GenAI and Academic Libraries: Where Are We? Where Are We Going? How Will We Get There?

I think about stories a lot: the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories other people tell about us, the stories we unwittingly find ourselves in. These stories change what we think is possible, what we do, and what stories we tell others.

In my Makerspace work I often advise students to think about what they’re making as a story. When students focus too much on the object they are making, they tend to focus on what they can already do (or what they’ve been told they can do) and the results are often boring and the learning shallow. When they think of what they are making as a story illustrated by an object, they’re free to make something interesting and ambitious.

Stories are also relational: they tell us about the people involved and what they value. Objects are often presented in isolation, as if they came into existence outside of a specific community or set of values.

I’ve been thinking a lot about GenAI and academic libraries over the last few years. I run a makerspace focused on helping users learn how to learn about technology so they can have agency in the future over the technologies in their lives. I’m also the co-chair of my department.

I would like to pretend that I’ve been proactive about these issues, but in reality I’ve been avoiding them professionally. I think almost every librarian, no matter what they believe, is experiencing a lot of stress about the impact of GenAI on academic libraries and information literacy. It feels like we’ve been thrust into a story we don’t control and are being told to make decisions before we have our own story to tell.

It’s never a good idea to be in somebody else’s story.

I don’t think generative AI is going away. There might be a correction in the market, and many use cases may prove false, but I’ve seen enough myself and from people I respect to believe people are finding real value in these technologies and they are here to stay, at least in the near term. I also believe that these technologies and many of their advocates are anathema to a healthy information literacy. I also believe that those in education pushing these technologies without carefully considering their impact on knowledge and expertise are potentially undermining the very reasons for our existence.

Maybe most importantly, for all our flaws I believe that academic librarians and other educators are the experts best placed to care about the impact of these technologies on our users and advocate for their interests and a healthy information ecosystem in general. We cannot sit these conversations out. If we do, we risk finding ourselves stuck in someone else’s story.

So where are we? Where are we going? How will we get there?

I don’t think we can know the answers to the first two questions. If we could, the story would already be told. Many people are trying to convince us that they know where we are and where we are going, but they don’t. They’re trying to make us live in their story.

What we can know, because we get to decide it together in small groups and communities, is the third part: How are we going to get there? We can decide what kind of story to tell about the journey. How are we going to talk about these issues? Who will be part of those conversations? What will the conversations be about?

What are our wildest ambitions and values?

I suspect that, somewhat ironically, these conversations will mostly not be about GenAI at all, or at least not about specific technologies, products, or services. Those are part of the first two questions. Instead, they will be about who we are, what we believe, and what kind of world we want to live in. And if AI is here to stay, how do we want to tell its story within that world?