Critical Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence in Librarianship

In Critical Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence in Librarianship, librarians, archivists, and other library workers grapple with how we might adapt to, mitigate, and/or resist AI. While some embrace AI and others reject it, a critical approach to librarianship offers an opportunity to investigate “the messy middle,” a nuanced gray area marked by uncertainty or precarity, where interacting with AI does not have to be either/or, but maybe, or sometimes, or under certain circumstances. This edited collection creates space for a variety of library voices in this messy middle.

These chapters use a variety of critical lenses, such as feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial theory, to consider the impact of AI in our work. The contributors to this collection examine AI broadly and in contexts such as information literacy instruction, metadata creation, and archival collections, posing questions that might direct the future of AI in library work. Authors reflect on how the ethical use of information might be shaped or reshaped by AI, how we might reckon with the impacts of AI, who benefits from the use of AI while who is harmed, how the politics of refusal might be employed, and more. In short, this collection seeks to facilitate conversations, reflections, and critical praxis about AI for those engaged in library work.

Tessa Withorn (she/her) is the Science Librarian and an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. She has an MLS from Indiana University Bloomington (2017) and a BA in English from the University of Louisville (2015). She has previously published and presented on a variety of topics, including critical online library instruction and AI literacy.

Maria T. Accardi (she/her) is a faculty librarian and Coordinator of Instruction and Assessment at IU Southeast, a regional campus of Indiana University, located in New Albany, IN. She has an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh (2006), an MA in English from the University of Louisville (2004), and a BA in English from Northern Kentucky University (1999). She is the author of Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (2013), co-editor of Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (2010), and editor of The Feminist Reference Desk: Concepts, Critiques, and Conversations (2017).