Blog

One of the great challenges—and opportunities—of our age is the pursuit of digital wisdom. To thrive in our digitally enabled and enhanced information environment, we need to learn how to design and use digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) wisely so that we may become wiser. Right now, this includes discerning how AI may be integrated wisely into our lives and world. Libraries have an important role in creating a better information environment for human as well as artificial agents.

The Role of Libraries

Our emergence as a species is connected with our capacity for reflective attention. The ability to discern information in our environment and to think about it reflectively and imaginatively—instead of reflexively and automatically—set us on a trajectory that resulted in the creation of complex information societies. As we became dependent on the ancient ICTs of writing and textual artifacts, libraries were developed in diverse contexts to enable the discovery, use, creation, and sharing of knowledge.

To manage attention and information, libraries begin with an intention to configure an intellectual ordering of reality represented by textual expressions of knowledge. This goal, defined by particular communities, involves the selection and collection of texts judged worthy of attention. It also involves the mediation of access to this collection—as well as the broader context for discovery a library curates—through social and technological systems that enable human agency within an information environment. 

Library intentions, selections, and mediations have changed and grown in complexity as ICTs have changed. The digital transformation of libraries—the integration of digital ICTs into library resources, services, and spaces—has been underway for decades. Libraries automated many technical operations in the 1960s, including cataloging, acquisitions, resource management, and circulation. In the 1970s, through collaborative consortia and networked computers, libraries developed automated processes for information exchange. Libraries created new automated discovery and retrieval services through online public catalogs and remote databases in the 1980s. By the end of twentieth century, libraries were providing online access to local as well as global resources. As they were digitizing information resources and services, librarians also developed the concept and practice of information literacy—which enables people to identify information needs and find, evaluate, and use information to fulfill those needs. Over the last twenty years, digital resources, services, and spaces have become thoroughly integrated into most libraries.

Today, libraries are being rapidly and radically transformed by new automated and artificial intelligence technologies—technologies that will profoundly change how people discover, use, create, and share information. A generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), which predicts plausible responses to requests based on past language patterns, is a significant AI technology that is already changing how people engage with and think about information. Many libraries are exploring how this technology may be used to advance knowledge discovery and creation. If wisely integrated into libraries, this technology could significantly augment human attention and agency. The digital wisdom needed to realize that goal begins with reflection on a number of ethical questions.

Information Ethics and GPTs

For several decades, the field of information ethics has explored various ethical issues to assess the impacts—as well as guide the implementation—of new and emerging ICTs. An instance of a GPT, such as ChatGPT, touches many (if not all) of the concerns of information ethics. 

Consider, for example, the following issues and questions.

1. Authenticity: Does ChatGPT provide meaningful information or rather false information (misinformation)? ChatGPTs information sources are obscure, but it is clear not all of them are good. Additionally, the current version of ChatGPT does not always provide accurate information and is well known for its tendency to fabricate or “hallucinate” misinformation. OpenAI warns that, “While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice.”
2. Access: Is access to ChatGPT equitable? This question concerns not only access to the technology itself, but also to the technologies and skills needed to use it well. At this point, the business model for ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI is not clear or stable. Many GPTs are commercial products and require user contributions of personal data as well as subscriptions for advanced models. Best practices for using ChatGPT are, at best, provisional.
3. Diversity: Is ChatGPT inclusive of diverse perspectives? Given the lack of transparency around the texts used to train ChatGPT, as well as about human interventions meant to mitigate bias and bad information (or malinformation), it is unclear how diverse and inclusive ChatGPT is. There are questions about censorship, too, as different groups call for the exclusion of certain perspectives from their information environments.
4. Property: There are many open questions about ChatGPT and copyright and intellectual property rights—about ownership rights of the content on which ChatGPT is trained, on who owns its outputs and the content created in connection with its use, and about how cases for fair or transformative use will be defended when content is automatically and cryptically generated.
5. Privacy: How does ChatGPT access, protect, and use personal information? OpenAI warns that, “Conversations may be reviewed by our AI trainers to improve our systems” and, further, advises against sharing “any sensitive information in your conversations.” If you ask Chat GPT about privacy, you will get responses that promise anonymity and encryption but caution that “no system or service can guarantee complete security and privacy.”
6. Security: Does ChatGPT protect people from—or expose people to—online harm? There has been at least one case in which users’ questions were publicly exposed. If you ask ChatGPT how secure it is, it asserts that user data is restricted to “authorized personnel” and that OpenAI has implemented controls to prevent unauthorized access to or misuse of user data.
7. Community: Does ChatGPT foster harmonious relations among people, help cultivate citizenship, and serve the common good? When I asked ChatGPT how it serves the common good, it claimed a number of positive applications: creating mental health chatbots; developing interactive learning tools to help students learn and retain information more effectively; generating virtual assistants to help people with disabilities access information and services more easily; and analyzing and synthesizing large amounts of data to help researchers in fields such as medicine and environmental science make new discoveries and insights. ChatGPT acknowledges it also can cause social harms: it can be used to lie and slander, amplify biases and inequities, cheat and steal, disrupt relationships and jobs, and much more.

GPTs have the potential to enhance teaching, research, writing, coding and all the other work we do to process and act on information. But the intentions, selections, and mediations of GPTs need to be critiqued, governed, and reformed further to ensure that human attention and agency may be helped rather than harmed.

From Information to Wisdom

Libraries have always used ICTs to help people attend to and work with information. Through their intentional approaches to information, their selection of information resources, and their mediations of information access and use, libraries have cultivated human attention and agency to augmented human intelligence for millennia. Now, this work includes automated information processing and artificial agents. Increasingly complex forms of AI will continue to transform libraries and our information environment. Drawing on their histories and experiences of technological adaptation and ethical practice, libraries are well positioned to lead digitally wise social and technological transformations with AI.

For an introduction to information ethics, see Foundations of Information Ethics, edited by John T. F. Burgess and Emily J. M. Knox (ALA Neal-Schuman, 2019).

The COVID-19 pandemic was an apocalyptic event. It was apocalyptic in the popular sense of the word, in that the pandemic was a sudden and global catastrophe. But the pandemic was also apocalyptic in a more literal sense, as an uncovering of deeper realities. The pandemic quickly became an infodemic; it exposed and exacerbated systemic racial, economic, and other social inequities; and it revealed many of the problems and much of the potential of emerging technologies. Before the pandemic, it was clear to many that it was past time, in the words of Ruha Benjamin, “to reimagine what is possible” (Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code [Polity, 2019], 1). Now, as we emerge from the pandemic, there is a unique opportunity to learn from this apocalyptic moment and strive “for another and a juster world” (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [Penguin, 2018], 63).

Libraries have been central in the discovery, creation, and sharing of knowledge for millennia. Initially, the aims of libraries were modest and imperialistic. More recently, guided by professionals responsive to social and cultural dynamics, libraries have become significant sites for cultivating individual and collective agency. (See, e.g., Wayne Wiegand’s Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library [Oxford University Press, 2015]). Uniquely situated within both local communities and global networks, librarians and libraries are well positioned to help shape a better post-pandemic world—a world that also will be postdigital.

Librarians have participated in a trajectory of digital transformation since the middle of the 20th century: automating operations and access, digitizing resources and digitalizing services, and developing new platforms and accompanying formative practices. All of these changes enabled libraries to sustain many core programs during the pandemic, but the nearly all-digital work of librarians revealed dimensions of the library that cannot be automated or adequately mediated digitally. These pre- and extra-digital elements of the library—human-scaled interfaces, fully embodied interactions, collaborations unconstrained by software designs, data and algorithmic autonomy, temporal and physical constraints, and environmental responsibilities—provide insights into future priorities for the library. Technological advances accelerated by the pandemic, such as artificial intelligence, will continue to transform our world. (See, esp., Luciano Floridi’s The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality [Oxford University Press, 2014]).

But libraries have always been about augmenting intelligence—indeed, libraries themselves are technologies for intelligence augmentation—and librarians can draw from a deep history of information access, attention, and agency to critique and integrate wisely into our lives transformative technologies such as AI. Ours is a time for postdigital librarianship: a critical and constructive approach to digital enhancements that lead to better futures after the digital has lost its salience. (For a discussion of “postdigital,” see Jeremy Knox, “What Does the ‘Postdigital’ Mean for Education?,” Postdigital Science and Education1 [2019]: 357-70.)

A few years ago, I began thinking of the future of the library in terms of a post-digital future. By “post-digital” I do not mean a post-apocalyptic library, like the analog libraries reconstructed after the nuclear war in William Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz or after the flu pandemic in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. I am thinking of a time not when digital infrastructure collapses but when it is taken for granted—when the qualifier “digital” is no longer necessary.

When I went to library school some twenty years ago, the digital libraries we built were more like digital cabinets of curiosities—selected or small collections of things that could be digitized and publicly shared. Libraries had special departments for this work, and as interesting and as expensive as it was, it was not typically a core function within any library. Libraries were, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, already digital in many ways: online catalogs and research databases, as well as electronic journals and books, were common. But libraries as entities were largely synonymous with their buildings and the people, materials, and functions contained within them. Some of us, though, who used online public catalogs and found through libraries resources on the open web, sensed that libraries were extending beyond their traditional boundaries.

When I became a library director about a decade ago, I became more intentional about thinking about the library as a hybrid entity—our resources, services, and spaces were both non-digital and digital. As libraries like mine pressed into integrating digital technologies into every dimension of our work, we added more digital resources, services, platforms, and expertise to function online as well as offline. As we did this, we emerged as leaders within our institutions in areas such as digital literacy, digital pedagogy, digital scholarship, and digital institutional transformation. 

A few weeks ago, many of our libraries became entirely mediated through digital technologies. We closed our buildings, we suspended the circulation of physical materials locally and throughout our networks, and we moved all of our services online. In all of my communications, I am careful to say that the library building is closed; library resources, services, and staff remain accessible online. 

Fortunately, after many years of investing in digital resources and infrastructure—and in cultivating digital expertise among my faculty and staff—we were ready for this sudden and complete digital shift. We were even able to add new resources and services. But when people ask if the library is open, and we respond that it is online, we know that we are not fully functional. And we lament that.

When I imagine the future form of the library, it is neither purely digital, online, nor purely physical, offline. It is the best of both of these—a blend of digitally networked enhancements to physically situated experiences, adaptable to individual and community needs and preferences. The qualitative difference is like that between the internet, virtual reality, and chatbots and the Internet of Things, mixed reality, and robots.

The present pandemic has revealed the impressive extent to which libraries have become digital. There is of course more work to be done—especially related to improving digital presence and place beyond video conferencing and learning management systems. But now, I am looking forward most to creating what comes next: the post-digital library.

Previously, in what seems like another age, I argued here that four major information revolutions have occurred throughout human history. These four revolutions were associated with the emergence of information abstraction, information agencies, information artifacts, and information automation. At the moment, in the midst of a health pandemic that is also a dangerous infodemic, I have been thinking about the information crises that have come with each of these revolutions.

With the ability to imagine and articulate abstract concepts came the invention of lying. If the Garden of Eden is read as a reflection of the evolutionary emergence of imagining alternative realities, then information abstraction is the foundation for the original sin of doubting (with the help of a malicious agent) God’s intentions for the first humans.

With the establishment of the earliest cities and the information agencies needed for ordering their activities, lying became propaganda—the deformation of information for the rule of the polis. One could read the claims of the founders of Babel as benevolent: Let us build ourselves a city, make a name for ourselves, and live together safely. But who suffered and who benefited from that labor? Whose names were glorified? And what social distinctions or divisions existed and how were these managed? 

The information artifacts that represent the third information revolution communicate a mixture of information, misinformation, and disinformation. Over millennia, we have developed complex historical, literary, and other methodologies in attempts to evaluate information and use it appropriately. Our semantic efforts are ultimately provisional, though, and the artifacts always remain to some extent suspect.

Now, in an age of information automation—including both the automated processing and the automated creation of information—we are overwhelmed with information that may not be information. The development of digital, networked information and communication technologies such as the internet, social media, mobile devices, and artificial agents has made sharing information easy and automatic. These have outpaced our previous strategies for information management, and our current information environment is polluted with disinformation and misinformation. We have created the Antilibrary of Babel.

The COVID-19 crisis heightens the unique features of our information revolution’s crisis: the speed, scope, and sources of communication. Regardless of value, messages are transmitted quickly and broadly without clear contextual information about their creation, credibility, currency, and channels of distribution. 

When we are fully in crisis informatics mode—seeking information to address our uncertainties and anxieties and make sense of what we are experiencing—we are vulnerable to being misinformed. And when there is insufficient or incomplete information, that vulnerability grows. Even more so than before this crisis, as we wait for better information and information management systems, we need to be more attentive and analytical. We need to slow down, be aware of how we’re being affected, and verify and add context. We need to think more and consume and share less.

Bryan’s Alexander’s recent book Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins, 2019) is an excellent resource for understanding trends in higher eduction and thinking about future scenarios related to these.

Here, I simply would like to note a few of Alexander’s comments about the specific role the library has had–and will continue to have–in shaping the future of higher education:

• Libraries (themselves a form of information technology) have always evolved with technology, and they have been evolving with digital technologies since the 1960s. Highlighting information literacy and new networked information resources, Alexander claims: “Few professions have been so far-sighted, so collaborative, and so forthright in action” (35).
• In one of his more positive scenarios, “Open Education Triumphant,” Alexander credits libraries for contributing to the “open paradigm” shift: “Libraries were crucial in the transition to open, as they were early adopters of scholarly material repositories, encouraged faculty to adopt open access publishing mandates, and negotiated with publishers” (166). With an abundance of digital content, libraries create “more multi-media materials of their own” as well as “new practices for research and learning.” The shift away from the role of purchaser enables libraries to “publish new finding aids, teach new classes, and explore the history of information to look for inspiration in how previous ages responses to upsurges in content” (169).
• In another positive scenario, a “Renaissance … [with] new media layers added to college and university lives,” libraries share and celebrate student work. This is an extension of what libraries had been doing for some time, increasingly playing “a larger role in supportive community creativity, from advising on copyright to providing recording spaces and media technology, and archiving resources” (177f.).

Books about higher education rarely delve beyond surface assumptions about the nature and role of libraries, and those thinking about technological transformation rarely see what libraries have done, are doing, and may do yet. Alexander’s book is helpful and appreciated corrective to limited images of the library.

After writing 9.5 theses about technology, I thought a similar exercise would be helpful for presenting my thoughts about the library.

A number of these theses were included in a keynote presentation I gave a few years ago, which explored the meaning of the library through past memories, future expectations, and present actions. The ninth thesis may be the only controversial one, but I want to argue that it follows from the others.

The theses:

1. Information is fundamental for human existence: we seek it to survive as well as thrive—to eat, to mate, to learn, to create, and to understand ourselves and our role in the universe.

2. With the creation of information artifacts some five millennia ago, information became more materially fixed, more reliably transferable across time and space, and more powerful.

3. Libraries were created to provide immediate and long-term access to information artifacts—especially textual and portable works—that were important within a particular culture. This cultural intention involved the selection, collection, and mediation of fixed expressions of knowledge to and for members of a particular community.

4. The library became the primary institution for sustaining the human information process and an important infrastructure for shaping individual and collective attention and agency.

5. The library forms attention and agency by archiving memories of what we know, inspiring our imagination of what we may hope for, and enabling us to act in the present.

6. We are living through an information revolution that elevates the library’s significant role in cultivating attention and agency, individually as well as globally.

7. Digital technologies add a digital dimension to the library—including new resources, services, and spaces—which the library scales for human use.  

8. New and emerging technologies will continue to enhance libraries’ curation and innovation of the information process, even as autonomous and intelligent systems become more integrated into library operations and infrastructure.

9. Absorbing the best affordances of predecessor and successor information technologies, the library is the greatest information technology ever created. 

9.5. The library is a material and formative information technology for every age.