technologies (Chakraborty 2023, 63; Baytas and Ruediger 2024, 9). Libraries face increasing pressure from vendors marketing AI tools, often bundled into existing platforms or introduced as standalone products, and from internal stakeholder expectations for guidance and access. And yet, this landscape does not conform to past practices and legacy evaluation models. Although libraries have long sought to align resource acquisitions with local needs, which include the vision, mission, and strategic plans of both the library and the broader university, rapid product development and frequent updates often introduce new functionalities that can render prior assessments outdated. When combined with the opaque nature of AI systems and inconsistent or inaccessible usage metrics, the already nuanced task of resource evaluation is further complicated.

Vendor roadmaps, while generally a key resource for anticipating future developments, do not guarantee transparency or control. A critical question remains: How can libraries ensure that the swift pace of product development is sustainable and continues to meet initial requirements? When new AI features are introduced into existing licensed resources, collaboration amongst library teams is often needed to fully understand the impact of the features and determine whether to enable them. However, libraries do not always have the option to disable or opt out of these changes, forcing a reactive stance that erodes institutional agency and placing greater pressure on libraries to maintain communication with users, gather local feedback, and advocate directly with vendors.

Navigating this nuanced decision-making is particularly critical for heavily used platforms. At Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Libraries, tools like EBSCOhost’s Natural Language Search mode (EBSCO, 2025) and Ex Libris’ Primo VE

Research Assistant (Ex Libris, 2024) prompted internal investigations by the Collections Advisory Council. During a trial of the Web of Science Research Assistant, CMU’s Evidence Synthesis Program and AI Support Group hosted a demonstration for library personnel. This effort culminated in the development of the AI-Powered Tool Assessment Framework, designed by library faculty from diverse backgrounds to aid in the evaluation of “academic research discovery tools for literature search,” and heavily influenced by a series of blog posts on the same topic by Aaron Tay (Young et al. 2025; Tay 2025). This tool will ultimately be shared with the larger university community as part of the library’s new AI in Research Program to support the responsible adoption of AI tools by researchers, and highlights how librarians can lead in ethical evaluation and outreach.

Beyond CMU, other institutions have developed, shared, and refined various thoughtful tools and frameworks grounded in the core ethics of information professionals, which include “access to information, responsibility, integrity, independence, neutrality, and transparency” (Nogueira 2025, 2). Nogueira et al. present a set of questions related to the assessment of an AI tool, including its potential benefits, intended application, functionality, ethics, who developed the tool and what business model they follow, and privacy concerns (Nogueira et al. 2024, 10-12). Temple University Libraries’ AI Tools Report Card offers a model centered around the concepts of access, sources, relevancy, accuracy, chatbot, my data, and goals (Temple University Libraries 2025). Upshall’s framework includes technical aspects such as algorithmic transparency and training data along with performance metrics, documentation, and user feedback mechanisms (Upshall 2022, 13-14). These frameworks can be viewed as critical wayfinding in the fog of constant technological change.

ITHAKA S+R’s report, “Generative AI in Higher Education: The Product Landscape” (Baytas and Ruediger, 2024) and its associated Generative AI Product Tracker, serve as an invaluable resource for classifying, monitoring, and assessing the proliferation of AI technologies. AI tools can be categorized by their intended purpose — discovery, teaching & learning, research workflow, writing, coding, and image generation (Ithaka S+R n.d.). Although multi-purpose, enterprise-level AI tools such as Copilot are frequently handled by institutional IT departments, task-specific tools require the subject expertise of librarians to lead in their evaluation because of their highly specialized nature and multitude of categorical distinctions (Nogueira et al. 2024, 2-4).

Qualitative frameworks are undoubtedly valuable for informing decision-making, particularly during trial periods, and identifying the appropriate framework largely depends on local needs and the tool to be evaluated. However, these

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frameworks can be cumbersome and resource-intensive to apply. Thorough evaluations often require multiple stakeholders and hours to complete, which is difficult to scale as tools change and introduce new features frequently. Moreover, many frameworks lack a component for standardized usage measurement, which is a critical element in the e-resource lifecycle, particularly for acquisitions teams who rely on quantitative usage metrics.

Library industry organizations such as NISO and COUNTER are actively facilitating dialogue between libraries and publishers to establish a collaborative path forward concerning the integration and evaluation of AI products. Publishers commonly provide COUNTER reports to libraries for traditional e-resource evaluation, often adhering to the NISO SUSHI protocol to automate the delivery of usage statistics. These metrics are not yet standard among AI vendors, however, which complicates the evaluation process. Fortunately, work in this area is underway as Project COUNTER noted in their July 2025 email newsletter, with the formation of two new working groups. The first group is tasked with defining “human versus non-human usage,” while the second is investigating pathways for COUNTER compliance, aiming to “make it possible for small, non-Code-compliant publishers to start offering some form of COUNTER reporting.”

The NISO Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) Standing Committee conducted a survey among libraries and content providers in the discovery ecosystem related to Generative AI to understand areas of interest and concern (NISO, 2025). The report findings shed light on the diverse perspectives of each sector’s “hopes and fears” as well as potential areas where ODI could help to foster transparency. Although traditional evaluation metrics and usage analytics were noted in survey questions, they were not ranked as priority areas for libraries nor content providers. For example, the “definition of usage reports related to how publisher content is used for training, searching, viewing, and clicking” was listed as an option but was ranked low by content providers. Despite the low rankings at the time of the survey, it will be interesting to see how priorities shift for each sector as technologies evolve.

In the absence of standardized COUNTER statistics, alternative usage metrics can be employed to aid in evaluation. Measuring web or system analytics is a recommended approach (Emery et al., 2020, 44). Additionally, link resolver usage data can be beneficial when interoperability between AI products and existing library discovery tools can be configured. AI vendors may offer metrics such as the number of users, user sessions, searches, report views, or assistant queries, and it is advisable to understand the availability of usage metrics before subscribing to any product to support informed decision-making during the tool’s lifecycle. Libraries will ultimately need to determine which cost vs. engagement metric best fits the unique function of the tool in question. This bespoke approach to usage metrics unfortunately makes it increasingly difficult to generalize usage across tool categories.

Beyond technical concerns, libraries must also consider the ethical and economic context of AI tools. The lack of a simple, one-size-fits-all approach to evaluating AI tools is an indication of how dramatically the information landscape has changed since 2001. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in her work on surveillance capitalism, the commodification of user data presents profound challenges in a complex landscape where highly abstract factors are inextricable from the provisioning of information for progress and profit. These practices raise issues such as data extraction, lack of consent, data as behavioral

surplus, the power imbalance inherent with AI technologies, and the economic concept of predictive control (Zuboff 2020). Surveillance capitalism makes a compelling case for how these issues have converged to activate a new era in the realm of information, its applications, and the forces that drive it.

A cornerstone of surveillance capitalism is the extraction of personal data without meaningful user knowledge or consent, and many AI tools marketed to academic libraries engage in precisely this practice. As Nogueira et al. caution, information professionals must evaluate not only what AI tools do, but what data they collect and how it is used (Nogueira 2025, 6). This includes data input by users, interaction logs, and contextual metadata, all of which exceeds what is required for service improvements and may be harvested as “behavioral surplus” to refine commercial models, train future algorithms, or sell to third parties. Libraries should pay particular attention to a vendor’s transparency around data practices, especially when language appears to be intentionally vague. There is often an imbalance of power between vendors with access to vast user data and libraries attempting to maintain ethical standards, which mirrors the larger dynamics of surveillance capitalism. If information about data practices is not readily accessible in documentation, libraries must work with their vendor to set clear expectations around the collection and commodification of user data.

It is also important for librarians to be cautious of the “AI halo effect,” which is the assumption that any tool using AI is automatically beneficial. Technology historian Mar Hicks points out that hype tends to build around tools rather than infrastructure or processes because it is easier to make abstract promises about a tool’s capabilities without getting into specific details that might not hold up under closer scrutiny (Auslander 2025). Just because a tool uses AI does not automatically make it better despite the accompanying marketing pitch and buzz, as the Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence clearly illustrates (Khandabattu and Tamersoy 2025). Librarians, due to their close work with systems and platforms, are particularly susceptible to this bias and should adopt a healthy skepticism when evaluating new tools grounded in a commitment to evidence and ethics.

In reviewing the plethora of issues raised, there is no one clear path forward for libraries attempting to evaluate AI tools. Instead, there are a multitude of factors that must be examined and weighted according to local expertise, institutional priorities, and alignment with the research and educational mission of the library and its parent organization. As new technology continues to transform the information landscape, libraries must evolve from “static support structures into dynamic centers of influence” to ensure the best outcomes for AI integrations (Hanegan and Rosser 2025, 3). We hope the following takeaways can aid in this ongoing work:

1. Lead with core values — Ensure that transparency, privacy, access, and ethics are at the forefront of AI evaluation.

2. Advocate for data clarity — Demand usage metrics and data transparency from vendors, and scrutinize vague or ambiguous policies.

3. Collaborate across teams — Leverage internal expertise from different library units, campus partners, and colleagues at other institutions to evaluate tools holistically.

4. Customize evaluation approaches — Adapt frameworks to match the type and purpose of each AI tool.

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5. Resist the hype — Question marketing claims and examine actual functionality, user experience, and alignment with institutional needs.

6. Keep learning and sharing — Participate in communities of practice, contribute to evolving frameworks, and share insights across the profession.

Librarians are uniquely positioned to influence the trajectory of AI in academia, not just as experts in information, but as stewards of ethical progress. By continuing to apply our evaluative skills and professional judgment, libraries can help ensure that AI serves the interests of learning, discovery, and equity in our communities.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dom Jebbia for sharing his invaluable insights on these topics and suggestions for framing this investigation and discussion.

Bibliography

Auslander, Rachel. “Historian Mar Hicks on Why Nothing about AI Is Inevitable.” Fast Company, August 21, 2025. Accessed August 25, 2025. https://www.fastcompany.com/91384078/ nothing-about-ai-is-inevitable-historian-mar-hicks-onrejecting-the-future-were-being-sold

Baytas, Claire and Dylan Ruediger. “Generative AI in Higher Education: The Product Landscape.” Ithaka S+R, last Modified March 7, 2024, https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320394.

Chakraborty, Utpal, Roy, Soumyadeep, and Kumar, Sumit. Rise of Generative AI and ChatGPT: Understand How Generative AI and ChatGPT Are Transforming and Reshaping the Business World (English Edition). Los Angeles: BPB Publications, 2023.

EBSCO. “Natural Language Search,” accessed August 20, 2025. https://www.ebsco.com/artificial-intelligence/products/ natural-language-search.

Emery, J., Graham Stone, and Patricia McCracken. Techniques for Electronic Resource Management: TERMS and the Transition to Open. Chicago: American Library Association, 2020. https:// doi.org/10.15760/lib-01

Ex Libris. “Primo Research Assistant,” accessed August 21, 2025. https://exlibrisgroup.com/announcement/exlibris-primo-research-assistant-is-now-available-for-primoinstitutions/

Hanegan, Michael, and Chris Rosser. Generative AI and Libraries: Claiming Our Place in the Center of a Shared Future. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2025.

Ithaka S+R. “Generative AI Product Tracker,” accessed August 25, 2025. https://sr.ithaka.org/our-work/generativeai-product-tracker/

Khandabattu, Haritha, and Birgi Tamersoy. “Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2025.” Gartner, June 11, 2025.

National Information Standards Organization (NISO). “Generative Artificial Intelligence and Web-Scale Discovery,” accessed August 20, 2025. https://niso.org/publications/odiai-survey-report

Nogueira, Leticia Antunes, Stine Thordarson Moltubakk, Andreas Fagervik, and Inga Buset Langfeldt. “Cutting through the Noise: Assessing Tools That Employ Artificial Intelligence.” IFLA Journal (January 9, 2025). https://doi. org/10.1177/03400352241304121

Tay, Aaron. Aaron Tay’s Musings about Librarianship . Accessed August 19, 2025. https://musingsaboutlibrarianship. blogspot.com/

Temple University Libraries. “AI Tools for Research: Assessing AI Research Tools.” Last updated August 19, 2025. https://guides.temple.edu/ai-research-tools/assess

Upshall, Michael. “An AI Toolkit for Libraries.” Insights 35 (January 1, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.592

Young, Sarah, Alfredo González-Espinoza, Haoyong Lan, and Huajin Wang. “AI Powered Search Tool Assessment Framework.” Last updated July 22, 2025.

Zuboff, Shoshana. “What Data and Digitalization Could Mean for Your Democratic Future.” OECD Podcasts, produced by Robin Allison Davis and Samia Basille. Podcast, streaming audio, 26:15. December 14, 2020. https://soundcloud.com/oecd/ data-digitalisation-democracy-shoshana-zuboff

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Embedded AI in Practice: How Libraries and Platforms Shape Research and Instruction Together

By Anne Grant (Research Librarian for the Humanities & AI/Information Literacy Coordinator, Clemson

University

Libraries, Clemson, SC) <anne1@clemson.edu> libraries.clemson.edu

and Beth LaPensee (Principal Product Manager, JSTOR, ITHAKA, New York, NY 10006) <beth.lapensee@ithaka.org> www.ithaka.org, www.jstor.org

Introduction

The rapid proliferation of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in higher education has raised concern among academic librarians and research platform providers alike. Many tools embed themselves without user consent and obscure how results are generated, prompting important ethical questions about responsible engagement. For example, the potential misuse of intellectual property and the “forced” embedded nature of many tools that do not allow users to opt out of AI suggestions leads to warranted questions about the best ways to ethically and responsibly engage with these tools.1

One academic librarian observed that “refusing to use it (generative AI tools) is a key step along the way,” expressing frustration over the lack of opt-out options.2 At the same time, scholars in the humanities have noted that AI can help identify textual patterns previously difficult or impossible to detect, offering a way to augment human capacity and engage more deeply with complex humanistic texts.3

To responsibly integrate AI, organizations are encouraged to regularly evaluate performance, provide specialized training, and foster partnerships with the academic community.4 This article presents a collaborative perspective between JSTOR, a nonprofit digital library and research platform, and Clemson University Libraries, one of the early beta partners for JSTOR’s embedded AI research tool. Together, the authors explore how the tool was developed, integrated into instruction, and evaluated in practice.

JSTOR’s Perspective: Building the AI Research Tool

When we began exploring generative AI at JSTOR in spring 2023, our goal wasn’t to chase a trend, it was to solve meaningful research challenges. Students and scholars were overwhelmed by information volume, librarians prioritized critical thinking, and publishers emphasized context and attribution. We asked: How could AI support all three?

We chose to begin at the level of the document (a journal article or book chapter). Rather than layering AI on top of search or producing summaries, we designed a tool that deepens engagement with the source itself. Every response is anchored in the full text, with inline citations linking directly to relevant passages. Instead of producing essays or interpretations, the tool prompts better questions, traces concepts, and connects related material, reinforcing habits of inquiry and academic integrity.

From the outset, we prioritized transparency and trust. Our design principles were clear: focus on the source, ensure traceability, maintain academic integrity. The tool exists to strengthen research practice, not replace it.

Development was collaborative. Librarians, faculty, students, researchers, and publishers tested early iterations and shaped

the design. Feedback guided how we scaled access: first to individual users, then to institutional pilots, and now to broad early access across the JSTOR platform. Each phase revealed how people used the tool, what it unlocked, and where to refine.

Today, institutions can choose whether to enable the tool based on their readiness. It remains a work in progress, evolving in response to community needs. What remains constant is our commitment to transparency, traceability, and the values of scholarship.

Clemson’s Perspective: Instructional Integration & Assessment

Clemson University Libraries participated in the beta release of JSTOR’s AI research tool. A humanities librarian served as the lead contact and collaborated with the Ithaka team to develop instructional materials, including an online guide. The same librarian, also the instructor of record for a science and technology course (STS 1010), created an assignment requiring students to engage directly with the AI tool.

Table 1. STS 1010 Assignment Instructions:

Add a comment about this article. What surprised you? What do you have a question about? What did you learn? What did you already know? Did you use the AI tool? If so, what did you like/dislike?

Clemson is beta testing a new AI tool in JSTOR (one of our databases). You can use it to summarize this article.

1. Go to the article in JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/ stable/40971194

2. Log in using the button in the top right — if you do not have an account, you can create one for free

3. Once logged in, you’ll see the option to find out “What is this text about?”

4. You can also ask questions of the article.

Not all students opted to use the tool, but reflections included both enthusiasm and skepticism. Some were surprised to find AI integrated into a database. Several commented that the tool made the lengthy article more manageable, while others felt that complex language was not sufficiently simplified and that smaller details were sometimes overlooked.

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One student initially had difficulty locating the tool but later appreciated being able to “ask questions” of the text. A few students highlighted that the tool surfaced similar themes for multiple users, raising concerns that class discussions might become homogenized if students relied too heavily on AI.

Anecdotally, both students and faculty expressed hesitancy toward using generative AI tools. Nevertheless, early usage data shows promising uptake. About 40% of logged-in users engage with the research tool; they use twice as much content during a visit; run three-times as many searches; and return to JSTOR more frequently. Overall, tools embedded within trusted academic platforms such as JSTOR can improve discoverability and reduce barriers to engaging with scholarly texts.

Insights from the Beta Period: How the Tool is Used

The beta period included 14 participating institutions and many individuals, averaging approximately 1,200 daily active users. Across all user groups, the tool was used primarily to make sense of individual documents. Nearly 70% of questions focused on understanding content: what was mentioned, how concepts were discussed, or what methods were used. For novice researchers, the tool made dense texts more approachable and supported the development of critical reading habits, helping them refine their thinking. Instructors used it to facilitate inquiry-based learning and lower barriers to engagement. Experienced researchers treated the tool much like a research assistant, probing texts for conceptual relationships and exploring adjacent materials to deepen their background knowledge. One faculty member described the impact succinctly: “AI isn’t doing any of the intellectual work for me… It’s not thinking things for me; it’s showing me where to look.”

The remaining 30% of queries reflected experimentation, including attempts to generate content or test the tool’s limits. This curiosity points to evolving expectations for how AI might fit into future research workflows.

Usage data reinforces this picture of focused engagement. Institutionally affiliated users already interact regularly with JSTOR, but those using the research tool, by logging into a free personal account, are even more active. This pattern holds across both weekly and monthly timeframes and has remained consistent as access expands. Compared to other affiliated users, research tool users conduct more searches and request more items per day, indicating deeper and more sustained research behavior. At Clemson, this same trend is evident: while a smaller subset of users is currently accessing the tool, those who do are consistently active, suggesting strong alignment between the tool and engaged research workflows.

Opportunities and Challenges: JSTOR’s View

The tool has opened new doors for reimagining discovery. Beyond helping users navigate individual texts, it invites new ways of moving through the platform. We see three directions for innovation:

• Micro-discovery: Surfacing arguments, claims, or evidence within documents

• Semantic exploration: Letting users move conceptually or thematically, not just by keyword

• Dynamic engagement: Treating content as responsive and teachable, not static

Together, these modes promise a richer, more interactive research experience, one that supports both expert scholars and students developing their research skills.

Our primary challenge is to ensure that AI strengthens rather than shortcuts the intellectual habits of humanistic research. Humanities scholarship thrives on individual interpretation and thoughtful engagement.5, 6 Many commercial AI tools promote speed and convenience at the expense of rigor. We’re working to align our tool with the slower, more reflective processes that define academic inquiry.

A second challenge is managing expectations. Some users arrive with prior experience using opaque commercial systems and may approach any embedded AI with skepticism. Our hope is that, through direct use and feedback, librarians, students, and researchers will recognize the difference and help us shape the future of responsible, scholarly AI.

Opportunities and Challenges: Clemson’s View

From a library and instructional perspective, the embedded AI tool offers several opportunities:

• It creates a starting point for discussion — what did the AI emphasize, and what did it overlook?

• It breaks down long or dense readings into bite-sized, approachable pieces

• It improves transparency by clearly citing its sources — unlike many commercial tools.

• It’s available at no additional cost , expanding equitable access.

• JSTOR’s team provided responsive support for instructional integration and guide creation.

Challenges remain. Skepticism persists among both students and faculty. Some students expressed confusion about the login process. Others found the tool lacked nuance in interpreting complex texts. Standardized tutorials and instructional strategies would help address these concerns.

While the AI tool can sometimes miss the subtleties of a reading, it also invites new types of engagement — especially when classroom conversations build on its outputs. The potential lies not just in the answers the AI gives, but in how those answers can spark deeper human interpretation

Conclusion: Learning Together in an Evolving Landscape

This article has offered a joint perspective from an academic library and a nonprofit research platform on the development, integration, and evaluation of an embedded AI research tool. The partnership demonstrates how innovation and instruction can co-evolve to keep AI grounded in scholarly values.

One clear takeaway is the importance of transparency Commercial AI systems often resemble a hotdog: seemingly complete, but unclear in composition. By contrast, JSTOR’s approach is more like an organic farm: rooted in high-quality, trustworthy content with full traceability.

Another lesson is the power of collaboration . When platforms and libraries co-create resources, such as assignments, guides, and classroom activities, they not only extend the tool’s reach but also build broader AI literacy.

Finally, access and choice remain vital. JSTOR’s AI research tool is free for institutions, with the ability to disable it, allowing librarians to pace adoption based on local readiness.7 This ensures an equitable and adaptable path forward.

As feedback continues to shape the tool’s evolution, we reaffirm a shared goal: to build AI support that enhances inquiry, rather than replaces it… and to do so in partnership with the communities we serve.

endnotes on page 26

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Endnotes

1. Monnier, R., Noe, M., & Gibson, E. (2025). AI in Academic Libraries, Part One: Concerns and Commodification. College & Research Libraries News, 86(4), 173. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.86.4.173

2. Monnier, R., Noe, M., & Gibson, E. (2025). AI in Academic Libraries, Part Two: Resistance and the Search for Ethical Uses. College & Research Libraries News, 86(5), 218. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.86.5.218

3. Duch, W. (2024). Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Humanities. Er (r) go. Teoria-Literatura-Kultura, (48), 269-297.

4. Alalaq, A. S. (2025). AI-Enhanced Digital Databases. Journal of Sensor Networks and Data Communications, 5(1), 01-08.

5. Chen, Z. (2025, May 14). The humanities in an AI world: Personal reflections from SXSW EDU 2025 [Blog post]. About JSTOR. Retrieved from https://about.jstor.org/blog/the-humanities-in-an-ai-world-personalreflections-from-sxsw-edu-2025/

6. LaPensee, B., & Kaya, D. (2025, February 13). The humanities in the age of AI: Notes on a participatory exploration at MLA 2025 [Blog post]. About JSTOR. https://about.jstor.org/blog/mla_2025_highlights/

7. For more information on enabling or disabling the tool, see JSTOR’s AI Research Tool: Managing Institutional Access, available at: https://support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/30315886380695-JSTOR-sAI-Research-Tool-Managing-Institutional-Access

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Crisis at Isla Nublar: Using Artificial Intelligence for Metadata Standardization

By Aaron Krebeck (Deputy Director, Washington Research Library Consortium, Upper Marlboro, MD 20774) <aaron.krebeck@wrlc.org> www.wrlc.org

Paging Dr. Malcolm

There’s an oft-quoted scene in the original Jurassic Park film where a leather-jacketed Jeff Goldblum — perfect in the role of skeptical mathematician Dr. Ian Malcolm — admonishes the park’s creator for opening a Pandora’s box of toothy dinosaur murder. In their quest to do something great with cutting edge technology, “scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

As my finger was poised above the keyboard, about to submit a job that would change hundreds of thousands of metadata records based on the whims of AI, my thoughts turned to Dr. Malcolm, the quote above, and whether I had the Goldblumian levels of bravado and confidence to pull off a leather jacket. I wondered if I was about to open a Pandora’s box of my own. I could update these records using a series of queries and guidelines that I’ve fed into ChatGPT, but should I? Where would the use of that technology take us?

Fashion choices aside, the underlying questions — how I got to that point in my AI journey, and what happened after — are likely relatable to those reading now and are important discussions to confront at every GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive, Museum) organization.

Part 1: Implementations

Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) was established as a non-profit corporation in 1987 to support and enhance the library and information services of universities in

the Washington, DC metropolitan area.

We have nine partner institutions using an Alma Network Zone environment and, like other consortia, a number of committees that coordinate work in various program areas to unify policies and processes. In May 2023, our Metadata Committee created cataloging guidelines for item description in print periodicals.

The purpose of these guidelines was to standardize serial holding and item descriptions in the WRLC Alma Institution Zones and to facilitate the discovery of print periodicals in the WRLC instances of our Primo discovery service. Decades of cataloging by hundreds of different catalogers had led to wide variation in how volumes, dates, and other data elements were displayed. The resulting item description templates were incredibly detailed and well-documented. And while it was agreed that every effort would be made to adhere to these guidelines for newly cataloged items, there was no accompanying initiative to correct the item descriptions for more than a million print periodical volumes that were already in the catalog.

The committee’s reasons for stopping short of a recommendation to update all existing records to match the new guidelines are not hard to imagine. Correcting a million records would be a daunting task for even the most generously-staffed tech services department. And generously-staffed tech services departments have largely gone the way of the velociraptor. Yet it’s easy to see why such a project could be incredibly worthwhile. What’s the point of having specifications if so many items are out-of-spec? Standardizing item descriptions across the catalog would have benefits for discovery but also for shared print retention and a host of other important library initiatives. No more wondering if the v. 1, no. 3, 5/96 on your shelf is the same volume as the Num. 3; Volume 1, 1996 (May) on somebody else’s.

As these item description guidelines were being approved for consortial use, ChatGPT burst upon the scene in a blizzard of surreal, acid-drenched images. My most exciting early experience with AI was in asking for new episode scripts of my favorite prestige television programs while I waited the industry standard 24-36 months for a new season. The results weren’t going to win any Emmys, but it was still amazing to see how the technology clearly understood my intentions and could write and rewrite things based on a clear set of guidelines. And it was there that my mind uncharacteristically turned to a practical work application for this behavior.

The pace at which we’ve all become accustomed to using AI in our daily lives makes the actual nuts and bolts of what I did next seem fairly quaint and in no way earth-shattering by late 2025 standards. The great thing about artificial intelligence is that it mimics the iterative process of organic intelligence in learning through plain language. We librarians love to create workflows and guidelines to help preserve institutional knowledge, and those are perfect documents for teaching AI also. The item description templates created by our Metadata Committee

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Image created via AI prompt by DALL-E 2, prompt supplied by the author.

proved to be a crucially important resource. By telling ChatGPT what item description data should look like and some of the most common ways that it might differ, the AI got very good at taking our out-of-spec metadata and rewriting it according to the consortial standard.

Another timely upgrade to OpenAI’s platform during the early stages of this project was the ability to upload and process data sets as part of the prompt. What this ultimately looked like is

Prompt:

shown below. I was able to include a summary of rules for the display of volume information as a style guide and a CSV file containing a set of item records to be corrected. ChatGPT would provide its understanding of my rules and an overview of how it would process each data element, and then it would return the first 10-20 rows from the data set to ensure it was on the right track. If all looked good, I would ask it to process the full set, download the file of corrections, and assess the performance.

[Guide to style: All description statements should begin with volume information if available like “v.101:”. Then there should be number information if available like “no.3,”. Then there should be issue information if available like “iss.7”. Date information if available should be enclosed in parentheses like “(2022: Mar. 21)”. Statements starting with a 4 digit date should be rewritten as “v.2 (1998)”. There should not be more than one hyphen in a statement. So “v.33-36: (1976-1979)” should be reprinted as “v.33 (1976) – v.36 (1979)”] Reprint all strings in the description column of the attached csv and write to a new column

Generated Result:

The CSV file contains two columns: “Barcode” and “Description”. The “Description” column appears to contain various forms of volume, issue, and year information. Let’s proceed with reformatting these strings according to the rules you’ve provided.

Here are the rules summarized:

1. All description statements should begin with volume information if available (e.g., “v.101:”).

2. Then there should be a number information if available (e.g., “no.3”).

3. Then there should be issue information if available (e.g., “iss.7”).

4. Date information should be enclosed in parentheses (e.g., “(2022: Mar. 21)”).

5. Statements starting with a 4-digit date should be rewritten (e.g., “1998 v.2” becomes “v.2 (1998)”).

6. There should not be more than one hyphen in a statement. So “v.33-36: (1976-1979)” should be reprinted as “v.33 (1976) – v.36 (1979)”.

Please note that without explicit examples for each rule some assumptions will be made in the implementation. If the results are not as expected, please provide examples for clarification. Let’s start with the reformatting process.

Finished working

The descriptions have been reformatted according to the rules provided and written into a new column named “New Description”. Here’s how the first few rows of the dataframe look after reformatting:

0 21194001655113X 1950 v.12 v.12 (1950)

Once I had an intriguing prototype, I brought in some of my colleagues to help. I am not a cataloger, but I know some great ones and they were able to refine my processes and make me aware of additional efficiencies. One improvement was to create separate AI prompts for each WRLC partner library as each institution tended to do things similarly in-house so there were fewer variables that the AI would encounter when standardizing. Another important contribution from our WRLC Network Zone Manager, Jacqueline Saavedra, was to create a cross-checking script that would compare the numeric values in the original description to the ones found in the “corrected” description to ensure that nothing was lost in these updates. This would ensure

that when committing the changes in the library management system, we would only replace metadata that had truly been standardized and was — at the very least — no less descriptive than it had been before.

In the end, we were very successful in fixing variable cataloging. If the information was there but formatted incorrectly, we generally had great results. However, it’s still somewhat of a garbage in/garbage out proposition. This methodology cannot magically fix blank item descriptions though AI is now being tested for original cataloging. Even our most refined templates and style summaries also struggle with certain typos and input errors such as barcodes that are

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accidentally scanned into the middle of a string of otherwise correct information (a surprisingly common occurrence). The expectation for this project was never a 100% success rate, and accuracy differed by institution, but ChatGPT was able to standardize over 80% (over 800,000) of our legacy item descriptions. Results were provided in CSV files that could be easily loaded into our Alma system via batch jobs.

Part 2: Implications

It was at this point that I was confronted by Dr. Malcolm’s paradox. By all accounts, it was a successful test of using AI to perform corrective cataloging on a massive data set. I could now improve 800,000 records, but should I? After all, there’s a reason why we don’t have those generously-staffed tech services departments to do this work anymore. Choices were made at administrative levels to eliminate or freeze positions. Whether by buyout, layoff, or attrition, librarians left and didn’t come back. And those are always hard decisions. As Deputy Director, I’ve had to make some myself, but they are decisions about what is important and what is valued in our libraries. If library funding is such that we can’t afford a large staff of great catalogers, do our users deserve great catalogs? Or am I just continuing in the long and wretched library tradition of — contrary to our own best interest — doing more with less?

I likely wouldn’t have been asked to contribute to this issue if I hadn’t gone forward with the metadata changes. The records were updated. But I’m still not 100% sure it was a good idea. There’s a part of me that feels disloyal to every tech services employee who lost a job. There’s a part of me that wonders how long before my library’s budget is such that someone is hired to devise AI prompts at half my salary. Perhaps even that person will ultimately be replaced by a series of AI agents. But these are not just worries of the library world. This is humanity’s newest and heaviest socio-economic burden. I firmly believe that every employer who eliminates a position because of AI should have to contribute the entire cost of that person’s salary and benefits to the establishment of a universal basic income. I’m not sure we survive without that. But the time and the political climate to make that type of radical shift is not this one.

While an AI future presents a host of dire scenarios for traditional modern capitalist societies, GLAM organizations do have some natural bulwarks against the most negative outcomes. One advantage — if it can be considered such - is that our staffing levels are already about as low as they can get. There’s not much more fat to trim, and job duties have little overlap. Another is that we are never driven by profit at the same level as a publiclytraded company, so there’s less incentive even at our most budget conscious organizational levels, to be early adopters. That said, we don’t need to hasten our own demise. There is still time for ethical use of AI. I would make four recommendations when considering future AI projects.

Run AI models locally whenever possible. The carbon footprint of web-based AI models like Gemini, Copilot, and

ChatGPT5 is staggering. They consume vast amounts of natural resources each day, and there are other options. You can easily run smaller AI models locally and even offline with tools like Ollama. This solution is perfect for low to medium complexity queries such as asking for help in composing emails or for vibes coding Excel queries and simple Python scripts. Models such as Qwen, Gemma, and DeepSeek can run on your own computer (even offline!) and would consume no more water and energy than you are currently using to read this article.

Related to the above is to take great care in what you are sharing when you do use those large online models such as ChatGPT. Even if you are protecting personal information and using a somewhat private corporate account, those models are learning from your prompts and queries all the time. With apologies to Karl Marx, ChatGPT is old prompts, which, vampirelike, lives only by sucking new prompts, and lives the more, the more prompts it sucks.

Decide what jobs can and should be done by humans and hold the line. I believe my project of correcting item descriptions was much too large and complex to have ever been done by humans. But it’s a slippery slope. Once you wield the hammer of AI, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Finally, at the risk of sounding a little subversive and undermining articles like this one, use good judgment in how much you discuss your workplace usage of AI. None of us should be too specific on public channels about our successes with AI or the relative ease with which we completed a massive project. That really doesn’t do anyone any favors in the short or long term. If you find a clever way to automate vast swaths of your workday, that’s amazing. In fact, I’d love to hear how you did it. But message me privately.

It’s amazing how much has changed since my organization’s first AI project in 2023. AI and large language models have become relatively commonplace in our work life, if for no other reason than it’s a great way to summarize web results, vibes code, or get draft language for a tricky email. The academic library landscape has changed as well with universities under fire for no shortage of imagined slights against a hostile federal government. It’s unrealistic to expect that an end to our organizational austerity is on any nearby horizon. So it may seem like an odd time to double down on the goal of doing more with less, but I think that’s what we need to do. We just need to remember who we’re doing more for. It doesn’t have to be for the administrative offices that will continue to trim staff, and it certainly doesn’t have to be for that ceaselessly hostile government. It can just be for each of us who has a job and who strives to leave this world and its metadata a little bit better than we found it. Will AI ultimately mean the end of jobs? Probably. And that’s a heavy weight for all of us to carry. In the meantime, grant yourself the grace to use AI in any way that makes your life a little easier. Maybe buy yourself a leather jacket. You’ll look great.

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Reader’s Roundup: Monographic Musings & Reference Reviews

Column Editor: Corey Seeman (Director, Kresge Library Services, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan) <cseeman@umich.edu> Visit him at https://www.squirreldude.com/

Column Editor’s Note: It is not that uncommon that people share a picture of a splooting squirrel during the summertime. Sometimes called pancaking (a name I much prefer), the squirrel is laying flat on the dirt or a stone or cool surface in an attempt to regulate its temperature during the summer. Since they cannot sweat, this is the next best thing. It is kinda amazing that a squirrel in that position will try to stay still and not move for a considerable amount of time — maybe until the cool ground does its work.

So when I thought about this column, I thought about a squirrel picture I took a short time before with a squirrel pancaking on a bench in a shady part of campus under a canopy of trees. While we can certainly come up with twenty things it might be doing when it assumes this pose, it is clearly doing it for temperature comfort. But you would like to imagine that it (like us) is wondering, “Where did the summer go?” This year went quickly for sure. However, for many of us in the library field, the days of a quiet summer are in the rear-view mirror. Instead, we are left running around and making sure that our expenses match our budget allocation. We want to make sure that we have everything set up for the Fall Term. And we want to ensure that we are providing the best service we can to our community.

That all being said, there have been more than a few times when I wondered (out loud), “Where did the summer go? How did we get to September already?” Heck … October or November also. And sure, I bet you are thinking that this is yet another instance where this column is late to the great Toni Nix and the Charleston crew, but that is another story.

But as I look at the books that are reviewed today, I see the path forward for the work that we have to do and the resources that we should consider.

Pancaking squirrel. Sometimes called splooting. Just a behavior that provides a bit of relief on a warm or hot day.

While the cause of this behavior is weather related, I believe that we can learn a great deal from the books that are reviewed in this issue as each of the three titles reflects on something that is exhausting. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (Library Juice Press) addresses unfortunately a period when these members of our communities and our libraries are coming under attack for being who they are. Chronic Pain: Handbook & Resource Guide includes a number of government reports and CDC studies that we might not easily find today when the agency is venturing in a different direction I must say, some of the fiction that comes from the future measles outbreaks should be fascinating. And with Critical Survey of Mythology and Folklore: Creation Myths, we learn about the power of creation stories — as applied to so many different entities. So these works do not only help our community members and students and managers learn how to navigate through an assignment, it lets us learn how to navigate through 2025. And 2026 … and so on.

I think this picture is appropriate today not because we have had a long and hot summer, but because it seems that we are operating in a constant sense of exhaustion. Libraries across the spectrum are at risk in ways that I believe are unprecedented. Public library funding (at the federal level) has been slashed through the dismantling of the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services). Programs in my home state of Michigan such as MeLCat — our shared catalog — and MeL — the Michigan Electronic Library — both benefit from an influx of federal dollars. Most campus libraries that I know are scaling back purchasing and subscriptions in light of new or projected shortfalls. Our materials budget (all for subscriptions) is not 5% at my library at the University of Michigan. Exhausting times indeed.

I hope on your campus, in your firm, in your library or wherever you are, you find a little bit of respite that we could all use these days. Maybe it is a great cup of coffee. Maybe it is a perfect cinnamon doughnut. Maybe it is a tall glass of apple cider. Or maybe it is a nice cool place to regroup your wellbeing and your mental state before fighting the dragons once again.

Special thanks to our reviewers who take the time to explore these works to see if they are appropriate for libraries. Special thanks to my reviewers for this issue: Katerina Allmendinger (University of Colorado Boulder), Janet Crum (Fresno State University), and Michelle Speed (Baylor University). As always, I want to thank them for bringing this column together.

If you would like to be a reviewer for Against the Grain, please write me at <cseeman@umich.edu>. If you are a publisher and have a book you would like to see reviewed in a future column, please also write me directly. You can also find out more about the Reader’s Roundup here — https://www.squirreldude.com/ atg-readers-roundup

Happy reading and be nutty! — Corey

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Where did the summer go? Squirrel at the University of Michigan trying to catch some relief on a warm day in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Taken on Thursday September 18th, 2025.

Adolpho, Kalani Keahi, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCracken (Eds.). Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2023. 9781634001205, 560 pages. $75.00

Reviewed by Katerina Allmendinger (Success and Engagement Librarian, University Libraries, University of Colorado Boulder) <katerina.allmendinger@colorado.edu>

Trans and gender diverse people increasingly face dangers to their safety and wellbeing in the United States. Library workers may find ourselves, as trans and gender diverse people, alone and unsupported, subject to micro or outright aggressions; as cis people, unsure how best to act in allyship with our trans and gender diverse colleagues. This is, in part, because much of the literature focuses on working with trans and gender diverse patrons rather than on trans and gender diverse library workers’ experiences. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries brings dozens of perspectives to the conversation, helping to fill that gap. (Note that in this review I use the same terminology as the editors, “trans and gender diverse people” with the intention of that phrase being inclusive of everyone who identifies with those terms, including transgender, nonbinary, agender, and genderqueer people.)

The editors bring their considerable expertise and experience in libraries and archives to curating this volume, in addition to their lived experiences as gender diverse people. Importantly, the editors also bring an openness and honesty of perspective to their editorial roles, framing the scope of this work not as “the definitive guide to trans and gender diverse experiences in libraries, but instead to start the conversation.” As noted in the book’s introduction, it is not intended to be scholarly, but rather for chapter authors to share their experiences in library work or LIS education. This wide scope across library type,

Guide to the ATG Reviewer Ratings

The ATG Reviewer Rating is being included for each book reviewed. Corey came up with this rating to reflect our collaborative collections and resource sharing means and thinks it will help to classify the importance of these books.

• I need this book on my nightstand. (This book is so good, that I want a copy close at hand when I am in bed.)

• I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

• I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

• I need this available somewhere in my shared network. (I probably do not need this book, but it would be nice to get it within three to five days via my network catalog.)

• I’ll use my money elsewhere. (Just not sure this is a useful book for my library or my network.)

career stage, and writing format is a strength, making space for authors to write chapters that are manageable in length while being substantive. One notable perspective not represented are Black trans and gender diverse voices in the volume, as the editors acknowledge. I agree with the editors that Black trans and gender diverse people in libraries and archives must be part of any similar forthcoming volumes if we are to truly understand the experiences and needs of trans and gender diverse people in our profession.

There are many practical applications in this text, regardless of the size or type of library readers work within. Those planning LGBTQ+ allyship workshops or similar professional development will find the appendices in the chapter “Gender Inclusivity Trainings at Academic Libraries: Two Case Studies” invaluable.

Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries fills an ongoing gap in the literature for a wide range of perspectives of trans and gender diverse library workers and LIS students, including those who have left the profession. It is an essential purchase for library science collections. Those doing work around wellness or burnout in libraries can look to this book to further illuminate the dimensions of workplace harm particular to trans and gender diverse people’s experiences. For those in leadership roles, this is an unmissable read to ensure a broader understanding of the state of the field. Anyone working in libraries will find this book an indispensable step of their continuing education.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this on my desk. (This book is so valuable, that I want my own copy at my desk that I will share with no one.)

Chronic Pain: Handbook & Resource Guide. Amenia, NY: Grey House, 2024. 978-1-63700-815-7 (hardback); 978-1-63700816-4 (eBook). xv, 643 p., $165 (print), $206 (eBook).

Reviewed by Janet Crum (Dean of Library Services, Fresno State University, Fresno, CA) <janetcrum@mail.fresnostate.edu>

In 2021, the CDC estimated that nearly 21% of US adults experienced chronic pain, and nearly 7% experienced “highimpact chronic pain (i.e., chronic pain that results in substantial restriction to daily activities)” (Rikard, 2023). Rikard goes on to describe chronic pain as a “public health imperative” that is linked to dementia, suicide, substance misuse, substantial health care costs, and lost productivity (2023) — not to mention the suffering experienced by individual patients. This suffering takes place against the backdrop of two epidemics — opioid abuse and medical misinformation — both of which make it difficult for chronic pain patients to have their pain treated adequately and appropriately. Clearly, there is a need for current, evidencebased information for chronic pain patients and their families and caregivers. Chronic Pain: Handbook & Resource Guide helps address that need, though not without some limitations.

The book is divided into two main sections: 1) Studies & Statistics, which constitutes two-thirds of the book (approximately 400 pages) and contains reprints of US government reports and patient handouts (most from the CDC) and journal articles, and 2) a directory of resources. Both sections are subdivided as follows: chronic pain in general, causal conditions (e.g., arthritis, cancer, fibromyalgia, long COVID), and comorbid conditions (e.g., anxiety, depression, hypertension, substance disorders). The book concludes with a glossary, a name index, and a geographic index. Unfortunately, the book does not include a topic index, though the online

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version can be searched by keyword. [Editor’s note: Normally, a book that published government reports would be less useful, but given the changes in 2025 at the CDC and elsewhere in the federal government, having a historical record of these reports and studies is extremely important].

The reprints in the first section are a mix of resources for patients, clinicians, and policymakers. A detailed table of contents with brief annotations is included to help readers locate relevant information quickly. Highlights in this section include:

• An NIH report on complementary approaches to chronic pain.

• An FDA report called The Voice of the Patien t that synthesizes comments from a public meeting with chronic pain patients. This document portrays the patient experience in rich detail and should be required reading for every clinician who treats pain patients.

• A National Cancer Institute publication with detailed information about pain for cancer patients.

The content in this section appears to be current, with most reprints dated between 2019-2022, though some are undated.

The remainder of the book consists of directories of resources, organized by general topic (chronic pain, causal conditions, comorbid conditions) and, within the latter two, by specific condition, then by type of resource. Resource types include agencies and associations, foundations, libraries and resource centers, research centers, support groups and hotlines, print resources (mostly journals, some magazines), digital resources, and websites. Most organizations listed are in the US, with a few Canadian resources included. For organizations, entries include name, address, phone number, email, and website, plus a brief description. In some cases, email addresses are for an individual person rather than a general organizational account, so they may become out of date quickly. Entries for digital resources and websites include the title, link, and a brief description. Patients will likely find the support groups and websites to be most helpful.

The Chronic Pain: Handbook & Resource Guide works well as a reference resource, a place for patients, families, and caregivers to get general information about their condition and locate additional resources (especially organizations, support groups, and websites). Because the first section consists solely of reprints, the materials can feel disconnected and lacking context, but the information is still useful. The single biggest limitation of this book is the lack of a subject index. The online edition is keyword-searchable, which helps, but a well-constructed topic index would enable readers to find all information relevant to their conditions much more easily.

Despite this limitation, Chronic Pain: Handbook & Resource Guide will be useful in public and academic library reference collections and consumer health libraries.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

References:

Rikard, S. M. (2023). Chronic Pain Among Adults – United States, 2019–2021. MMWR. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 72 https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7215a1

Shally-Jensen, Michael (Ed.). Critical Survey of Mythology and Folklore: Creation Myths. Amenia, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2023. 978-1-63700-452-4 (hardcover); 978-1-63700-455-5 (eBook). 2 v. xxi + 1027 pages. $295.00.

Reviewed by Michelle Speed (Metadata Librarian, Moody Library, Baylor University) <michelle_speed@baylor.edu>

Critical Survey of Mythology and Folklore: Creation Myths follows a very broad definition of “creation.” The editor does not limit this work to tales of the creation of the earth or mankind but includes myths about the creation of language (“The Tower of Babel”), the creation of specific landforms and waterways (“The Creation of the Ganges”), creation of empires (“The Rod of Gold”), and myths describing the creation of a culture’s significant god or goddess (“Garuda”). This approach adds to the breadth of works represented and keeps the casual reader interested. At times, comparisons are drawn between similar myths in differing cultures or time periods, although this is not a standard feature of all entries.

The book is published in two volumes. Volume one covers “Africa,” “Mesoamerica and South America,” “North America,” “The Far East,” “Norse, Celtic, and European Mythology,” and ends with coverage of “The Pacific and Oceania.” Volume two covers “Egypt,” “Greek and Roman Mythology,” “India,” “The Near East,” and includes four indexes and a bibliography.

Each geographic region is organized into the following subsections: “Overviews,” “Myths and Stories,” “Selected Sources and Authors,” and “Gods and Goddesses.”

The “Overviews” section contains a general introduction to well-known ancient literature of the region in question, followed by an explanation of the role of said literature within a given culture, and finally by an exploration of the literature’s impact in other regions or cultures.

The “Myths and Stories” section’s content is presented alphabetically by title and include the author (often given as “Traditional”), the time period, a more specific country or culture of origin, its genre (myth, folktale, epic, etc.), a summary of the plot, and the significance of the myth.

“Selected Sources and Authors” are arranged alphabetically by the author’s name, or when unknown, by the title of the source. Facts are given such as an author’s pseudonym(s), birth and death dates, related civilizations or locales, and their major role or position (for example: bard or farmer). A brief biographical sketch is presented along with a short explainer about the author or source’s influence. For those civilizations and continents that do not have many surviving records or who have strong oral traditions, the Selected Sources and Authors section contains very little information.

For entries in the “Gods and Goddesses” section, a brief outline of their associated symbols is given, as well as more specific locales or cultures. An overview of the god or goddess is presented, as is a description of their role within mythology. Some entries include details about the mythological origin of the god or goddess and any known information about cults surrounding these figures. Lastly, a summary of their role in popular culture is included. As with all sections, suggestions for further reading are included.

In this work, there are four indexes and a bibliography. Three of the indexes are presented first: the chronological index (5000 BCE–2500 BCE to 1951 CE–2000 CE), the index of selected

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sources and authors, and the index of gods and goddesses. This is followed by the bibliography by region. Lastly, the subject index is presented. Because the bibliography interrupts the sequence of indexes, some readers may find the layout confusing.

The text is richly illustrated, including maps, photographs of relevant archaeological findings, and full-color artwork.

Because Critical Survey of Mythology and Folklore: Creation Myths encompasses all regions of the world, not all known creation myths and legends can be included in this two-volume work. For example, very little attention is paid to the creation myths of the mountainous Caucasus region, outside of Turkey and Iran. Regions that the global West has largely ignored continue to be given such treatment. Modern translation efforts have begun to tackle Ossetian myths and the legends of the Chechen-Ingush region, but overall, these are quite lacking, so it comes as no surprise that there is no inclusion of these and many other rich, but insular, cultures’ myths.

Despite these shortcomings, Creation Myths is a fantastic introduction to the mythology and folklore of ancient peoples, with a smattering of modern creation legends mixed in. The editor, Michael Shally-Jensen, deftly incorporates cultural and

temporal context, weaving in detail about modern influence. No bias or favor is given to any one culture or tradition. It may be upsetting to some to find their own strongly held beliefs listed as an entry in a book of creation myths, but to exclude them would clearly introduce questions of fair treatment. As the editor explains in their introduction, myths differ from folktales and legends in that they are “understood to be essentially true stories by the people who originally created them and kept them alive. They are basically part of a religious tradition, and it is only when they are viewed from outside that tradition that they appear false or fanciful.” (page xv)

In sum, Critical Survey of Mythology and Folklore: Creation Myths is an excellent resource for high school students, undergraduates, and anyone with an interest in exploring the myths and stories of the ancient world. It is an engaging reference text, providing many pathways to dive into further for more in-depth study.

ATG Reviewer Rating: I need this in my library. (I want to be able to get up from my desk and grab this book off the shelf, if it’s not checked out.)

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Booklover —Red Flags

Column Editor: Donna Jacobs (Retired, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425) <donna.jacobs55@gmail.com>

Great Stories by Nobel Prize Winners was a treasured find more than a decade ago in a second-hand book store that I discovered while traveling. Edited by Leo Hamalian and Edmond L. Volpe of the City College of New York, it is a discarded volume from the Central Rappahannock Regional Library of Fredericksburg, Virginia. There are 26 stories by 26 different Laureates with a five-page preface by the editors. Each story is introduced by a short-italicized biography of the author. It has been a valued resource for this column providing material for now 23 “Booklover” columns. Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann’s Flagman Thiel was the next offering listed in the “Contents” with a title that gave away nothing of the story.

Hauptmann was awarded the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature “primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art.” His “Biographical” section on the Nobel Prize website: https://www.nobelprize. org/prizes/literature/1912/hauptmann/biographical/ is written in first person. Hauptmann tells us: “A play Vor Sonnenaufgang [Before Dawn] made me publicly known in 1889.” The play simultaneously created scandal and fame, encouraging him to further explore dramas with naturalistic themes. Born in 1862 in Bad Salzbrunn, Prussia (now present-day Szczawno-Zdrój, Poland), Hauptmann initially dabbled in sculpture, music, and poetry before deciding to dedicate his career to dramatic writing. He is known as one of the founders of German Naturalism, a literary discipline that embraces observation and determinism. To better understand this discipline, a Google search with an AI answer revealed the following characteristics:

“Focuses on depicting reality and everyday life with accuracy.

Emphasizes the influence of environment and heredity on human behavior.

Often portrays the struggles of the working class and social issues.

Utilizes detailed descriptions and a scientific approach to storytelling.”

The short story Flagman Thiel embraces all of these characteristics and gives the reader a depth of understanding

to the clinical telling of the life and tragedy of Hauptmann’s main character, Thiel. No spoilers will be given here. Frankly, it is a difficult read. One curiosity about Flagman Thiel — it was used as the basis for a ballet that gained popularity in Berlin during the 1930s. This story’s choreographic interpretation to a dance media is hard to image; however, popular ballets are replete with tragic themes.

As difficult as the tale is that Hauptmann wrote for us, it is decorated with many lovely passages, some of which come at critically tragic moments. Enjoy three of them. For clarity in the second passage, Tobias is Thiel’s son.

“The pine-trees bent over, their branches scraped against each other with uncanny creakings and squeakings. For a few moments the moon was visible, a pale yellow chalice amid the torn clouds. By its light could be seen the wind’s mauling of the black treetops. The foliage of the birches along the embankment waved and fluttered like ghostly horses’ tails. Beneath them lay the rails gleaming wet, absorbing the pale moonlight in spots here and there.”

“Thiel knew the sound of each pole on his beat so well that with closed eyes he could tell at exactly what spot he stood. And now he stopped several times, holding Tobias by the hand, to listen to the wonderful tones that came from the wood like sonorous chorals from inside a church. The pole at the extreme south end made a particularly full, beautiful sound. It was a mingling of tones that seemed to come without pausing a breath.”

“The great purplish ball of the moon shone low between the trunks of the pine-trees. As it rose it paled and diminished in size until finally it hung high in the heavens like a swinging lamp, and cast a pale sheen over the forest, through every chink and cranny of the foliage, painting the faces of the processionists a livid white.”

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LEGAL ISSUES

Section Editors: Bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel) <bruce.strauch@gmail.com> Jack Montgomery (Georgia Southern University) <jmontgomery@georgiasouthern.edu>

Questions & Answers — Copyright Column

Column Editor: Kyle K. Courtney, Esq. (Director of Copyright & Information Policy, Harvard Library) <kyle_courtney@harvard.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: This month’s Copyright Q&A

Column features a conversation with Kevin Smith — a pioneering figure in copyright law for libraries and cultural institutions. Kevin was among the first to imagine and embody the role of a “copyright lawyer in the library,” laying the foundation for what has now become a recognized and vital profession. His work has not only shaped the ways our institutions navigate copyright, licensing, and access, but also inspired a generation of librarians and lawyers to think more boldly about the law’s possibilities. Kevin has been a friend and mentor to many of us in this field, myself included, and it is a privilege to share his reflections here as he looks back on a remarkable career and ahead to the challenges and opportunities still before us. — KKC

Kevin, when you first started out as a “copyright lawyer in the library,” what did that role look like? Has your sense of what the job is changed over the years?

KS: When I started in that kind of role, most of the institutions were hoping to get copyright knowledge closer to the populations that might be creating liability as they made day-to-day decisions. Faculty would seldom think about taking questions about what they could use in class to General Counsel, so my role was to work closer with those faculty, in a role they were comfortable with, and to help other librarians learn more about copyright so that they could address common questions. What were the biggest copyright challenges libraries were facing when you began your career, and how do those compare to what libraries are grappling with today?

KS: In the beginning, most concerns involved what could be shared by faculty with students, especially using the learning management systems that were just coming into widespread use. Remember that we did not have the developed body of fair use cases that have evolved over the past 20 years, so we were doing some real risk analysis. In my first couple of years, the Association of American Publishers was looking for a defendant they could sue over electronic reserves. In fact, a threat of lawsuit delivered to my employer at the time really helped solidify my position in the libraries. Another big topic was streamed video, which still seems to bedevil the academic world. Although the scope has grown over the years, those questions are still part of the core responsibilities of a copyright librarian.

Licensing seems to dominate so much of the conversation now. From your perspective, how has the rise of licenses reshaped

— or even undermined — traditional copyright balances like fair use?

KS: As the role of copyright played in higher education expanded, we certainly saw a huge increase in licensing. Sometimes that was helpful. Streaming video, which I just mentioned, has arguably become easier, although licensing has also made it more complicated. We look at fair use less often because there are so many licensed access points through which students can access streamed film. On the other hand, libraries especially are seeing ever-widening efforts to use licensing to control access and use, often pushing us to accept restrictions on activities that copyright law itself would seem to permit. Licenses are used to create and delimit markets, so vendors are using them to carefully carve lots of different kinds of “rights” that they can sell. Think, for example, of “sync” rights and “grand” rights for music, which are divisions created entirely by licensors, as are different sets of rules for different versions of scholarly papers.

Do you think the role of copyright experts in libraries has grown in importance over time, or do you see it shifting in a different direction? What skills or knowledge do you think the next generation of library copyright folks should develop?

KS: Over the years, I think librarians have grown more sophisticated about copyright; I am very impressed by many of the young librarians I meet, who know a lot more about copyright than I did at their stage in my career. So, I think it is true that copyright expertise, broadly conceived, has grown in importance, but I also believe that the need for a single, designated “expert” has decreased.

In terms of skills and knowledge, knowing the “rules” of copyright has never been sufficient; it usually leads to excessive caution and naysaying. Applying those rules is the key, and it is not easy. Librarians who are going to explore these issues deeply need to understand how copyright law interacts with the circumstances of a particular situation, how contracts work, and how technological developments will interact with the law in new situations.

Over your career you’ve watched digitization, the open access movement, and now AI transform the copyright landscape. Which of these larger cultural shifts do you think has had the most profound effect on libraries?

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KS: Obviously, I think, digitization has been the most revolutionary development for libraries. It has completely transformed the way libraries work, and the way we receive and process information. Libraries have gone through revolutions in format and economics before, so we have been a little bit ahead of the curve on this, but it is a process of continuing change.

Open access is an opportunity created by the digital environment, and it is a tremendous opening for libraries to advance their mission to make knowledge available to all. But we have allowed large commercial publishers to co-opt the open access movement. Libraries started out in the forefront of OA, but once publishers figured out how to monetize it, they have been successful in spreading the myth that OA is something that you have to pay for.

I want to be cautious about AI; it is the subject of so much talk and attention right now, and I don’t think we are yet at a point where there is much we can say that is definitive. I cringe when I hear some to the current cliches about AI, such as that it is “built on theft,” which is both conclusory and a misunderstanding about how intellectual property works. Likewise for claims that AI will revolutionize libraries, or even that it is an existential threat to humans. I don’t think we know enough yet to distinguish all the hype from reality. I do think AI will make significant changes to library work, and to academia, but to really understand and evaluate it, we need to take some deep breaths and be patient.

Libraries often take on an advocacy role when it comes to copyright. Looking back, where do you think libraries have been most effective in shaping policy, and where do you think new strategies are needed?

KS: I think we have done a really good job clarifying fair use for higher education over the past twenty years. The Georgia State case was a milestone, and it involved a lot of work by libraries and academic lawyers — big hat tip to Kenny Crews for his great efforts — to get to that positive result. I think it has been a major step in making librarians feel more confident about fair use.

Open access is an area where we have been very successful but also need new strategies. I am astonished by the shift in the attitudes of faculty and scholars toward open access that have occurred during my career. I remember how hard we fought at Duke to get an OA policy adopted and am hugely gratified by how common such policy-based licenses have become. But, as I said earlier, there is a real danger of seeing OA become a payas-you-go windfall for large commercial publishers. To be frank, I think we need to focus on strategies that cut those publishers out of the knowledge-sharing equation. We must focus on academic-owned infrastructure and non-profit, communitysupported publishing.

Looking to the future, what do you see as the biggest threats to ensuring broad public access to knowledge and culture? On the flip side, what opportunities do you think are most exciting?

KS: I think I just answered that question! Commercial capture of OA is a huge threat. We risk OA sinking into a thicket of complication and greed that will undermine rather than advance the democratization of knowledge. And it represents a waste of the potential of digital technologies for them to become just another profit center for publishers, locked down so that each new idea or advancement has to be licensed and

paid for. There are still opportunities, many of them driven by funders, to escape those thickets, and that is where I believe the real opportunities lie.

How well do you think libraries, museums, and archives are adapting their copyright policies to today’s highly digital and licensed environment? Where are cultural institutions doing well, and where are they falling behind?

KS: That’s a hard question to answer, since cultural heritage institutes have such varied approaches. I guess I would start by saying that licensing is not a bad approach at all, especially in the digital environment where there can be so much experimentation and variation. I often think that we need relatively simple copyright policies and robust structures for negotiating licenses. I have found that archives often model this approach best among cultural heritage bodies. Museums have begun to catch up, although the years during which many museums tried to claim a right over reuse of public domain works and other works for which the museum did not actually hold rights have slowed that progress.

When I teach groups about copyright, I often walk them through five questions, which I learned from Peggy Hoon and refined in collaboration with Lisa Macklin, that really help clarify situations. The first thing to ask is if there is a copyright, and that is a very important question for cultural heritage institutions; it is a prerequisite to any thought about fair use or licensing.

Overall, I think we have made a lot of progress in using licensing to our advantage and to advance the mission of cultural heritage institutions. That is an area where our institutions differ a great deal, and it is a huge opportunity to learn from each other and to breakdown silos between libraries, archives and museums.

Is there a particular copyright case, policy fight, or teaching moment that stands out to you as especially defined, even just personally memorable, over the course of your career?

KS: For me, personally, the Princeton University Press v. Michigan Documents Services case out of the 6th Circuit was a turning point in my career. As a young librarian getting interested in copyright law, I was so appalled by the decision, which seemed to me to be wrong on every point in its fair use analysis, that it really pushed me to finally decide to go to law school. And then, I had some involvement with the Georgia State e-reserves case, which helped clarify fair use for colleges and universities.

More broadly, however, the cases that have really defined the analysis of transformation in fair use — Campbell v. Acuff Rose, obviously, and Bill Graham Archive v. Dorling Kindersley — have really redefined the space in which we work. I think that the Bill Graham case is especially useful for teaching about fair use.

Finally, as you look ahead to retirement, what advice would you give to the next generation of librarians and copyright specialists who are carrying this work forward?

KS: Lean on your colleagues and try not to turn away from opportunities to learn from and discuss with others. Copyright is a complex and changing body of law; we will never achieve a perfect understanding of it; Mark Twain famously said that that was impossible even for God. So, we just need to learn from each other, be patient with our clients, and work to improve the understanding of copyright among faculty and students. We will never get everything right, there will be lapses and mistakes, continued on page 39

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Seeing the Whole Board — An Excerpt from The EveryLibrary Institute’s “Institutional Accreditation and the Academic Library: A Strategy for Engagement and Representation”

Column Editor: Kathleen McEvoy (Senior Policy Fellow, The EveryLibrary Institute) <kathleen.mcevoy@everylibrary.org>

This month’s column is an excerpt from a recently published paper from the EveryLibrary Institute: Institutional Accreditation and the Academic Library: A Strategy for Engagement and Representation. The paper provides information about the academic institution accreditation process, recent changes to accrediting bodies and their language about libraries, and new accrediting bodies that are emerging. The EveryLibrary Institute provides roadmaps for participation in the accreditation process for academic library professionals, as well as a guide for consortia and systems where a strength in numbers approach offers a promising opportunity for libraries. It is a call to action for academic library professionals to participate in their institution’s accreditation process at the administrative level to ensure library representation but also to ensure institutional accreditation changes don’t jeopardize program-level accreditation standards.

The full paper is accessible from the EveryLibrary Institute website: https://www.everylibraryinstitute.org/new_report_ released_institutional_accreditation_academic_library

Overview

Across higher education in the United States, academic libraries have long been engines of student success, research advancement, and institutional credibility. Yet today, their role within the structure of institutional accreditation is increasingly at risk. Academic libraries have not diminished in importance to students, scholars, and researchers. It is the systems that define and validate institutional quality that are themselves in flux.

In a political and policy environment where accrediting agencies are facing pressure to rewrite standards for ideological or efficiency-based reasons, the academic library profession must become proactive and strategic about how we show up in accreditation conversations. This report is grounded in a clear and urgent three-part thesis:

1. One cannot have an accredited institution without a library. Accreditation standards across all seven federally recognized accrediting agencies have historically acknowledged that a library that is adequately resourced and professionally managed is essential to fulfilling an institution’s academic mission.

2. Academic libraries do not exist independently of their institutions. Because accreditors evaluate colleges and universities as integrated entities, libraries are only as protected and valued as the standards allow. Changes in accreditation rubrics can either affirm or imperil the future of libraries, often without any library-specific review process.

3. The challenge before us is how to hold the line on accreditation standards or manage changes to those standards in ways that promote a future for libraries and librarians in higher education.

This report is intended as both a diagnostic and a roadmap. In the sections that follow, we provide a close analysis of how each of the seven accrediting agencies, Middle States (MSCHE), New England (NECHE), Higher Learning Commission (HLC), Northwest (NWCCU), Southern (SACSCOC), Western/WASC (WSCUC), and the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), currently frames the role of academic libraries. We trace how those standards have changed over time within each agency and assess the risks and opportunities for libraries embedded in each rubric.

We then examine the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Standards for Libraries in Higher Education, a widely respected framework that aligns library planning and assessment with institutional goals (ALA, 2018). These standards are designed to guide libraries in demonstrating value within their campus ecosystems and offer a compelling blueprint for discussing academic libraries with accrediting agencies. Our analysis explores how ACRL’s standards can and should serve as a bridge between library practice and institutional policy in the accreditation context.

The report then turns to an urgent education policy concern. In April 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14279 on higher education accreditation. As written, the Executive Order would significantly disrupt how accreditation functions in the U.S. by imposing federal mandates against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); upending the peer-review basis of accreditation; and incentivizing the emergence of ideologically aligned accrediting bodies. We examine this Executive Order’s legal foundations, policy implications, and likely effects on academic libraries.

Next, we look at the evolving accreditation climate in a legislative context. The Higher Education Act (HEA), the statute that authorizes accreditation agencies with their gatekeeping function for federal funding, is overdue for reauthorization. We forecast how the 119th Congress (or a future one) could take up that reauthorization under the influence of Executive Order 14279 and how a failure to defend library-inclusive standards in the HEA could replicate the mistakes that gutted K-12 school librarianship following the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 as No Child Left Behind in 2000.

Finally, we focus on actions that academic library stakeholders can take to help shape the future of our sector. Drawing from best practices for administrative and regulatory (rather than lobbying) actions, we argue that academic library consortia and systems are uniquely positioned to engage with accrediting

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agencies during standards review cycles. These consortia can lead professional, coordinated efforts to center library impact in standards, shield individual institutions from risk, and amplify the profession’s collective voice. We offer a model for this engagement and specific tactical recommendations to help library stakeholders prepare for and participate in accreditor consultation and public comment processes.

This report’s broad audience includes academic librarians seeking to protect their essential contributions, consortia leaders building a coordinated voice for the profession, vendors and publishers interested in a stable marketplace, and higher education policymakers and accreditors looking to maintain educational quality amid institutional and political pressures.

What This Report Is and What It Is Not

Academic libraries have long played a critical role in their institution’s accreditation self-studies and peer review processes, contributing vital documentation, evidence, and narrative that demonstrate how library services align with and support institutional missions. During an accreditation cycle, libraries participate in internal self-assessment and often provide information for external peer review teams, particularly when those teams include librarians. This kind of participation is essential. It reflects a library’s alignment with institutional priorities and contributes to a meaningful, transparent review process.

However, this report is not about that type or mode of institutional participation. Instead, this report focuses on a strategic and systemic level of engagement: how academic libraries, particularly when organized through consortia, associations, and other stakeholder groups, can engage directly with the regional accrediting agencies themselves. These agencies set the standards and rubrics that shape the entire accreditation process. Our concern is not with how libraries respond to accreditation criteria, but how those criteria are written in the first place, and how the inclusion or omission of libraries in those standards affects our collective future.

Likewise, this paper is about the accreditation of institutions rather than programs. In American higher education, which generally falls into two categories: institutional accreditation and programmatic (or specialized) accreditation.

• Institutional accreditation is granted by regional accrediting agencies and evaluates the college or university as a whole. It encompasses governance, mission alignment, financial and administrative capacity, student support services, and the quality of academic offerings across departments. Institutional

Legally Speaking continued from page 37

and our policies will always fall short. But my career has taught me that we can make things better if we work together toward reasonable goals.

The big task for the next generation, in my opinion, is to take back the open access initiative from the large publishers. The vision of OA expressed in the Budapest Open Access Initiative

accreditation is a prerequisite for federal financial aid eligibility and is the primary mechanism through which the U.S. Department of Education ensures that colleges and universities meet standards of educational quality and integrity.

• Programmatic accreditation, on the other hand, is granted by specialized agencies that evaluate individual departments or degree programs, such as law schools, teacher preparation programs, nursing or medical education, and even Master’s in Library Sciences, against discipline-specific standards. These accreditations may require graduates to sit for professional licensure exams. These program-level accreditation standards are governed by different agencies within specific disciplinary fields.

In short, this report is not a guide for contributing to your own institution’s next self-study either at the institution or program levels. It is a call to action for library leaders to shape the landscape of accreditation itself through collaborative, coordinated, and consultative participation in agency-led standards development, review, and revision cycles. By clarifying this distinction at the outset, we invite our readers to think beyond the traditional role libraries play in accreditation and to see themselves as active contributors to the evolution of the frameworks that will define institutional quality and effectiveness for years to come.

Kathleen McEvoy is a long-time communications executive with direct experience in crisis communications, media and public relations, and public affairs. She has lobbied and created strategies to address legislation in multiple U.S. states and has met directly with state executives and legislators to call out the unintended consequences of legislation. Kathleen is a Senior Policy Fellow at the EveryLibrary Institute and board member of EveryLibrary, the national political action committee for libraries. Kathleen has also cochaired a task force on intellectual freedom as part of the American Library Association’s United for Libraries division, where she is a board member and serves on the Intellectual Freedom, Public Policy, and Advocacy Committee. She is a member of the American Library Association’s Committee on Legislation.

and some other statements from the early part of this century still articulate the goal we should be seeking, where access to knowledge, especially as it is created in our colleges and universities, is shared openly and freely, using the technologies available to us. In other words, we still must resist the efforts to enclose the commons.

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Wandering the Web — Online Fashion Resources, Part II: The Fashion Industry

Column Editor: Lesley Rice Montgomery, MLIS (Catalog Librarian II, Tulane University Libraries’ Technical Services Department)

Introduction

This month’s “Wandering the Web” is the second of a threepart series covering the topic of online fashion resources. Part I outlined the history of fashion in the western world from the viewpoint of different eras. In this issue, Part II, I will review websites on the fashion industry itself, including educational sites for interested parties who want to enter the profession. The series will conclude in the next Against the Grain issue with Part III, when Associate Professor Roxanne Spencer, a retired library department head from Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, will write on the subject of blue jeans — the history and as a cultural meme.

The Fashion Industry

There are so many parameters that define the nature and scope of the fashion industry, which encompasses clothing design, the study of consumer trends, shipping and purchasing of raw materials, manufacturing, and retail sales. The industry is comprised of an extremely complex global network of creative individuals who can intuitively predict potential cultural trends and incorporate these consumer demands into their finished products, all while closely working with business entrepreneurs who are experts at harnessing the worldwide workforce, adding to this significant economic sector by creating millions of jobs in fabric mills, clothing factories, online and brick-and-mortar stores, as well as in the international shipping industry.

“It’s not an easy thing, breaking into the world of fashion…”

The fashion industry is cutthroat, particularly in the marketing and runway or fashion magazine modeling sectors. It also increases dire tendencies within the population by its promotion of unrealistic ethereal and unhealthy physiques, often exacerbating self-loathing for young adults and escalating rates of eating disorders, especially for those who are interested in entering the world of modeling. Fortunately, citizens have started to fight back during the past decade or so, incorporating a myriad of body types into clothing catalogs, sewing and design magazines, and even knitting pattern periodicals. It is still a truisim that runway models are required to be a specific height and weight, although this too is evolving, and there are actually alternative jobs, including hand modeling in magazines and jewelry catalogs, or the very specialized niche of foot modeling to advertise foot care and accessories! To enter the modeling profession, you must build a strong portfolio, and this has been the case for many decades, whether you are wanting to work as a catwalk or hand or foot model. Modeling portfolios are a collection — physical or digital — of professional photographs that showcase the model’s appearance to potential modeling agencies. First you have to decide which aspect of the field you wish to enter, pay a professional photographer to shoot and edit your strongest images, and cohesively arrange the photos to highlight your versatility and usefulness for your chosen career. Here are a few websites that will help you to create this important modeling portfolio.

Pixpa — https://www.pixpa. com/ — is an excellent site that allows photographers and models to collaborate and to create fabulous online portfolios. The website features over 200 templates, is advertised as being “the go-to website builder for top creatives” where you can “create stunning websites, portfolios, stores, and blogs — all in one place,” and is cost effective. Users do not need to know coding, and the beautiful templates will allow you to build mobile-ready sites with drag-and-drop simplicity. This site that has had a top ranking for over eleven years and has 24/7 support, a Help Centre, and a Live Support expert team.

Wix — https://www.wix.com/ — This site will help you to construct your website, but the interface is not considered to be as user friendly as Pixpa, as it is an intuitive HTML, cloudbased website builder. Wix allows you to create and customize sections of your website by dragging and dropping text, visuals and buttons without having to actually learn coding, and has over 900 designer-made templates. You also can create your site using Wix’s AI website builder. Special features include the ability to add scheduling modules, where you can accept bookings and get paid, an online portfolio section, and you can even create your own blog to grow a fan base.

Models — https://models.com/ — is a popular interactive online resource that provides profiles for models, photographers, and agencies, serving as a professional platform for people in the fashion industry, enabling professionals to connect with new talent and to stay updated on events and trends. The directory offers a model database with photos and statistics, curated rankings for top models and photographers, an agency directory that models can use to schedule bookings for interviews — and that the agencies in turn can use to book models — as well as articles, information on fashion campaigns, and industry leader interviews. Overall, this is a good site for models to gain visibility as they build their careers.

Challenges and Sustainability

The fashion industry is known to be a source of pollution with its high carbon factory emissions and immeasurable textile waste. Poor working conditions, labor exploitation, and a failure to provide living wages are factors that continue to demand the industry’s accountability for destroying people’s finances, health and overall well-being. These ongoing environmental and sociocultural impacts have led many global citizens to eschew the fast fashion model in favor of focusing on more ethical resale, reupcycling, repair and rental models to reduce this waste and to promote sustainability. Here are a couple of interesting articles that cover the topic of sustainability as it relates to the fashion industry.

Forbes Technology Council . “The importance of sustainability in fashion.” — https://www.forbes.com/ councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/04/26/the-importance-of-

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sustainability-in-fashion/ — Fashion industry standards have started to improve in recent years, with leaders taking a more proactive role in monitoring and analyzing the supply chain, inspired by the positive shifts in consumer ethos that guide customer decisions about how to spend their money, preferring to purchase from companies that demonstrate more empathy for clothing factory workers and act responsibly when stocking their retail stores with garments that were made by workers who are being paid fair wages. Consumers are educating themselves about dangerous working conditions for fashion industry workers and the concept of “fast fashion,” that is clothing that has been rapidly produced — often in the aforementioned factories with abysmal working conditions — but that also deteriorates quickly and adds to environmental waste and pollution. This article by Forbes is a thoughtful and thorough analysis of these various challenges to fashion sustainability. It discusses in-depth how new technologies are enabling brands to sell environmentally friendly materials while creating less waste throughout the entire process, from product creation to advertising and marketing, and finishing with store or website sales.

Cleaner Engineering and Technology . “Sustainable practices in slow and fast fashion stores: What does the customer perceive?” — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S2666790822000180 — Published online by Science Direct in February 2022, this scholarly journal article highlights how the fashion industry is one of the most polluted industries on the planet but asserts that both fast fashion and slow fashion manufacturers have been producing evidence that they are trying to improve the sustainability of their production chains. While fast fashion factories focus on fast production and disposal, slow fashion purports to manufacture timeless and durable garments. Both fast and slow fashion stores are seeking to communicate their sustainability practices to customers. Interestingly, the data demonstrate that despite consumers insisting that they care about the environment, they in fact do not want to pay higher prices for products that have come out of these cleaner production chains. This research article is a sobering witness to consumer preferences and hypocritical stances that show even though customers believe manufacturers should institute sustainable practices, they do not actually want to pay more for these greener products.

Educate Yourself

There are several paths you can take if you wish to work as a fashion designer or in merchandising. Education for the fashion industry includes earning bachelor’s degrees in these areas as well as associate degrees, certifications and workshops in specialties such as textile design, CAD (Computer-Aided Design), sustainable fashion, or luxury brand management. A two-year associate’s degree can land you a job as a design assistant or retail manager. A four-year bachelor’s degree can provide an excellent education in the fields of garment construction, textile science, and digital design. Master’s degree graduates typically specialize in specific areas, including advanced textile technologies. Additional certifications and workshops in the industry are useful for learning pattern-making skills and digital design. Along with developing a proficiency in technical skills such as CAD, understanding the many available fabrics, and garment construction, you will need hands-on practical experience that can be found in apprenticeships, internships, and part-time jobs. There are numerous education-related websites that can help you to build your career.

Wilson College of Textiles — https://www.youtube. com/@NCStateWilson/videos — I’m listing one of my favorite educational sites first, the former Institute of Textile Technology located in the beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia countryside which relocated in 2003 to form a program within North Carolina State University’s (NC State) College of Textiles. This program that has been in operation since World War II focuses on educating both new students and researchers who are working in the textile industry. The current Wilson College of Textiles at NC State, founded in 1899, is renowned for its research and offers degrees in a variety of fields, including Textile Engineering that works in tandem with the College of Engineering. The educational experience includes fostering connections in the textile industry and building skills in design, the use of state-of-the-art technologies, and real-world business practices. The hands-on learning is conducted in the college’s maker space where students learn how to operate dyeing, knitting and spinning equipment. Graduates successfully obtain jobs with leading brands or are fully prepared to start their own textile companies. NC State’s YouTube web page presents an impressive catalog of 86 videos, describing the “…only college in North America completely dedicated to textiles.” The home page at https://textiles.ncsu. edu/ gives further information on this “…multibillion-dollar global industry that’s integrated into everything we do.” The program includes all stages of education, from K-12 precollege summer camps to undergraduate studies in chemistry, marketing and engineering with textile applications through the chance to earn a master’s degree or Ph.D. at this famous globally recognized institution.

Fashionista — https://fashionista.com/2021/06/bestonline-fashion-courses-platforms — is a legitimate source of information about the fashion industry and career advice. It is important not to engage with the many scam websites on the Internet; however, this entity published by Breaking Media is purported to be a legitimate digital publication, offering a careers section with job listings, insider as well as consumer information for those interested in the industry. Fashionista also portrays itself as an independent journalism site, successfully identifying new brands, retailers, and trends. Fashionista’s article “18 online fashion courses anyone can take” is a good one-stop-shopping site to find out how to get started in the fashion industry, whether you’re a hobbyist, a budding entrepreneur or are jump-starting your career. Fashion schools and their access points include several online Institut Français de la Mode courses at the legitimate and highly prestigious French institution known for fashion and luxury and its excellent educational offerings. Students will gain hands-on experience in the comprehensive programs including bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fashion design and technologies. Online classes include a variety of certificate and summer school programs. This is considered to be one of the top international fashion schools (https://www.ifmparis. fr/en/).

Fashion Institute of Technology — https://www.fitnyc. edu/ — Closer to home in the U.S., the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) at https://www.fitnyc.edu/ is considered to be a good school for those interested in starting a career in the fashion industry. Housed at New York City’s main campus, this challenging school with a demanding academic workload does have two online degree programs, offers over 600 online courses, and is a part of the State University of New York (SUNY) public college system.

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Conclusion

Important key aspects of the fashion industry include the significant economic impact with its continuing support of the vast international workforce that contributes to the overall world GDP (Gross Domestic Product); global reach that begins with raw material sourcing, continues to textile design and production, and concludes with clothing manufacturing and the retail sector. It includes various sociocultural levels of the industry such as high-fashion and off-the-rack stores, whether online or physical locations; and of course the ever elusive trend-driven nature of the industry, given that fashion is always changing, influenced by technological and cultural shifts in the general population. The prediction of upcoming trends also molds the advertising and marketing entities which can rise or fall on the whims of consumers, who can destroy expensive ad campaigns should they decide to pull back from purchasing the fashion industry’s commodities. Designers may spend an entire year creating collections and working closely with their favorite manufacturers to produce wearable garments and various accessories, but if retail sales flounder for whatever reasons — due to environmental and ethical concerns, a downturn in the worldwide economy, and so on — then the expensive promotional campaigns, fashion shows, and media-driven marketing of specific brands will be all for naught if consumer behaviors cannot be controlled to support the industry. Hopefully this article will have provided some understanding of the parameters and challenges of the amazingly complex fashion industry and will prove useful to individuals who might be interested in entering the world of fashion to work in one of the industry’s sectors, whether it’s design, manufacturing, advertising and promotion, modeling, or sales.

References

FIT. (2025). Home page. Fashion Institute of Technology. https://www.fitnyc.edu/ IFM. (2025). Admissions and course finder. Institut Français de la Mode. https://www.ifmparis.fr/en/ Mau, D. (2021, June 3). 18 online fashion courses anyone can take. Fashionista https://fashionista.com/2021/06/bestonline-fashion-courses-platforms Models. (2025). Home page. Models. https://models.com/ NC State. (2025). Home page. Wilson College of Textiles. https://textiles.ncsu.edu/ NC State. (2025). YouTube course descriptions. Wilson College of Textiles. https://www.youtube.com/@NCStateWilson/videos Oliveira, L. G., Miranda, F. G., & Paula Dias, M. A. (2022). Sustainable practices in slow and fast fashion stores: What does the customer perceive? Cleaner Engineering and Technology, 6, Article 100413. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S2666790822000180 Pixpa. (2025). Home page. Pixpa. https://www.pixpa.com/ Savilia, K. (2024, April 26). The importance of sustainability in fashion [Council post]. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/ councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/04/26/the-importance-ofsustainability-in-fashion/ Wix. (2025). Home page. Wix. https://www.wix.com/

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Libraries, Leadership, and Synergies — On Discerning and Informed AI Strategies: Philosophical and Practical Guideposts

Column Editor: Antje Mays (Collection Analysis Librarian, University of Kentucky Libraries) <antjemays@uky.edu>

Column Editor’s Note: Enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) brings boosters leaning on promises of innovative cost savings and detractors concerned with work destruction, disregard for intellectual property in training language models, impact on learning outcomes and knowledge acquisition, and tensions between trend-following and AI implementations tailored to real needs. This article recommends educated discernment in AI deliberations and offers guideposts for AI strategies. — AM

Introduction

The 2022 opening of ChatGPT for consumer access has unleashed a tidal wave of sudden mass awareness and spawned widespread clamoring for incorporating AI; this AI race has touched many industries including libraries, higher education, knowledge- and data-intensive business sectors, and advanced manufacturing. The newfound mass awareness has created superficial admiration and profound fears. Incompletely informed leaders view AI as a convenient labor-replacement and problem-solver, while equally novice general populations fear the specter of AI-driven job losses. Established AI researchers are concerned with the lack of nuance in the broader public’s views on AI’s potential and shortfalls. To help libraries and our industry navigate the challenges of AI decisions, this article offers strategic deliberations in determining AI approaches, practical factors in choosing and deploying AI, philosophical and ethical considerations, and practical guideposts.

On Educating Informed Citizens and Cultivating Discernment Skills

The current debate on artificial intelligence and its implementation reflects a dichotomy between informed, critical evaluation on one hand and the uninformed superficiality of novelty-seeking trend-following on the other hand. The widespread AI discourse omits the intellectual core of vetting AI outputs for quality and suitability to the purpose-driven task at hand. Recent research exposes the proliferation of quickly generated AI outputs devoid of quality and substance, requiring time-consuming human re-work and adding cognitive burdens in the workplace.1 Early childhood education and cognitive science contend with an analogous tension in harnessing technologies: Deployment of screens for young children’s learning activities at ever-earlier ages raises concerns because cognitive, socioemotional, physical-motor, and knowledge-acquisition development takes shape through tactile engagement with tangible objects in physical environments; experts recommend accompanying technology-infused learning with clearly related physical environments and activities.2 Exposing young children to screens too early risks gaps in their cognitive development by skipping over crucial early learning stages, as very young

children before age five cannot yet clearly distinguish between a physical object and the screen representation of the object.3 Similarly, hasty AI launches downplay the central role of human expertise and understanding the AI’s logical underpinnings in guiding AI toward productive outcomes.

The importance of human expertise and intellectual prowess in vetting AI outputs for errors and omissions is rooted in centuries of recognition that an educated populace is of strategic importance for nations’ well-being and stability and for individuals’ sustained liberty.4 Libraries share the instructional mission of cultivating educated and informed citizens imbued with analytical thinking, critical evaluation, practical application of knowledge, and discernment in distinguishing novelty from substance.5 The library profession’s AI literacy frameworks offer structured pedagogies toward critically weighing AI outputs against content knowledge and plausible AI expectations, 6 in tandem with guidance for nurturing AI competencies and informed confidence among library workers.7

Philosophical Guideposts

Effective decisions for or against AI implementations require analytical thinking, deeper awareness of AI’s large-scale information processing potency, and a feel for AI algorithms’ underlying logic to gauge AI outputs’ potential enhancements or harms to organizations and broader society.

Society and energy: Concerns abound over AI’s societal upheavals through algorithmic bias, targeting, disinformation, and reshaping work and skill ecosystems, 8 as well as data centers’ increasingly disproportionate emissions and utilities consumption.9 These concerns are reminiscent of history’s Malthusian threat of resource depletion through unchecked population growth, 10 leading to unsustainable living-cost increases. 11 Yet subsequent centuries’ agricultural 12 and technological 13 advances enabled support for much larger populations — a hopeful precedent for solving AI’s rising energy demands. Research and development are expanding renewable and clean energy to relieve pressures on utilities constraints.14

Algorithmic bias and AI ethics: When considering AI tools, examining for algorithmic bias is a crucial step in determining the tool’s potential for positive gains through productivity enhancements or harms through rogue operations undermining cybersecurity, operational functions, and the social fabric.15 Likewise crucial is framing AI initiatives within desired values to ensure the chosen AI tools’ results support your mission and purpose.16

Practical Guideposts

AI promises productivity enhancements, time-saving information-processing power on a massive scale, and timesaving delegation of rote tasks to free up human bandwidth for higher-order undertakings. Pitfalls for AI implementation

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decisions arise when the distraction of novelty overrides the beneficial aims of needed work enhancements and solving real problems. Informed by the above-referenced AI factors, the following guideposts will help you navigate AI decisions: Know your why: What motivates your AI implementation? Discernment is a key ingredient of AI success: Does the potential tool add value? Is it useful? Solution for a real problem? Or novelty seeking application? Are you facing comparison pressures to mimic others’ AI use? Or are your AI contemplations rooted in your own contextually considered pedagogical and productivity aims?

Consider your organization’s key characteristics and services: Whom do you serve? What technology umbrella exists for your potential AI? For example, library patrons include undergraduate through doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, instructors, researchers, employees, and community members. Vendors’ library customers need operational and researchsupport in increasingly complex environments. These users embody a wide range of research inquiry, technology comfort and uses, data security needs, operational complexities, and needs-tailored AI use cases.

Consider your organization’s technology environment: Are hardware and connectivity infrastructures, software, and expertise in place? Is expertise sufficiently distributed across the organization to take stock of emerging AI tools and their likelihood of providing meaningful solutions for real-world needs?

Nuance and boundaries: Successful AI strategies require targeted, context-driven approaches. Especially in large, complex organizations, no single tool can address all productivity or automation needs. Instead, identify specific challenges and implement focused pilots with clear boundaries to prevent scope creep and ensure manageable execution.

Clarity and scope: Establish a clear plan for selecting, implementing, and evaluating AI initiatives. Define scope, stakeholders, and realistic timelines. Set success criteria and assess scalability beyond the pilot. If not scalable, would its niche value justify continued use, and why?

Endnotes

1. Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, September 25, 2025, 1–10.

2. Tom Lowrie and Kevin Larkin. “Experience, Represent, Apply (ERA): A Heuristic for Digital Engagement in the Early Years.” British Journal of Educational Technology 51, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 131–47. doi:10.1111/bjet.12789

3. Canadian Paediatric Society, Digital Health Task Force, Ottawa, Ontario. “Screen Time and Young Children: Promoting Health and Development in a Digital World.” Paediatrics & Child Health 22, no. 8 (November 2017), 461-477. doi:10.1093/pch/pxx123

4. Kern Alexander and M. David Alexander. American Public School Law. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: West/Thomson Learning, 21-24, 2001.

5. Leo S. Lo. “AI Literacy: A Guide for Academic Libraries.” College & Research Libraries News 86, no. 3 (March 1, 2025): 120–22. doi:10.5860/crln.86.3.120. https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/26704/34626

6. Sandy Hervieux and Amanda Wheatley. White Paper — Building an AI Literacy Framework: Perspectives from Instruction Librarians and Current Information Literacy Tools. Choice360, August 28, 2024. https://www.choice360.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/ TaylorFrancis_whitepaper_08.28.24_final.pdf

7. ACRL AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers, Draft, March 5, 2025. https://www.ala.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/ AI_Competencies_Draft.pdf

8. Mustafa Suleyman. The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma. New York: Crown, 2023.

9. Kate Crawford. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021.

10. T.R. Malthus. An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society. With Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. London: printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1798.

11. T.R. Malthus. An Investigation of the Cause of the Present High Price of Provisions: By the Author of the Essay on the Principle of Population. Second edition. London: printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s-Church-Yard, by Davis, Taylor, and Wilks, ChanceryLane, 1800.

12. Vernon W. Ruttan. “9. Population Growth, Environmental Change, and Innovation: Implications for Sustainable Growth in Agriculture,” in Population and Land Use in Developing Countries: Report of a Workshop. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Washington, D.C.: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 1993, 124–156.

13. Jielin Dong, Wei Li, Yuhua Cao, Jianwen Fang. “How Does Technology and Population Progress Relate? An Empirical Study of The Last 10,000 Years.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 103 (February 2016), 57-70.

14. International Energy Agency. Energy and AI. Paris, IEA, 2025.

15. Dorota Domalewska, Aleksandra Gasztold, and Agnieszka Wrońska. Humans in the Cyber Loop: Perspectives on Social Cybersecurity 1st ed. Leiden: Brill, 2025.

16. Mark Coeckelbergh. AI Ethics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020.

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Biz of Digital — Outlook, Email, and Teams: A Low-Tech Solution to LibCal

By Joy DuBose

(Library Director, Digital Design Studio Supervisor, Dr. and Mrs. James T. Cook Library & Learning Center, Florida State University, Panama City, 4750 Collegiate Drive, Panama City, FL 32405, Holly A110-D; Phone: 850-770-2244) <jedubose@fsu.edu>

Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-3544) <flinchba@umbc.edu>

Introduction

The traditional view of academic libraries is generally one of great halls of knowledge with towering bookshelves. While libraries are still a place for books and archives, they now supply and rely on technology as well. E-resources, virtual reality, and computers are as much at home in a library setting as the traditional archives. Librarians themselves rely on technology more and more to keep their domains running smoothly, but what if one of those services is not available?

LibCal is a service that many academic libraries rely on to reserve spaces, schedule consultations, and handle events. However, it can be daunting to go from a LibCal-reliant campus to one that is not. In that case, it is important to examine the main uses of LibCal and some options that fulfill the same needs. This minor case study focuses on the options used by Florida State University at Panama City (FSU PC) in place of LibCal.

What is LibCal

While many academic libraries and librarians may be familiar with the software LibCal, others may be unfamiliar with it. As Nelson (2016) explains, “LibCal is a web-based software product…that provides appointment scheduling, online calendars, and room booking features for librarians and their patrons.” For many academic libraries, LibCal is the go-to platform used to not only schedule appointments and rooms but also to host LibGuides and some online resources. There have been many papers written about the virtues of LibCal and its usefulness to the library profession. Two of these (Scronce, 2023; Wetli, 2021) highlight three of the major uses of LibCal: room scheduling, managing library events, and scheduling consultations. With all the praise towards LibCal, librarians may think it is the only option, and many may find it daunting when they go from a university that employs LibCal to one that does not.

Why not use LibCal

There are many reasons why some academic institutions may not use LibCal. Some may not be able to afford it, have other options already in place, or, as in the case of FSU PC, there may be other problems. Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, houses the Strozier Library, which is the primary branch of the FSU library system. FSU does employ LibCal and uses it to host the various services mentioned above. However, the Dr. and Mrs. James T. Cook Library and Learning Center (LLC) of Florida State University in Panama City does not employ LibCal as much for one very important reason. LibCal only allows one time zone to be implemented, and while the Strozier Library in Tallahassee is in the Eastern time zone, the LLC in Panama City is in the Central time zone. Thus, all LibCal scheduling, from

room reservations to consultations, is done in Eastern time, and this can be confusing to students and faculty alike. FSU is not the only university that has had difficulty using LibCal across branches. In his article, Wetli (2017), discusses the “limited functionality of LibCal to support librarians who work across different locations and various campuses.” In Welti’s case at the University of Michigan, they shared the feedback with LibCal’s developer, Springshare. The question then becomes, what do those other locations and campuses do? Do they continue to use LibCal or look for different options?

FSU’s LLC offers many of the same services that other academic libraries use LibCal for: room reservations, events and workshops, and consultations. In past years, they had tried using the FSU LibCal, with notices about the different time zones. Unfortunately, that proved problematic and did not work. When the new director of the LLC started in January 2025, she was determined to offer these services. However, with LibCal “unavailable,” technological workarounds had to be found, and they had to be found quickly to help with the spring semester.

LibCal Alternatives

Finding alternatives to LibCal is not a new process. Libraries and librarians always seem to be on the hunt for a process that fits their institution better. In the case of the LLC, that process proved to be fairly simple, as Microsoft Outlook and Teams provided the answer for reserving rooms and scheduling tours. Other institutions have used Microsoft Office in the past for events, etc. Scronce (2023) even mentions moving away from Outlook calendars for LibCal. However, the difference can be found in the size of the library. The LLC is a smaller library, with a handful of study rooms.

Faculty, staff, students, etc., can all reserve these study rooms for any amount of time. There has been more than one occasion where classes will have breakout sessions using the rooms. LLC’s policy is to let the library know at least 24-36 hours ahead of time. Once the reservation has been made, the date and time are placed on a shared Teams calendar. This calendar is shared with library faculty, staff, and student workers. Part of the student workers’ daily duties is to keep this calendar open and keep up to date with possible room reservations. These calendars only allow for 16 events to be placed at one time. Therefore, old reservations are deleted to make room for new ones. However, it was quickly found that for events such as university tours, these calendars were not going to be sufficient.

FSU PC holds many university tours and many times have held several days with over 30 visitors. The LLC is a highlight on the tour, and so it is necessary to keep library personnel aware of when they are coming through. For these events, they are all placed on an Outlook Calendar, showing the tour times and an

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estimate of how many people will be coming through. These calendars are then printed up, and hard copies are placed at student workstations, so they can be aware of the tours.

The library holds other events such as workshops and various programs. These are all listed on the library website and FSU’s main page of events. All of the workshops are hosted via Zoom, so attendees can attend them from anywhere. Indeed, they have attracted students from FSU Tallahassee and those who are not FSU students yet but are planning on attending. To help with workshop outreach, posters have been printed with QR codes leading to the library website, and email blasts have gone out to professors. Students are likely to just glance over such emails, while professors take notice and mention it constantly to students. While Outlook, websites, QR codes, and email blasts may seem to be very simple techniques and somewhat low tech, if it works, then it’s still useful.

The last area that LibCal assists with is consultations. This has also been addressed by a somewhat low-tech answer, and that is becoming visible. In the workshops, email blasts, and even the tours, the librarian reaches out and says, “Here is my information if you have questions.” This is becoming visible to as many students and faculty as possible. That way, if a patron has problems, they know who to contact. On the FSU PC website, there is a link to the librarian and a LibCal link to set up a consultation. As of July 2025, no one has made a consultation in that way. However, students have sent emails and come to the library with questions after a workshop or after getting information from their professor. Again, this may not be an answer for every library or every university, but for smaller libraries, becoming visible and getting your information out there is a low-tech solution to a complicated problem.

Conclusion

While LibCal can be problematic on many fronts, it remains one of the “go-to” solutions for many academic libraries. However, sometimes other options are needed. When looking at options or solutions to use instead of LibCal, sometimes low tech is the way to go. Outlook, Teams, and even email blasts can all be used in the place of LibCal. After all, at the end of the day, libraries are all about serving patrons to the best of our abilities, and sometimes that means getting a little creative and a little low-tech.

References

Nelson, G. M. (2016). Libcal: A Product Review. The Reference Librarian, 57(1), 57–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.201 5.1096226

Scronce, G. (2023). Streamlining room scheduling and managing library events using LibCal. Journal of Web Librarianship, 17(4), 75–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/1932290 9.2023.2263648

Wetli, A. (2021). Consultation scheduling with LibCal at the University of Michigan. Public Services Quarterly, 17(1), 46–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/15228959.2020.1832641

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Biz of Digital — Leveraging Static Web Technology to Maintain Legacy Digital Collection Websites

By Nailisa Tanner (Digital Collections and Repository Infrastructure Librarian, McGill University, 3459 McTavish Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 0C9; Phone: 514-396-2406) <nailisa.tanner@mcgill.ca>

Column Editor: Michelle Flinchbaugh (Digital Scholarship Services Librarian, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250; Phone: 410-455-3544) <flinchba@umbc.edu>

Introduction

Soon after web technology allowed for it, libraries began building and hosting digital collection, exhibition, and research websites. Early iterations of these projects are now decades out of date. Libraries have addressed aging digital project sites in various ways: many institutions have been content to simply take these sites offline, some have preserved sites using web archiving, and others have opted to consolidate content to centralized web content management systems. More systematic approaches have also emerged: the Endings Project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, focused on the sustainability of digital scholarship and included the University of Victoria Libraries as a partner. However, there are a myriad of technical, curatorial, and institutional factors that can interfere with a library’s ability to provide long-term access to their legacy research websites.

This column describes McGill University Libraries’ recent pilot project to migrate one of our legacy websites to CollectionBuilder, an open-source framework for creating static digital collection websites, with the goal of ensuring long-term access to library resources while reducing the technical burden on our Library Technology Department.

Legacy Websites at McGill Libraries

As of 2024, McGill Libraries was supporting approximately 90 independent websites dating back to the mid-1990s. These included digital exhibitions, digitized collections, archival finding aids, and indexes of all kinds. Keeping up with the maintenance demands of these sites has been a significant amount of work for our Application Development (AppDev) team: an analysis of tickets from our department’s project management system revealed that in 2023, about one-third of AppDev’s story points were spent on digital collections-related tasks, primarily bug fixes and security updates, without launching any new initiatives or services.1 This maintenance workload has become unsustainable and has stalled new initiatives: for example, our once-active digital exhibitions program has been paused indefinitely since 2022. Moreover, we are acutely aware that we are spending this time maintaining sites that are not truly serving our users: most of these sites do not meet our province’s legal requirements for web accessibility or basic user experience expectations such as responsive design across device and screen sizes. Despite these shortcomings, these sites have remained valuable to our users, and our stakeholders are not ready to see them disappear.

Industrial Architecture of Montreal

In 2024, McGill Libraries launched a pilot project to migrate one of our legacy sites into a static site using CollectionBuilder. We selected the site Industrial Architecture of Montreal, an index of 131 industrial buildings in the city of Montreal, Canada, where McGill is located. The site documents the buildings’ history and architectural features along with information about the architects and architectural firms behind their creation. Library staff photographed the buildings that were still standing in 1999 and scanned architectural plans and advertisements to provide additional information about the buildings and the industries they supported. In preparing for the migration, we learned that the original project team had also intended to digitize historical maps of Montreal and use georeferencing to link the map images to building records, but this phase was never completed.

Despite the site’s age, McGill’s liaison librarian for architecture affirmed that it had value for our users. For over a century Montreal was the industrial center of Canada, and the Lachine Canal, where much of this industrial activity was located, is a designated National Historic Site. The Industrial Architecture site had been created to document the city at the precipice of deindustrialization, and there has been considerable interest in the history of Montreal’s industrial and working-class neighborhoods in recent years. The site serves as a capsule of a rapidly changing city, and many of the buildings documented for the project are now recognizable as artists’ studios and condominiums.

We also selected Industrial Architecture for this pilot because it was difficult to preserve through our standard web archiving practices. McGill’s web archiving program, like many others, relies on captures by the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service that are then viewed via the Wayback Machine. The original Industrial Architecture site was built on a backend database, and its navigation relied on queries to the database: the majority of the site’s content was designed to be accessed through explicit searches that returned “pages” with those search parameters in the URL strings. For this reason, the site’s main content was not captured in Archive-It crawls. The original site design can be viewed via the Wayback Machine, but building records are not accessible there.

Charting a Path with CollectionBuilder

CollectionBuilder was created by librarians at the University of Idaho following the Lib-Static approach to library technology, which advocates using static web technology and other minimal computing principles to promote sustainability in library work.

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Familiar library web publishing platforms such as Drupal and Omeka rely on databases and server-side processing and require continuous maintenance for security and performance. In contrast, static websites are composed of plain HTML, CSS, and JS, requiring simpler infrastructure and far less maintenance. As our department has struggled to keep up with our own maintenance load, the principles of Lib-Static and minimal computing resonated strongly with us. Migrating Industrial Architecture ’s content to CollectionBuilder proved to be a relatively easy way to keep the site online with minimal work and no commitment to a specific tool or platform, as would have been the case if we had migrated the site to a content management system like Omeka.

CollectionBuilder offers three template versions with varying barriers to entry and ability for customization; our pilot project used CB-CSV for its flexibility, but projects requiring a smaller learning curve and fewer customizations may be content to use CB-Sheets or CB-GitHub Pages. Briefly, the process of creating a CollectionBuilder site involves creating a repository in GitHub from the project template, creating a metadata spreadsheet formatted according to the template’s specifications, configuring site settings using the templating language Liquid, and editing site content using Markdown. CollectionBuilder uses a CSV file of object metadata to create a site’s main contents, and while it is designed to accommodate one single CSV file, it is possible to generate pages and deliver content from multiple CSV files. The original Industrial Architecture site’s database contained three tables for metadata relating to buildings, architectural firms, and individual architects, and so we exported this data into three CSV files for the new site’s contents. The project team for this migration was small, and I was able to complete most of the work independently within a few weeks. CollectionBuilder documentation is thorough and users can access additional support through a Slack space

The new site offers improvements in responsive web design and meets modern web accessibility standards. It now includes a Leaflet map of the building locations throughout the city, fulfilling one of the original project’s unrealized goals. It also allows researchers to download the building metadata for reuse in other projects, providing an easy way to participate in the “Collections as Data” movement.

Conclusion

Several months after completing the pilot, we’re pleased with the results. We’ve identified a handful of other legacy sites that are strong candidates for retroactive staticization with CollectionBuilder. As with Industrial Architecture of Montreal, these are sites that can’t be easily captured with web archiving tools and their content remains relevant to our users. To continue beyond a pilot phase, we will next need to customize CollectionBuilder’s style sheets to align with the McGill Design System, a collection of web design standards, so future sites adhere to our institution’s common look and feel.

Static site tools such as CollectionBuilder are a strong alternative to libraries’ typical website content creation and management tools. This pilot allowed us to explore alternate approaches to web content creation that can lighten our maintenance load, and we are confident that it can do the same for other libraries facing similar challenges.

Endnotes

1. Jessica Lange & Gagandeep Dhillon, “Planning Higher, Faster, Stronger? Analyzing Past Tickets to Inform Future Planning,” PowerPoint presentation, Access 2024 Conference, Montreal, Canada, October 21, 2024, https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/presentations/ g445cm38d.

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The Digital Toolbox — Accessibility Isn’t

Optional: It’s a Commitment to Every Learner’s Right to Access

Column Editor: Steve Rosato (Director of Digital Book Services for Academic Libraries, OverDrive, Cleveland, OH 44125) <srosato@overdrive.com>

In higher education, accessibility is no longer an add-on feature. It is a core commitment to equity and inclusion and, as the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) affirms, it is a fundamental human right. Article 21 of the CRPD calls on both governments and private entities to provide services “in accessible and usable formats for persons with disabilities.” Access to information, including the web, is not simply a technical matter, it is a matter of rights, representation, and responsibility.

The Race Toward Accessibility Standards

Digital accessibility standards, such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), set the framework for ensuring that students of all abilities can engage with online learning materials. WCAG 2.0, built around four core principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, was later formalized into U.S. law through Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Most colleges and universities are required to meet at least WCAG 2.0 AA standards, which impact areas like color contrast, navigation, and screen-reader compatibility.

“By April 2027, all publicly funded institutions are expected to be fully accessible and compliant,” says Rebecca Oling, Director of Digital Accessibility at Purchase College Library. “In higher education, many publicly funded schools are still playing catch-up, reassessing their core digital collections, and weighing accessibility barriers — alongside factors like budget — when making renewal decisions.”

Recent updates from the Department of Justice (DOJ) introduced WCAG 2.1, expanding requirements to address the needs of individuals with visual, auditory, physical, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. These guidelines are divided into three levels:

• Level A: The baseline, with minimal design impact.

• Level AA: Adds 13 criteria, significantly affecting design choices such as colors, flow, and keyboard navigation.

• Level AAA: The most comprehensive, requiring deep structural redesigns.

“While some people debate the risks regarding the current Department of Justice’s priorities, on our state operated SUNY campuses this makes little difference,” says Oling. “Our local and state accessibility laws come into play as well. Vendors will be squeezed on all sides to ensure forward momentum on this issue.”

While most institutions aim first for Level AA compliance, the stakes are high. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, over 20% of undergraduates and more than 10% of

graduate students report at least one disability. Failing to meet their needs puts institutions at ethical, reputational, and financial risk, including exposure to lawsuits and penalties. Conversely, embedding accessibility into digital strategies safeguards institutions while improving the quality of learning for all students.

Vendor Partnerships Matter

Institutions cannot achieve compliance in isolation — they rely on vendors and partners to deliver accessible digital tools. That is why OverDrive, through Libby and Kanopy, has made accessibility a cornerstone of its development. As part of its first accessibility milestone, OverDrive delivered more than 550 accessibility improvements across 38 products to meet the European Accessibility Act. This work reflects the belief that accessibility is a right, not a feature, and it sets the standard for vendors supporting higher education.

“Our commitment to accessibility isn’t just about meeting benchmarks — it’s about ensuring every learner has equitable access to knowledge,” noted Ryan Fish, Executive Vice President of Product Management & UI/UX, “By prioritizing accessibility in our roadmap, we strengthen our partnerships with institutions that share this vision.”

Lessons from the Field

Colleges and universities are actively working with Libby and Kanopy to navigate challenges, prioritize upgrades, and ensure compliance. I nstitutions report that vendor transparency, knowing not just where tools are compliant but also where improvements are planned is essential for making informed decisions. This collaboration allows schools to weigh short-term constraints against long-term accessibility goals, ultimately fostering inclusive digital ecosystems.

Accessibility as an Investment in the Future

Digital accessibility should not be treated as a box-checking exercise. Proactive accessibility strategies are an investment in high-quality instruction and a safeguard against reputational and financial risk. When institutions place accessibility at the center of their digital decision-making, they are not only protecting themselves — they are creating an environment where learners with diverse needs can thrive.

The race to accessibility is ongoing, and the finish line continues to move as technology evolves. But the goal remains constant: a digital learning landscape where accessibility is not optional — it is the foundation of every student’s right to learn.

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Optimizing Library Services — Human in the Loop: Deep Diving into AI Use in Peer Review

By Dr. Gareth Dyke (Academic Director, Reviewer Credits) <gareth.dyke@reviewercredits.com>; Dr. Tim Vines (CEO and Founder, DataSeer) <tim@dataseer.ai>; Dr. Haseeb Irfanullah (Independent Consultant) <hmirfanullah@yahoo.co.uk>; and Dr. Duncan Vinson (English Language Copy Editor, eContent Pro, USA) <duncanvinson@gmail.com>

Column Editor: Mr. Will Hartley (Director of e-Book Collection Sales, IGI Global Scientific Publishing) <wharltey@igi-global.com>

Column Editors’ Note: As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and expand its influence across academia, publishers have a growing responsibility to support libraries in preserving the authenticity and integrity of scholarly research. At IGI Global Scientific Publishing, we recognize the dual role AI now plays — both as a powerful research tool and a potential source of misinformation when used unethically.

Across the scholarly publishing landscape, editorial teams and peer reviewers are increasingly prioritizing the detection of AI-generated content to protect the credibility of academic literature. By developing unified guidelines, investing in AIdetection programs, and training stakeholders to recognize potential red flags (such as stylistic inconsistencies and false citations) publishers need to work together to uphold research integrity. These efforts protect scholarly research while also reinforcing the trust that libraries and their communities place in peer-reviewed research.

To further support libraries in navigating the rapidly evolving role of AI in academia, IGI Global Scientific Publishing offers comprehensive access to its eBook Collection, encompassing over 10,000 titles across disciplines such as Business & Management, Science, Technology, & Medicine (STM), and Education & Social Sciences. With hundreds of titles dedicated to artificial intelligence and its interdisciplinary applications, this collection enables librarians to provide researchers with trusted, forward-thinking content that addresses both the innovations and ethical challenges presented by AI. Through its responsive and rigorous publishing process, IGI Global Scientific Publishing ensures that institutions are equipped with the latest research needed to foster academic integrity, support curriculum development, and stay ahead of technological advancement. — WH

Introduction

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integrated into scholarly workflows, it’s vital that peer reviewers, editors, and copy editors are equipped to identify, evaluate, and ethically engage with AI-generated content and AI tools. IGI Global Scientific Publishing ( www.igi-global.com ) — “Publishing Tomorrow’s Research Today” internationally since 1988 — in collaboration with eContent Pro (www.econtentpro.com) and Reviewer Credits (www.reviewercredits.com), recently co-hosted a thought-provoking live webinar titled “Human in the Loop: Equipping Peer Reviewers to Detect AI-Generated Content.”

This interactive event brought together a panel of international experts to explore how AI is reshaping the academic publishing landscape — from improving writing clarity to the more controversial issue of generating entire manuscripts.

The discussion provided practical tools and critical insights into detecting AI-generated content, the ethics of AI use in scholarly writing, and the future of peer review.

We are now pleased to offer the webinar as a free on-demand virtual event. Join us as we examine the opportunities and challenges AI presents in today’s scholarly publishing and explore how these risks can be identified and prevented.

Learn More and Watch this Free On-Demand Virtual Event Now:

https://www.igi-global.com/symposium/ ?m#human-in-the-loop

Highlights

Check out some key highlights and takeaways from this thought-provoking discussion below.

Q: What are the most common indicators that a manuscript may have been partially or fully generated by AI?

Dr. Duncan Vinson: “As a copy editor, the first thing I would notice is that AI-generated content is really no different from old fashioned plagiarism, especially when you see a sudden shift in voice. There are certain tells with the punctuation, such as smart quotes, the sudden shifts between U.S. and UK usage and spelling, that indicate some sort of tool was used. But it’s of course much more than that. I came across the term “burstiness,” which I think is a really important reference to how LLM-generated English tends to be. Most of the sentences tend to be about the same length, which are usually too long.

When I was trained to write, I had kind of an old-school teacher, where we learned elements of style and so forth, and one of the things that we were trained to do was write short sentences with no complex clauses, and other sentences to be complex. Clearly, that’s just not what LLMs are doing. There are also certain connective phrases that get overused. I see a lot of “not only but also” and “so as to.”

But those are all matters of style. What’s more concerning is fake references, and I’m sure we have come across those before. In these instances, there’ll be a reference in the reference list. The author is an actual author. The title of the article uses the same keywords related to that author’s research. The journal is an actual journal. There’s a DOI link but when you click on it, either it doesn’t go anywhere, or it goes to a completely different article within that same journal volume and with the same page numbers. I think that’s what’s most concerning. Those references to the casual eye look totally fine and they

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would completely convince members of the general public, journalists, and possibly even experts within that field if you’re not scrutinizing them.”

Q: How effective are current AI detection tools in identifying AI-authored content, and what are their limitations? Should they be used in the peer review process?

Dr. Tim Vines: “I think we need to draw a line or pull out a continuum here of AI usage in manuscript writing. It is, in my opinion, absolutely fine to use AI to help you polish your text. If you’ve done the research, generated the figures, written a manuscript and it’s a bit rough (and maybe English isn’t your first language, which is the case for a lot of researchers), it is fine to get AI to help you get the text into nice, clear English. I think detecting that and punishing those researchers for doing that is probably the wrong path to go down. We should celebrate when science is clearer and easier to read. The other end of the spectrum is when the research hasn’t been done, and AI is being used to generate the impression that actual research has been done. If the text is being generated, now that is the one that’s important to catch.

There are tools like Pangram, which is a new entrant in the market that is able to, at a very high level, detect if AI has been used. It is good at detecting it, and it doesn’t falsely accuse people of using AI when they haven’t, which avoids the stigma that people have to write in a particular way.

More importantly: have they actually done everything? Does it all link up? That’s the real sniff test — with the figures and perhaps even if the data has been shared. Of course, I think if you’re trying to make up a research article, you’re not going to share the data, and you’re probably not going to submit it to a journal that requires that you share the data for fear of being exposed. That’s why journals should all have data sharing requirements because it makes it harder for people to fake research.”

Q: When AI-generated content is suspected, what is the appropriate course of action for a peer reviewer, editor, or copy editor to take?

Dr. Gareth Dyke: “Publishers now have wildly different guidelines for AI usage, so it is very confusing for researchers at the moment. I think that this is a really amazing time for researchers because of these fantastic AI tools that can help us overcome problems, but publishers need to unify their guidelines so that it’s clear on how much and which tools I am allowed to use in my manuscript and how I will then declare those when I make my submission.

So, AI content is suspected by an editor or a peer reviewer or a copy editor. What’s the appropriate action to take? Well, first you should go back and find out what the journal’s guidelines are. If you are observing the use of AI in the writing of a manuscript but it’s perfectly okay with the publisher and the journal, and it’s been declared by the authors, then there’s no action that needs to be taken. If I’m a peer reviewer or a copy editor, I would talk to the editor and then only in the final step would I go back to the authors and ask for further clarification.

I 100% agree with Tim’s point that that this is something that should be used to help us as researchers get our papers more effectively written. No different than the way you would have used a word processor when you were writing your Ph.D. thesis as opposed to a typewriter. And would you be declaring the use of a word processor as opposed to a typewriter when you put your paper together? No. These are just tools like any other. It’s when they’re used unethically to fake research or fake content that we face problems. We are not yet at the point where we can really effectively identify that text.”

Q: Do you believe it’s possible for AI-generated content to meet academic standards if disclosed transparently? Why or why not?

Dr. Haseeb Irfanullah: “As we have just heard, literature review can be quite daunting. Are we having AI help to write the literature review or draw an infographic, or is it supporting what’s already there? And if so, what’s the purpose of it? We need to understand why we are taking help from AI to generate content. Even if we just delete AI, [the academic standards] will vary across regions and disciplines. Of course, there is a very basic standard that actually determines whether my article is accepted [in a journal] or not. The interesting thing is if an article is rejected by one journal, it is not like it will never be published. I can submit the same paper without changing a single word and I can publish elsewhere. So it shows that academic standards have a huge spectrum. That’s why I often say that reviewing a manuscript is like rolling a dice. You never know what might happen.

Personally, I am in favor of an AI-dependent review system because the current human-dependent peer review system is exploited and overrated. So that’s why I’m 100% in favor of 100% AI-dependent reading system, but not quite 100% AI-generated content because it is actually devaluing human nature and our abilities. But it is not my call. Things will move on. Let’s see what is waiting for us by Peer Review Week 2026.”

Conclusion

The webinar, “Human in the Loop: Equipping Peer Reviewers to Detect AI-Generated Content,” provided essential insights into the growing impact of artificial intelligence on scholarly publishing and the challenges it poses to research integrity. Panelists highlighted the critical need to differentiate between ethical AI use and deceptive practices, emphasizing the roles of editors, reviewers, and especially librarians in safeguarding the academic record. For librarians, this discussion reinforces the importance of staying informed about AI-detection strategies and evolving publishing standards to ensure that the collections they curate continue to reflect trustworthy, high-quality scholarship. As AI reshapes the research landscape, librarians remain vital partners in upholding the rigor and credibility of academic resources for their communities.

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ATG Interviews María R. Estorino

Vice Provost for University Libraries and University Librarian, UNC-Chapel Hill

By Leah Hinds (Executive Director, Charleston Hub) <leah@charlestonlibraryconference.com> and Tom Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu>

ATG: The University Libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill is considered one of the best academic libraries in the country. What would you say are the greatest strengths of the University Libraries?

ME: Historically, we’ve best been known for our collections. Among ARL libraries, we have the largest collection in the Southeast. But the strength that I’m most excited about is our people. The librarians and staff who make up the University Libraries are our superpower. They bring so much expertise, creativity, and dedication to our mission and to our campus. It animates everything we do.

Another strength comes from the university we’re part of. Obviously, all public universities have a common mission of serving the public. At Carolina, it’s part of the DNA of the organization.

One way we embody that is the very fundamental work of resource sharing and putting the vast collections we have into service beyond our campus. We’re undertaking a series of inquiries to better understand how public libraries in our state are or are not taking advantage of the interlibrary loan and document delivery services we provide. I’m really excited about that very critical and intentional engagement.

Another way is technology transfer, how we’re putting our technology expertise and infrastructure in service to the state through our North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. We’re not removing collections from the places they live and serve but are partnering with organizations to create digital access to their collections, not just for their immediate communities, but for even broader communities online.

So much of what we do is informed by the goal of providing as much access to information as possible. You see that in our special collections. Over half of our in-person users are not affiliated with our campus. We are holding those collections in public trust. We want to make them as available as possible to the public.

ATG: Given those strengths, there must also be areas where you would like to grow. Could you talk about your priorities for the next few years?

ME: My thinking here is informed by my longer-term vision for the Libraries and also by the evolving nature of higher education at this moment. We’re undergoing such significant changes over which we don’t always have control. We still don’t know what we’re going to look like on the other side. So, I feel like my first answer to your question is that.

One of the things I would love for us to work on is getting comfortable with the idea that we can serve our various constituents well and also excel in a few things that are points of excellence. Libraries and librarians, by the nature of our work, sometimes feel compelled to do everything for everyone. We run the risk of spreading ourselves so thin that the quality of what we do isn’t always what we want it to be.

One opportunity for focus is with our Health Sciences Library. They’ve been leaders in the field in terms of applying machine learning methods and tools to things like systematic reviews. They’re also leaders in impact measurement and visualization services for our campus. I think we have real opportunities to continue growing in that area.

AI is another. It’s less about excelling at AI than it is about aligning with the aspirations and goals of our university. We’ve worked really hard to situate ourselves in the conversation, to understand what we as a library uniquely contribute to advancing AI ethically and responsibly on our campus.

Our sustainable scholarship plan launched in 2020 has been successful in advancing open access and redirecting our collection strategies. We are at an inflection point as we seek to expand that effort with deeper support for the humanities and expanded publishing opportunities. Our current priorities focus on mapping our services to the landscape we’re operating in today, both on our campus and in the publishing ecosystem broadly.

ATG: Could you speak more about how you’re steering the University Libraries to adapt to and support the emergence and growth of generative AI?

ME: About a year and a half ago, it became evident that AI was going to be a top priority for our new chancellor and therefore for our campus and its future. I pulled together a few people to think about what that meant for the Libraries, and we developed a roadmap for how we wanted to engage with AI.

The first area was facilitating learning and engagement amongst our own staff. We felt it was important to create lowbarrier access and opportunities for our staff to explore and learn together. We had the good fortune with an endowed gift to name a graduate student fellow who helped us begin that workforce component.

The next was to consider our own portfolio. AI has the potential to be an effective tool in a lot of our workflows and processes. So, where can AI help transform our practice as

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librarians and archivists? We’ve worked to create community and partnerships internally to advance those questions. One success has been how our archival processing team has engaged with a vendor, From the Page, to beta test AI transcription tools.

The final part of our AI roadmap is our public-facing engagement. Since collaboration is one of our values as an organization, the first thing we did was try to be present in as many campus conversations about AI as we could. That helped us understand the key units and people involved, and also where there was a gap we could lean into. That turned out to be student-facing engagement outside the classroom.

So, we’ve developed co-curricular workshops that have been extremely well attended. We’ve soft-opened a Library AI Studio in Davis Library and we’re working toward bringing a virtual Library AI Studio online this academic year. We’ve partnered with the Provost’s AI Acceleration Program to help fund the studio and a Library AI Fellows program as a paid opportunity for undergraduates to learn about AI and help their peers engage with it in responsible and informed ways.

ATG: You’ve alluded to the Libraries’ values. Can you talk more about what these values mean to you and how you’re working to implement them?

ME: I think about these values — inclusion, collaboration, sustainability — as aspirational, guiding stars for our organization that can help us make decisions, allocate resources, navigate change, and respond to opportunities and challenges. The values give us a way to ground ourselves as library professionals and as an organization.

Sustainability is the newest one for us. We’re thinking holistically about sustainability — about the environment, about social opportunity and fiscal sustainability, and about the interplay of all of those. Two members of our leadership team participated in ARL’s Sustainability Series and we’re about to launch a sustainability working group to understand the opportunities we have here.

Inclusion is very much at the heart of what libraries are about — creating spaces and collections that welcome everyone. As a university, we strive to make sure that everyone understands that they belong here. So, whether it’s in the collections we’re building, or the programs we’re putting on or the spaces we’re responsible for, we want to ensure that they’re accessible and welcoming, and that they provide everyone an opportunity to discover themselves and make their mark on our campus life and community.

Collaboration is also something that libraries have always done. Every collaboration requires us to show up with our expertise, then engage that expertise to create something more powerful and more meaningful that we can achieve on our own. We’re a large library — over 260 employees plus more than 180 student employees across the campus. Collaboration begins with intentionally building our own community and discovering our strengths here at home. If we can collaborate well as a library, then we’re in a stronger position to collaborate with partners across campus and in the larger scholarly ecosystem.

What we’re doing now as an organization is trying to engage with the concept of “values in action.” In other words, how do we take these values as more than just statements and think about what it means to live them, to put them into action, to allocate resources, to support them, to make decisions that advance them? Exploring those questions was the topic of our

staff summer retreat, where we came together to talk about what it means to put our values into action.

ATG: What has been your approach to strategic planning since becoming university librarian? How do you plan strategically in such uncertain times when things are changing so rapidly?

ME: When I became University Librarian in January of 2023, we kicked off a homegrown strategic planning process. We had a really good foundational strategic framework document that gave us a starting point. So, we began by asking: Does this framework still serve us? What opportunities do we have today to re-imagine it?

We did that work within the Library Leadership Team and also by creating opportunities for all members of the library staff to participate in revising the framework. Alongside that process, the leadership team worked toward identifying our most promising and most pressing opportunities that we could claim as priorities for the next few years.

Together, the updated strategic framework plus the strategic opportunities have become our strategic plan. Throughout the process, we strove for a balance of leadership-driven perspective, paired with community participation from the entire staff. We tried to make sure the strategic plan was something that people could feel like that they contributed to and that they could own.

I think that the biggest change right now is about pacing. Under perfect circumstances, we would be methodically working our way through the plan, through all the objectives and opportunities that we outlined. The reality isn’t quite like that. Some of our strategic opportunities — for example, our data services and AI roadmaps — have evolved quickly. Others like sustainable scholarship and publishing innovation are moving at a more deliberate pace as we refine and update our directions and, more recently, in response to changes in federal mandates. It doesn’t change our strategy to pursue them, but it does change the timeline.

There are also things we have to attend to that we didn’t forecast in our strategic planning process, but we’re taking the time to address them because it behooves us to do so, or because we must. Whether it’s budget or personnel changes, we take the time to address that, without necessarily stopping our progress on the strategic priorities.

ATG: When you talk about the Libraries to faculty, what do you most want them to know?

ME: I want faculty to understand that the Libraries and the people who work here can be their intellectual and creative partner, whether it’s in their research or in their teaching and learning.

I phrase it in that way because, while we do provide service to our campus and our constituents, I find that words like serve, support, help — while they’re all true — don’t do full justice to how libraries show up for faculty. Partnership puts us in a more active conversation with faculty and helps us be understood as a vibrant, essential part of the academic experience and research enterprise of the university.

I always encourage faculty to meet with their liaison librarian. The liaison is their doorway to the library and everything it holds. While the liaison may not be the person who’s going to be their partner on everything, liaisons can introduce them to the people, the collections, the services that will advance their goals.

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One thing I often say is that we cannot make assumptions about what people know about engaging with the library. We need to introduce and reintroduce ourselves again and again. Just because a faculty member has engaged with a librarian for an information literacy session, for example, does not mean that they know we can also support their author’s rights negotiation with their publisher. We want to get in front of our constituents and make it clear that there is tremendous opportunity for partnership in ways that will benefit and advance their careers, their goals and their successes.

ATG: UNC is also home to a highly ranked library and information school. What is the role of the library in preparing the school’s graduates?

ME: This is my first time working on a campus with an i-school. It’s a tremendously rich opportunity to be responsible for libraries alongside a school that is educating the next generation of information and library professionals.

One of the most important ways we prepare students for their future careers is through employment. About 20% of the master’s students from the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) work with us every year in jobs that give them important tools and experiences. Our librarians and staff are tremendously committed to mentoring students for the careers they’ll have once they obtain their degree. We also try to include these students alongside our staff in events, in meetings, in professional development and learning opportunities.

Some of our librarians also teach at the School. In the 20232024 academic year, librarians taught something like 16 classes for SILS. That, to me, is an acknowledgement of the demand for

courses informed by a practitioner’s experience as much as by the field’s theory and methodology. Also, because we are such a robust library system, we’re the subject of many, many master’s theses and even some doctoral dissertations.

I represent relatively new leadership for the Libraries, and SILS also has new leadership in Dean Jeff Bardzell. We’re really interested in exploring this partnership together. What other ways might collaboration between the School and the Libraries create unique opportunities at Carolina?

The bigger question I have is the relationship between i-schools and their academic libraries writ large. I’ve been involved in forming a community group within the Association of Research Libraries along with other library directors who have i-schools on their campuses to better understand the ways in which these two units can interact and engage. What is the relationship between curriculum and practice, between degree and employment needs? There’s a lot of interest from my peer directors who have i-schools or departments on their campuses to really engage with our colleagues in the schools about these questions and opportunities.

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted prior to the announcement about the formation of a new school at UNC Chapel Hill. We plan to provide an update when more information is available. See full press release at https://www. unc.edu/posts/2025/10/09/development-of-a-new-school-atcarolina/. — LH

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Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Sol Rosenberg, CCO, Underline Science

Scholarly Lecture Videos Advancing Research

Column Editor: Darrell W. Gunter (President & CEO, Gunter Media Group) <d.gunter@guntermediagroup.com>

DARRELL GUNTER: Hello, Welcome to the Innovator’s Saga. I’m so pleased to have a dear friend and colleague, Mr. Sol Rosenberg, Chief Commercial Officer for Underline Science. Sol, welcome to the program.

SOL ROSENBERG: Thank you for having me. We’ve been talking about this for a while — I’m glad we finally did it.

DG: I know you finally decided my program was good enough for Underline. (laughs) Let’s jump right in. Start with your background, then we’ll talk about Underline, and finally, your thesis I happen to agree with: why people should record their conferences. You’ve even put together a guide to boosting revenue and reach. But first — introduce yourself to our audience.

SR: If you agree with it, it’s not a hypothesis. (laughs) Thank you, Darrell. We always have a good time together. I’ve been in publishing — especially academic publishing — for a long time, working with university presses and journals. A few years ago, a former robotics scientist had a simple but powerful idea. Conferences are the lifeblood of many fields — especially in areas like AI, linguistics, neuroscience — where getting a paper accepted and presenting at a conference is the thing. Thousands of researchers attend thousands of conferences every year, yet for years no one recorded them. You might get printed proceedings — great and searchable — but none of the discourse was captured: no keynotes, no back-and-forth.

He said, “This is crazy. We live in a YouTube/TikTok world. Let’s preserve the content and build a video platform for conferences, the way journals have platforms.” That lightbulb moment became Underline. The pandemic accelerated it — first virtual, then hybrid, and now mostly in-person again, though travel and funding shifts are pushing some events back to hybrid or virtual.

We built a platform for deep engagement : video, paper, poster, slides, Q&A — everything in one container. The data surprised us: engagement often increases after the conference — one or two years later. That told us many people can’t attend — scheduling, funding, travel, border issues — but still want access. Why shut them out, especially when it’s also a revenue opportunity?

DG: Give us that revenue picture — the quick math.

SR: Say your conference has 1,000 in-person attendees. If 300 can’t come and you sell them virtual/on-demand access for, say, $300 instead of $800–$1,000, that’s $90,000 gross. Halve it — 150 people at $150 — and it’s still $45,000. Recording costs are a fraction of that, especially with our low-cost recording programs. We’ve done 400+ conferences; AV and capture are our specialty.

DG: You’ve also talked about a revenue crisis in conferences. What’s happening — and how does Underline help?

SR: Many societies run on thin margins. If attendance drops 10–30% — because of travel, funding cuts (think NIH), or logistics — the budget gets tight fast. Recording is no longer “nice to have”; it can be essential to stay cashpositive. Beyond revenue, it expands reach: for every 400 people on a “Mamma Mia” island, there are two to three times that number who would love to attend but can’t — students, earlycareer researchers, international colleagues. Recording gives them access, builds community, and creates a sustainable profit center — without cannibalizing in-person seats.

DG: How does Underline support societies year-round, not just during the event?

SR: Year-round engagement. Members often ask, “What does the society do for me the other 11 months?” Recorded talks, posters, and sessions — each with a DOI and links to your main journal — become a searchable, citable digital archive that drives traffic and new revenue streams. It’s all Google-indexed and easy to discover.

DG: If recording is so valuable, why have many scholarly conferences hesitated?

SR: Inertia. “We’ve never done it that way.” Publishing moves slowly unless it must — pandemic, funding shifts, etc. But video is the new publishing. Today, people watch a fiveminute talk to gauge relevance then dive into the paper. Younger researchers do this instinctively. We see collaborations form because someone “doom-scrolled,” found a talk a bit off their keyword track, and discovered a perfect match. We now host over 55,000 videos — lots of that kind of discovery.

DG: Walk us through the financials one more time — concretely.

SR: Pick your assumptions. How many post-event viewers — 150? 250? 500? What price point — $199? $295? Even conservative numbers generate meaningful revenue. Meanwhile, a three-room, three-day capture with editing might be around $9,600 with us. The recording pays for itself quickly.

DG: Do you stream live — or only record?

SR: We do both. Live streaming needs extra gear and coordination. If Underline is your AV provider, we bring everything and can stream and record. If you already have AV, we can just record — lowest-cost way to start. I call it the ondemand conference: no cannibalization, full post-event access for in-person attendees (great for parallel-session FOMO), and a second audience that buys access after.

DG: Where can people see this in action?

SR: Our platform pages show a typical “container”: video, abstract, slides, posters, author profiles, opt-in contact, related continued on page 60

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DOING THE CHARLESTON

My Personal History of Scholarly Communication

Katina Strauch with Darrell W. Gunter

In 1980, Katina Strauch started the Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition to bring together librarians, publishers, and vendors to discuss issues shared by the three groups The meeting has continued annually and boasts over 3,000 attendees in person and virtually This memoir is Katina’s diary and story of the Charleston Conference and its development concurrently with her career as a professional librarian. Over the last 45 years, there have been massive changes in scholarly communication, changes that Katina has been at the heart of Where and what will the library and publishing professions develop next? The sky’s the limit to reimagining! Let’s go

ATG PROFILES ENCOURAGED

María R. Estorino Vice Provost for University Libraries and University Librarian UNC-Chapel Hill <mrestorino@email.unc.edu> library.unc.edu

BORN AND LIVED: I was born in Miami. As an adult, I’ve lived in New Orleans, Boston, back to Miami, and now here in Chapel Hill.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I like to read, of course, especially fiction. I enjoy spending time and traveling with my kids and my husband. And houseplants — the more tropical the better.

TRAVEL BUCKET LIST: The next place I’d love to go to is Turkey. I’m really interested in it as a place that sits at the crossroads of so many historical, cultural, and religious interchanges and exchanges. That kind of space where those things come together really fascinates me. One of my favorite places to visit for that reason has been Córdoba, Spain.

PET PEEVES: Stepping on a wet bathroom rug. Don’t do it.

PHILOSOPHY: If you don’t ask, the answer is always going to be no. It’s another way of saying you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. I often talk about this because I find that we self-censor by not asking questions or not asking for things we want in our career or ideas we want to pursue. That self-censorship erases opportunities for us. Even if the answer is no, at least you didn’t shut down the opportunity by not asking.

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: In five years, my youngest will be graduating high school. My goal is to get both of my kids through school and successfully into the next phases of their lives, and that will be in exactly five years.

WHERE DO YOU SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: In this moment, that’s the billion-dollar question. I tend to think that in five years, higher education in the United States is going to be on the other side of a significant transformation. Hopefully we’ll be able to rely on the networks that we have with other libraries, with publishers, and with other members of our ecosystem to still be standing! We’re going to face significant change, not all of which is under our control. How we navigate that change will require a level of interconnection and interdependence that’s more than we’ve ever done before. Our future depends on reaching across our own campus and disciplinary boundaries in ways that we’ve only tested in the past.

Anne Grant

Research Librarian for the Humanities & AI/ Information Literacy Coordinator

Clemson University Libraries 116 Sigma Dr., Clemson, SC USA

Phone: (864) 656-6079 <anne1@clemson.edu> libraries.clemson.edu

BORN AND LIVED: Columbia, SC; Greenville, SC; West Union, SC.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Began my career as a staff member at Clemson Libraries in 2001 and went back to school for my MLIS and was hired as a faculty librarian in 2007. Have been with the

Clemson Libraries ever since! I began working with AI about a year ago and found that AI Literacy was a new dimension of information literacy and have been working as our AI Literacy Coordinator to collaborate with others across the libraries and across campus to educate users about responsible uses of AI tools.

IN MY SPARE TIME: Gardening, hanging out with my teenagers.

FAVORITE BOOKS: Power of One – Bryce Courtenay; In a Sunburned Country – Bill Bryson; The Devil in Spring – Lisa Kleypas.

PET PEEVES: Mean people.

PHILOSOPHY: Kindness.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: It is crucial for people to understand the information environment now more than ever. I feel our role as academic librarians is to work with students and faculty to ensure that there is a fundamental understanding of how information tools work and how information is created and shared so that they will be able to make positive change in the world in which we live. In short, I am a ruthless optimist and am hopeful for the generations to come.

Katie Hut

Business & Economics Librarian

American University 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW/Washington, DC 20016 Phone: (202) 885-3854 <khut@american.edu>

BORN AND LIVED: Born: Washington DC. Lived: Philadelphia, PA; Prague, Czech Republic; Boulder, CO; New York, NY; Bethesda, MD.

EARLY LIFE: I was born in DC and grew up in Chevy Chase, MD with my parents and two older brothers.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I started my career in book publishing and spent about 10 years working for various literacy agencies and at what is now Knopf Doubleday. I left publishing to obtain my Masters in Library Information Science at Pratt Institute and then began working for the Practising Law Institute as a Library Relations Manager. In 2018, I moved to American University, where I started as a Reference Librarian, before being hired as the Business Librarian in 2022. I’m an active member of ALA’s Business Reference and Service Section (BRASS) and Capital Area Business Academic Librarians (CABAL).

FAMILY: I’m married and have two kids, who are currently 11 and 8 years old.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I love to travel with my family, bake, play fantasy football, and watch NFL football.

FAVORITE BOOKS: The Unbearable Lightness of Being; The Looming Tower; I Have Some Questions For You; Go Ask Alice

PET PEEVES: Lukewarm soup; meetings that could’ve been an email; uncapped markers; fascism.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: AI will be firmly entrenched in academic work and research and, rather than being pushed aside by this technology, librarians will be busier than ever teaching students how to obtain reliable and credible information from the morass that’s in AI.

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Aaron Krebeck

Deputy Director

Washington Research Library Consortium

901 Commerce Drive

Upper Marlboro, MD 20774

Phone: (301) 390-2000

<aaron.krebeck@wrlc.org> www.wrlc.org

BORN AND LIVED: DC, Baltimore, Chapel Hill.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Began my career as a children’s librarian in a small public system where I eventually held almost every position except executive director. Moved to academic libraries about 10 years ago and continue to narrowly avoid being an executive director.

IN MY SPARE TIME: Tinkering, puttering, muttering.

FAVORITE BOOKS: To Each His Own – Leonardo Sciascia, Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy, War of the Worlds: What About Peace? –Bruno Latour.

PET PEEVES: Willful ignorance, windy days.

PHILOSOPHY: Democratic Socialism, Technological Humanism, Theological Noncognitivism.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: If we survive, it will be because libraries played a crucial role in protecting higher education from the rise of anti-intellectualism. We will have helped our universities to develop important safeguards against the recurrence of attacks on shared cultural and intellectual heritage. Our library deans and directors will have fought to position libraries as a central part of the academy’s mission and one of the few places where thought and speech are truly protected from the meddling of politicians foreign and domestic. Our staffing and funding levels will reflect this bold and successful action by library leadership and a broader acknowledgment by society of the high cost of ignorance.

Beth LaPensee

Principal Product Manager, JSTOR ITHAKA

One Liberty Plaza 165 Broadway, 5th Floor

New York, NY 10006

Phone: 888-388-3574 <beth.lapensee@ithaka.org www.ithaka.org, www.jstor.org

BORN AND LIVED: Originally from Windsor, Ontario Canada. Now lives near Ann Arbor Michigan.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: I hold a BA in English Literature and a Master’s in Library and Information Science. I’ve worked at JSTOR for over 25 years and currently serve as Principal Product Manager. With a background in user experience and over a decade of product leadership, I take a research- and design-driven approach to platform development. I led the creation of JSTOR’s AI-powered research tool and now focus on shaping our AI strategy to support responsible, impactful innovation in scholarly research.

IN MY SPARE TIME: In my free time, I serve as a trustee for my local library: Monroe County Library System.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: In the next five years, I believe AI will fundamentally reshape how we learn, research, and develop knowledge. Libraries, publishers, and research platforms

will play a critical role in shaping how these technologies are integrated into scholarly workflows. The opportunity isn’t just to adopt new tools but to ensure they support transparency, critical thinking, and equitable access. As information professionals, we have a responsibility to lead by drawing on our values and expertise to build a future we can be proud of, where AI enhances scholarship.

Joelen Pastva

Director of Library Services

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone: (412) 268-7268

<jpastva@andrew.cmu.edu>

BORN AND LIVED: Born and currently residing in Pittsburgh, PA, and have lived in Baltimore, New York, southern Virginia, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

EARLY LIFE: Undergraduate studies in English and Russian, MLIS from the Pratt Insitute, graduate studies in Russian and Slavic Studies and Information Systems.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: Worked in diverse library settings for over 15 years, with a focus on metadata, information systems & architecture, and academic research services.

IN MY SPARE TIME: Hiking, travel, cooking, and music all spark joy.

Gwendolyn Reece, Ph.D. Director of Research, Teaching

and Learning

American University Library 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW/Washington, DC 20016

Phone: (202) 885-3281 <greece@american.edu>

BORN AND LIVED: Born: Dayton, OH. Lived: Santa Barbara, CA, Salem, MA, Washington, DC.

EARLY LIFE: I am the eldest of four children. My father was the chair of the Department of Community Health at Wright State University’s School of Medicine where he founded a program in medical ethics in the 1970s. My mother was a classical soprano.

PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND ACTIVITIES: In addition to my MLIS, I have an advanced degrees in Religious Studies and Education. I joined the faculty at American University in 1998 and have served in several positions within the library. I have been the Director of Research and Learning since 2008. In addition to my service in the library, I was on AU’s IRB from 2009-2022 and chaired the committee from 2015-2022. This committee conducted the ethics review for all human subjects’ research. As a member of the faculty, I publish research on Contemporary Paganism within Religious Studies as well as scholarship in Library and Information Science.

IN MY SPARE TIME: I am also a Pagan Priestess and am an active leader within Contemporary Paganism. I am a published author and national teacher within my religious tradition.

FAVORITE BOOKS: The Nicomachean Ethics, The Pellinor Series by Alison Croggan, all of the extant Ancient Greek tragedies, The Iliad and Odyssey (Emily Wilson is my favorite translator).

PET PEEVES: The implication that librarians are change-resistant and the underlying sexism and ageism that often underlies it.

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PHILOSOPHY: We are in Earth School while we are in incarnation, and it is our job to keep developing our human excellences.

MOST MEMORABLE CAREER ACHIEVEMENT: Being awarded the Outstanding Service to the University Community, University Faculty Award in the spring of 2025.

GOAL I HOPE TO ACHIEVE FIVE YEARS FROM NOW: I want to develop a deeper discourse of AI ethics that is Humanistic and rooted in Virtue Ethics and the Ethics of Care.

HOW/WHERE DO I SEE THE INDUSTRY IN FIVE YEARS: I think AI will have changed the information landscape significantly, but I also think it will increase the need for human consultation. I think that librarians may transform into “meaning makers” where we help people make meaning out of the information they discover rather than being as focused on discovery. I think that the way in which the industry develops could either serve human thriving or be deeply detrimental. I am hoping that librarians will help it develop in ways that support human thriving and avoid being a tool for the worst of human potential.

Maranda Reilly

Electronic Resources Manager

Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA <mreilly@andrew.cmu.edu>

BORN AND LIVED: Pittsburgh, PA. IN MY SPARE TIME: Traveling. Listening to music. Going to concerts, musicals, and comedy shows. Gallery strolling through art museums. Practicing German using Duolingo.

FAVORITE BOOKS: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) and The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards.

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED

ITHAKA

One Liberty Plaza, 165 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10006

301 East Liberty, Suite 400, Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Phone: 888-388-3574 • Fax: (212) 358-6499 www.ithaka.org, www.jstor.org

KEY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES: We help institutions and individuals improve access to education and accelerate the impact of research and learning through diverse services.

JSTOR – Journals, books, images, and primary sources on a platform for teaching and connecting ideas

Portico – Community-supported preservation of e-journals, e-books, and digital collections

Ithaka S+R – Collaborative strategies and research for higher education and the arts

CORE MARKETS/CLIENTELE: Higher education.

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: ~400

HISTORY AND BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR COMPANY/ PUBLISHING PROGRAM: ITHAKA’s mission is to expand access to knowledge and education for people around the world. We started in 1995 with a simple idea: digitize the materials in university and college libraries to preserve them and make them available online to people everywhere. Today, we do that and so much more. Across our nonprofit services — Ithaka S+R, JSTOR, and Portico — we work with the community to make higher education and access to knowledge more affordable, improve outcomes for students and researchers, and preserve knowledge for future generations.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOU THINK WOULD BE OF INTEREST TO OUR READERS? JSTOR has been at the forefront of technology since our founding when we decided to digitize journals and put them online. Ever since then, we have explored the potential of new technologies to accelerate our mission and improve outcomes — whether that’s making library operations more affordable and sustainable, preserving content at scale, enabling new forms of research, or developing new digital-first business models to get newly published scholarship to more people.

Innovator’s Saga — An Interview with Sol Rosenberg continued from page 56

presentations across other events — the works. The key is to get past the “we’ve never done it” fear. It pays for itself, expands inclusion, and deepens engagement long after the five conference days.

DG: Best way to reach you?

SR: Underlinerecording.info or underline.io. I’m easy to find — <Sol@underline.io> and on LinkedIn.

DG: And references?

SR: Plenty. This is all we do — scientific conferences. We work with IEEE, AAAI, ACL, and many others across disciplines. Most clients come back year after year. We aim for white-glove service — delight organizers so they become ambassadors.

DG: Sol, thanks for the time and the candor. Lots to think about. Folks can reach him at <Sol@underline.io>. Sol, appreciate you joining us — see you at the next great conference.

SR: Thanks, Darrell. Always a pleasure.

DG: And that wraps this week’s “Leadership Begins with You.” Our guest was Sol Rosenberg, Chief Commercial Officer at Underline Science. Remember: leadership begins with you.

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Back Talk continued from page 62

There’s been political progress since; meanwhile, the city is a dazzling display of parks, contemporary architecture, and bustling shopping malls. The new mosque on the south side of the city is vast (can it really hold 250,000 people?) but the rest of the architecture is surprisingly successful at maintaining a human scale.

Kazakhstan floats on oil and is relatively rich; Uzbekistan lags a bit. Readers of Against the Grain will remember that Sci-Hub, the buccaneer content-thieving website, was invented by a Kazakh researcher resentful at being unable to access expensive STM journals. The real story there is that this rich country had many ambitions but had not included scientific research in those ambitions to the extent that would lead them to invest in the information infrastructure they needed. (For example, Kazakhstan is not eligible for benefits under the Research4Life program of STM, while Uzbekistan is a “Group B” country, able to subscribe to thousands of journals at a substantial discount, while there are “Group A” countries that get them without charge.)

My usual way of digging a little deeper in countries is to bust out of the tourist bubble and take my dirty laundry to find a laundromat. Durban years ago was a challenge there and so was, surprisingly, Helsinki, while Astana took me a 20-minute Yandex ride to a very bright, clean, and serviceable place that got the job done quickly and affordably. Sorry, Hilton, but $6 to wash each pair of socks just isn’t on.

It may sound as if the IFLA congress was an afterthought, but of course it was not: attendance was a little down from years when WLIC meets in more familiar and easily reached places, but the organization was outstanding, the range of programming was rich and interesting, and as often the profile of the attendees reflected the region, with more Asian and Pacific participants, fewer Americans. The Academic and Research Libraries section that I participate in had a particularly interesting presentation from a senior Kazakh librarian about the challenges and successes of librarianship in the region. Next year I hope to be looking for laundromat in Busan, Korea and expect to be dazzled by the technology there. Stay tuned.

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Nur Alem (“Shining World”) tower by the conference center in Astana

Back Talk — TOO MANY -STANS

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

There are too many -Stans to keep straight: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, to say nothing of Stan Musial, Stan Laurel, and my old boss Stan Chodorow. Afghanistan and Pakistan suffer from a poor branding strategy vis-à-vis the U.S., and the other five nations were devoured by the Soviet Union in the 1920s, so several generations of Americans barely had a clue they existed. Americans can be woefully ignorant of the world beyond our borders (except for the familiar tourist countries), but going to lands once ruled by Genghis Khan and Tamerlane really does take us far.

One reason I love IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Organizations) is that it helps me break out of my ignorance and see the world from different vantage points. Until this year, the most revelatory IFLA had been the one in Durban, South Africa, in 2007, which showed me both a beautiful deep-water port facing the Indian Ocean as well as the acute social and economic challenges facing South African cities once one gets away from the famous ones. Going back to South Africa twice more since then has been a key to making sub-Saharan Africa more a part of my mental world than ever before.

This year’s IFLA was again revelatory. The WLIC (World Library and Information Congress) itself was held in Astana, Kazakhstan, and we used the opportunity to visit also the city of Almaty (Alma-Ata in the atlas at home when I

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was a kid) and the neighboring state of Uzbekistan, seeing both the capital city of Tashkent and the historic caravan city of Samarkand. Travel is indeed broadening.

What one thing did I learn more than any other? There’s no Uber in central Asia, but instead there’s a company called Yandex Go, which does everything Uber does and does it better. Better app, better app experience: specifically, more useful choices of just what kind of vehicle you want to book, and swift and reliable service. Taking Yandex in several cities, I quickly learned one big thing: China is everywhere. Predictably, the Chinese are building a big Metro in Astana that will be quicker and cheaper than anything like it in the U.S. could be. And then there were the cars themselves. “BYD” was the logo on one frequently seen model — “Build Your Dreams” it stands for, which has an American ring, but the cars and the brand are from China. And the cars are electric. We were being ferried (cheaply) around these multimillion cities in silent, comfortable, well-made, and (the drivers and others assured us) affordable (to a central Asian middle class) Chinese cars. The only American make on display was Chevy in Uzbekistan because of a long-standing joint venture between GM and the local manufacturer; the cars themselves were Uzbeki, whatever their cultural roots in Detroit. China has the rest of the market.

The more predictable learnings were the obvious: the size of the cities, the prosperity, and especially the richness and attractiveness of the old capital, Almaty, and the astonishing newness of Astana, since December 10, 1997, the capital of Kazakhstan. Almaty was the capital historically and under the Soviets, but the new city (on the other side of the country, closer to Russia) was imagined by the late-Soviet bureaucrats who took over in times of independence and ruled for 20 years. continued on page 61

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Triumphal arches are Roman in origin and famous from Paris

Baiterek Tower at the center of Astana

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