“Librarians Leading in Unprecedented Times” Keynote. Congrès des Professionnel le.s de l’information. Montreal, Canada.
Abstract: Libraries reflect the communities they serve, and today, these communities are going through a difficult period. Book bans and attacks against librarians, the rise in “deaths of despair,” and the arrival of artificial intelligence are all manifestations of the same crisis: communities that are fragmenting, turning against themselves and against the institutions created to serve them.
This opening conference poses a difficult question: beyond the services they offer, how can librarians exercise true leadership in these turbulent times?
Slides:
Transcript (AI transcribed with minimal editing):
Hello. Yes, hello. Thank you for having me.
I would normally begin with a traditional American welcome, which is just an abject apology, but these days I might get fired for that. So there’s an election today. I might actually just be looking for asylum tomorrow. It’ll all be good. Thank you for having me.
I’m here to quickly talk about leadership, which I think is an excellent question, and I think putting it together with transformation is an important task. But I want to begin with a story.
I was flying into Springfield, Illinois, which is the state capital, and there’s not much there other than the state capitol. When you get out of the airport, which has two gates, I was going to catch a cab to get into the city. Everyone laughed at me and said, we do Uber here. So I got Uber.
This fine lady pulled up with a very large truck, and I got in the back. It takes about 11 minutes to drive from the airport into the heart of the downtown area. In those 11 minutes, my Uber driver told me that, in fact, this would have been her 30th anniversary, but she was divorced. She had stayed with the boyfriend she met in high school, her only boyfriend, until the kids were old enough. In the divorce, all the friends went with him. She went out of the state for a while, and now she’s back, and these dating apps are horrible. She really wishes that the man she was dating would give up the other two in order to form a serious relationship.
This is 11 minutes. It all began when she asked why I was here. I said I was here to speak on libraries. She asked what about, and I said community and connection. That’s when she went into how important it was to connect.
What’s interesting about that story is that the car, that truck, was her world, and I was invited into it. Given the economy and the situation, that’s where she spent most of her life. Her connections outside that world were people she met on an app, in a gig economy, in order to make a living.
This is the situation I want to talk about. When we talk about leadership and transformation, we are ultimately not just talking about transforming our libraries and leading within them, but about how we can use libraries to lead a transformation of our communities, our nations, and our world.
This is, of course, the time to have that conversation, because everything’s horrible. I could try to say otherwise, but we’re in the midst of a European land war. For the first time in a couple of decades, we have an economy that is doing all right, sort of, for some people. We have the greatest wealth inequality since the Gilded Age. We have crisis after crisis, and many of us are beginning to feel hopeless. We feel like there is so much we can take on. What can we do?
It is, however, not unprecedented. We use this word unprecedented all the time. We have lived through a time of great technological transformation before. We have lived through international political upheaval, alliance disputes, and disintegration before. We have lived through tensions with our Southern neighbors. It always seems like the worst moment, but it has happened before.
What is different now is that these unprecedented crises are happening together. We are in a situation where we are moving past the question of how we get through this. I want to talk today about how we move beyond the concept of service and how librarians begin to lead in this area. Because our communities are calling out to us for help. They are calling out for support, and they are calling out for direction.
To give direction, and to talk about what our communities can be and what we can do, we need to challenge a lot of the traditional ways we think about things, including the nature of service. I’m going to argue that it is time for us to stop serving communities, start saving communities, and ultimately start leading communities forward.
So let’s talk for a minute about the crises we are encountering. Obviously, I come from a very US perspective, and I would love to say book banning only occurs in the United States, and only in my state of Texas. But we know that’s happening everywhere. If it’s not happening explicitly, it is happening in smaller rural areas. It is happening because librarians never put the books on the shelves to begin with, because they don’t want to face those situations.
I’ve been to South Korea. I’ve been to Italy. I have been around the world, and in all of those places they say, if it is not here, it will be here. We look at Texas as a poster child for this. But many of these book banning cases, and many of the things that led to the Librarian movie, started with 10 people who were disgruntled. It started with 10 people in the community who wanted to ban their neighbors, but since they couldn’t do that, they were going to ban the books. That’s what it took. It led to all sorts of controversy, getting people on board, and moving things ahead.
I can pretty much guarantee you that in the communities you serve now, there are 10 people who have a different opinion on the kinds of materials you provide.
I want to talk about deaths of despair. I want to talk about what happens when these controversies and these ideas begin to pull people apart, separate them from their community, and make them feel powerless. Ultimately, we are not going to talk about loneliness. We are going to talk about disenfranchisement, which is a big, long word for lack of power and safety. And because this is a library conference, and I believe by law we have to talk about AI, we’ll talk about it.
So let’s start with the book banning conversation, and I’ll be brief. While we focus on what books get removed, what laws get passed, and what controversies we create, there is a more fundamental problem happening right now, in the United States and internationally. These challenges are challenging the very definition of what a librarian is. I don’t mean that as an abstract concept. I mean legal definitions.
In my state of Texas, and in Arkansas and Utah, there are laws that say if a child comes into your library and finds a book that their parent finds obscene or objectionable, a term never defined, you could be serving jail time. The laws have removed what’s called an affirmative defense. That is the ability to say, I was doing this as an educator, as a librarian, as part of my job. That defense has been removed, so you can now face criminal penalties. In these states, the librarian’s primary legal role has become the protection of children.
Illinois, New Jersey, and several others have passed laws making book challenges harder. They have made it so that if parents want to remove books, they have to go through a very formal process that is long and meant to dissuade. In New Jersey and Illinois, the definition of a librarian is one who preserves freedom to read and freedom of access.
What happens when a librarian wants to move from New Jersey to Texas? Are they still librarians? Once again, I’m sitting in Quebec. This is not exactly new. We’ve always had this conversation about what happens when someone moves from one province to another. But this is the kind of fragmentation being brought before us. It may seem abstract to ask what a librarian is and what librarianship is, but it now has very real structural consequences.
So where are all of these banning issues coming from? What’s happening within these communities? In the United States, several economists coined the term deaths of despair. They were looking at lifespans, how long we live, and they found something very odd. In the Western world, within developed economies, if you were to define what a developed economy is, you could pretty much do it by the extension of lifespans over the past century. We live longer. We live longer because we’ve cleaned up our water. That’s nice. We’ve lived longer because many of us have given up smoking. We’ve lived longer because of statins, and as a middle-aged white guy, I’m thrilled with statins. We’ve lived longer because we can deal with more cancer, and we can treat coronary heart disease.
Except something happened in the United States in the mid-1990s. Middle-aged white guys like myself were starting to die younger. We’re not used to this. So the question was why. The economists went in and looked at these demographics, and they found that it wasn’t just middle-aged white men. It was also middle-aged women. It was also Black Americans, other ethnic minorities, and Indigenous populations. When they tried to figure out what put them all together, the common factors were how they died and whether they had a college education.
A college education isn’t a way of saying they were smarter or not. In America, it says they had more money. If you can afford college, you can afford health care. If you can afford college, you can afford a house. It’s an indication of socioeconomic status.
In terms of how they were dying, they were dying from suicide, which tends to be younger. They were dying from the opioid epidemic and drug addiction. They were dying of alcohol-related diseases. They called these deaths of despair. When they asked what they meant by despair, what they found was that people felt powerless.
We’ve probably all heard about an epidemic of loneliness. There is no epidemic of loneliness. We have just as many lonely people as we have ever had. Social media did not make us lonelier. The internet did not make us lonelier. We’ve always been lonely. As a percentage of the population, that number has remained relatively constant.
But here’s the problem: when you say epidemic, you’re treating loneliness as if it were a disease. For certain people, in a very hardcore, pathological way, there is an issue of treatment. But for the majority of people who are lonely, and we have all been lonely, it’s like hunger. Hunger is an epidemic problem, but hunger normally means you need to eat. Lonely means you need to meet people. What we found is that people are lonely because they moved to a new town, had a child, or changed or lost a job. These things disrupt our social networks. We get lonely, and we need to reconnect. Libraries can be a place to do that.
So we see this happening, and the question is, what do we do about it? I would love to say this is a uniquely American problem, and that Canada by and large is doing much better. Quebec is doing very well. But we have our issues as well.
Last year, the US had a dramatic decrease in drug deaths. But it wasn’t because people stopped using drugs. It was because we had more treatment, and because, for example, public libraries had Narcan on hand so we could treat these cases.
So our communities are seeking power and seeking support, and the problem is not loneliness. Many people with a lot of friends, who talk to people on a regular basis, will kill themselves. Many people who meet and talk with others regularly will drink themselves to death. That is tragic and horrible, and it is not because they are lonely. It is because they feel they have no control. When they look at AI, at elections and referenda, at taxes, and at the jobs that are coming, they feel they don’t have a voice and don’t know what goes on. Yes, they vote for someone through the democratic process, but they don’t know how democracy works. They don’t think whichever politician gets elected cares about them. They look at wealth inequality and ask, why do I have control of anything? Unfortunately, the things they can ultimately control are things that will destroy them. So they move to controlling their intake, their moods, and ultimately how they depart.
So what do we do? We have communities in distress. We have communities in strife. What do we, as a library community, do? I would argue that we move beyond serving people. We’ve always said, we’re here when you need us. Come into our door and we will take care of you. We collect materials and provide them. We shout loudly about what you need to know. We already know. We’ve got to move past that. That’s an old model: we collect resources, and people come to us.
We’ve already begun moving toward saving people, connecting people to each other. We bring them in, engage them, and give them a stake in their world. We give them power over what they can do next. That’s amazing. But I argue we need to move even further. We need to take direction on behalf of the community.
Here’s what happens. We think we serve the community as an adjunct to it, or adjacent to it. But we are part of what they decide to do about land use. We are there when they decide on taxation. We not only spend their money, we help them earn it. We have the ability to think about what is better. What does disclosure look like? How can AI models stop taking advantage of people’s data? We need to begin taking direction and say, these are the precedents and platforms we need to move forward on. We need to look and say our communities are hurting. How can they get better?
As an example, this is a support group with a book in the middle of it. A little town near me called Jarrow, Texas, has a library maybe as big as this stage. Once a month, about eight elderly women come in for their book group. And you go, yeah, that’s the revolution we need, Dave. But they never talk about the book. It turns out there are also eight recent widows. It’s a support group. They’re coming in to be part of a community, to be part of something. The book is an excuse. In their generation, you did not have support groups to discuss these things. You had book groups, you drank a lot of wine, and you discussed other people.
So we can look at this and say, it’s a book group. We provide a book and a space, and we’re done. Or we can ask how we deal with a generation that is dealing with grief and loss. How do we support them? How do we make them feel they have control over their lives again? How do we connect them to other people in the same situation? And how do we make sure the resources are available as they move forward?
I had a great librarian, Meg. People came in to apply for jobs, and they were applying for menial jobs: janitor, package shipper. The idea was just basic, decent jobs. But they had to apply online. That had to be done online, so they not only had to be able to read, they had to be computer literate and internet literate. Meg would help them fill out the form. It turns out that the slower you fill out the form, the less chance you have of getting the job. Yes, they’re tracking that. As soon as she was done, and she’d thank the person and give them resources and send them online, she’d pick up the phone, call the company, and say, what the hell are you doing? You realize these people… I just rail for like an hour. It’d be awesome.
Another librarian had a situation with a knitting group. They would all come in and knit together. Then it was National Knitting Day, and they said, we should do something for National Knitting Day. She said, let’s go to Cracker Barrel. You have Cracker Barrel? Oh, good. Another American apology I don’t have to make.
Cracker Barrel is sort of like if Andy Mayberry decided to serve you deep-fried food with gravy. They have a long porch with rocking chairs where you’re supposed to wait. They said, let’s go to Cracker Barrel and knit on the porch and invite other people to join. The librarian said, great, picked up the phone, and called Cracker Barrel. They said no. I don’t know if that’s what they meant, but in my head, no. So she turned to the group of knitters and said, we could go anyway. Do you want to be the image of police hauling the knitters out of Cracker Barrel?
The idea is that it’s not enough to say, come here, do what you need. What do you need beyond that? How do we support it? I give you these examples because they’re cute, but they’re also at a scale we can act on. Yes, we need a national and international AI policy regime. Period. Nuff said. We need to talk about our data centers and our use of water, and the ecological disaster that could follow, and we should have a voice in that. But it doesn’t have to happen at that level every time. Every librarian who looks at this should say, start with the knitters, start with the book group, start with what they need, and then take that to what other people need, combine them, and bring them together.
Now let’s take a moment to talk about AI, because we have to. Artificial intelligence is an amazing technology with the potential to revolutionize education and software development, making it possible for anyone to develop software whether they can code or not. I don’t know if you’ve seen the recent stories. They make my heart sing. Someone looked at Adobe Creative Suite, which costs a couple thousand dollars a month to use. They went into Claude and said, Claude, could you make this software for me? And it did. Now Anthropic, which runs Claude, has to go in and say, you’re not allowed to do that. Stop it. Right? This is where we are with AI.
A lot of people are already looking at how AI disrupts higher education. If I had to put the fundamental problem AI has caused in higher education in one sentence, it’s this. We always believed that the way you could evaluate someone’s knowledge and critical thinking was through their writing. If you can write, you can think. That was a fundamental precept of how we structured everything, whether it was writing an essay, writing code, or writing a mathematical proof. And now what we’ve found is that if you can prompt, you can pass. We have disconnected writing from the thinking process, and we don’t know what to do. I don’t care how many professors you bring to the stage or how confident they sound. We are clueless. We’re making this up as we go. It is disruptive.
But when people look at AI, they see disruption, and they see two kinds. Only one of them is truly revolutionary. The first is that AI makes stuff. AI makes pictures, AI makes prompts, AI makes books. You do have AI books somewhere in your collections, I guarantee it. AI writes too many journal articles. AI can make a lot of things, and our human systems, like peer review and editorial journals, are not up to the scale it can produce.
But information overload is not new. We’ve done this before. We did it after World War II, and we did it at the advent of the printing press, when people feared all these books would lead us to barbarism because there were more than a thousand titles to know. We have dealt with information overload forever. That’s not new.
What’s new is that AI doesn’t just produce a product. It produces a belief. If I write an article and a journal has an AI use policy, they want to know how many words I typed myself. That is the wrong question. The better question is how many ideas I came up with and wrote about, and what conversations I had.
I’m sure no one in this room has done this, but you’ve gotten a test result back from a doctor, looked at it, and said, I don’t understand. So you go to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini and ask, am I going to die? At first it says you should talk to a doctor. But let’s be honest, this is what you have, right? This is what you should take, and this is what you should not take. And good luck.
If you happen to be a Chinese student living overseas, and you have serious epilepsy, and you begin to think the medications you’re taking slow you down so you can’t compete for a job, so you ask AI how to get off those drugs, it will tell you how, to the point where you will die of a seizure. True story. Unfortunately, that’s the revolution.
The revolution is that at 2 in the morning, when someone has a question about their rent, their medication, or who to vote for, they have someone waiting to talk to them who likes them, doesn’t judge them, and has the entirety of the internet ingested to be part of that conversation. The outcome is not a paper you can do AI literacy on. It is not an article you can check against. It is not an image you can watermark. It is a belief that someone will act on. People are developing relationships with these systems because the systems feed a need to be understood. We all have that need. And the systems are designed to engage them and keep them.
That is what I call an information shock. Information shocks that happen periodically throughout time fundamentally change our profession. It is what took us from being scribes to librarians, from librarians to documentalists, and from documentalists to information scientists. We are now at a point where I don’t know what we’re going to be next. That’s not a joke. I don’t know what five years looks like from now. The good news is that no one else does, including the AI developers. So we need to talk about what we do about that.
A chatbot never retires, never leaves, and answers to no one in the town. A librarian does. When a chatbot gives a wrong answer, nobody can come back and say it was wrong and make it right. But someone can say, my librarian told me this. That librarian is part of the community, has been here for 30 years, has this training and understanding, and is my best friend in the information domain. I can trust that.
A chatbot can tell you the lie with perfect confidence, and it will tell the next person a brand-new one, because it is a stochastic, non-deterministic system. That’s just a way of saying sometimes it’s making stuff up. Pardon my language.
So we can become the accountable conversant. Let me talk about our five ways to lead, and then I’ll be done, and we can move on with our day.
We can lead from our values. Librarians are nonpartisan, but we are not neutral. Please never say neutral. What is the French word for neutral? Forget it. It doesn’t exist. You’re not. If you think you’re neutral, come to Texas, and I’ll tell you about a book someone hates, and they’ll hate you for putting that book on a shelf. You are not neutral if you believe that the best, most rich, important knowledge comes from the most diverse sources. That’s not a neutral stance. If you believe in community participation, if you believe in public funding for libraries, if you believe we should invest in literacy, that is not a neutral stance. That is an ideology. Librarians have values. We have a moral compass. We have things we believe in, which means we have a perspective. We are nonpartisan. That’s not conservative, that’s not liberal, that’s not red and green and yellow and what have you. But it is an ideology. It’s an open one, and we try to communicate it as transparently as possible. We believe in collecting widely so people can decide for themselves. That is a standard. So we need to lead with our values.
We can lead outside the building. In Alaska, there’s a small island off the main coast. There are many. The Alaskan state government paid to have a submerged cable connecting this island to the mainland for internet. Several years later, they decided it was too expensive and were going to cut it. The librarian went to the state capitol and argued that cutting the island off would be a constitutional disenfranchisement, cutting them off from their democratic responsibilities. The state turned the switch back on.
What do we believe our communities need, besides, by the way, better construction and less traffic? We can even talk about that from outside our buildings. We live in a food desert. No one can get good, healthy food within 10 blocks of our building. Maybe we should put up a refrigerator with vegetables in it. Maybe we should begin providing food. We support the whole community, not just the people who walk into this building.
We can lead the hard conversations. Communities need a place to disagree in good faith. We earn that right by hosting it, by having our own hard conversations first. There are things we are not talking about among ourselves. There are things we don’t want to touch: politics, and our role in politics. You know who talks about politics in a library? Finland, Denmark, and Norway. By law, they host debates and political conversations, and they host forums with candidates. They talk about the major issues because it’s not a partisan perspective. They want an informed electorate. Politics is essential to what it means to be a citizen, so it belongs in a library that is all about informing our citizenry.
We host those conversations by talking about labor. Oh, AI is going to put everyone out of business and create all these low-paying jobs. Do we have low-paying jobs in our own institutions? Do we pay living wages? Do we talk about a four-day workweek for our own librarians? How do we have those conversations?
We lean on AI. You don’t respond to a poisoned water supply with water literacy. Yes, they died. This is how water works, right? We fix the water. We fix the regulation. We bring people in, and we install infrastructure. The same is true of AI. You have all been forced at some point this past year to develop, think about, or respond to an AI policy, and somewhere in there someone used the phrase AI literacy. I don’t know what the French equivalent is, but you know what? The joke is coming. AI literacy teaches it as if it were a tool, like a new Google. It teaches people to pretend it’s Google: you ask it a question, then go check what it produced. But it never produced anything. Take the essay it wrote and check it against five sources. It didn’t write an essay. It just told me to stop taking my medication.
What we need to talk about is what sovereignty over information looks like for our cultural heritage, our institutions, and First Nations. What does it mean to build a federated system that doesn’t destroy the economy or the environment? How can we host local AI systems and local servers for each individual’s needs? That does value privacy. That does value knowledge. That does value community.
We can lead without a title. Leadership is stewardship, taking charge for the good of the community. Service and leadership are not opposites. I don’t care if you have a degree. I give people degrees, and some of them are awesome. I want people dedicated to a mission of improving society by facilitating knowledge creation in the community. I want people dedicated to making the world a better place. I want people who hold the ideology we talked about. I don’t care where they got it, as long as they’re dedicated to continuing it, connecting people, and bringing them together.
We need to open our arms wide to feral librarians. We need to bring in people who are dedicated to making our communities better. We need to understand that they are librarians too. And we need to be held accountable. That is where we need to be.
For 4,000 years, this field has survived. We have survived war. We have survived famine. We have survived autocracies. We have survived genocides. We have survived climate disruption and floods. We have survived everything. Librarianship is a 4,000-year-old story, a story that still inspires everyone in this room to come into this room. We’re not done yet, because we have to preserve the next 4,000 years. The story resonates, and we continue it and believe in it, because we’ve seen it have a positive effect. We’ve seen the world get better because of it.
We now own that story. We need to write this chapter and prepare the next one within it. We need to be the ones who say, we are a force for justice. We are a force for good. And we need to choose joy in doing it.
Joy is not an emotion. Joy is not happiness. Joy is saying the world may have bad things in it, but I’m going to find the best, and I’m going to make them better. Joy is a choice, made in the midst of a struggle, to look for the positive and push forward. Joy is found in conflict, like now.
And here’s the important part: joy is a gift. In a religious tradition, joy is a gift of God. In a secular tradition, in a library tradition, it is a gift too. Look around you. You hold that gift to give to others. When someone has a bad day, when someone fights an injustice, when someone is fighting a book ban, looking at a budget, or fighting this notion, you are the one to reach out and say, I’ve got you. What you do is important. I know you. I’ll be there. Support. Thank you very much.