on knowledge, libraries, and higher education
With August just around the corner, it feels like summer is already wrapping up and the excitement of a new academic year is just ahead. I m entering my second year at Wake, with a newly named president, and I m already thinking about what the year will bring. My summer reading, as always, was a wide [ ]
For most of libraries history, the value of a library was easy to see. Information was scarce and we found it, acquired it, organized it, and preserved it. People came to the library because finding things was hard, and we were good at the hard part. The real work, underneath the stacks, catalog, and reference [ ]
This summer has been off to a good start! I ve been busy with different kinds of things, including sharing the set of ideas about libraries as epistemic infrastructure I ve been exploring here in other spaces. To make sure all the ideas have a home together, I m linking to them now. They re different cuts at the [ ]
I ve been thinking about the individual experience of students who become scholars through repeated acts of recognition, and the necessity of scale. I ve had the good fortune to have the experience of working in places that can be very high touch and in institutions where you have to start with scale first and find ways [ ]
We ve been there before, or we ve known students who have been there: the student that arrives on campus, looks at the library, and isn t sure where to begin or whether they belong. The building itself is imposing. The volume of materials is vast to sort through. I remember being so intimidated by the reference librarians [ ]
One of the biggest challenges for libraries telling their story is that the library means something different depending on who s in the room. For a student, it s a place to study and a staff full of people who want them to succeed. For a faculty member, it might be the invisible infrastructure that delivers electronic [ ]
When I started blogging, I was in library school. I continued to blog into my first librarian position and into my first managerial role. I shifted away from rough-draft public thinking and into more formal presentations and service work as I moved further into administration. For one I was learning a new organizational culture and [ ]
AI doesn t create the knowledge gap, but it has made it harder to ignore. The people most likely to turn to AI for information are often the same people least equipped to evaluate what it returns. This isn t a literacy problem that better prompting skills can solve. It s an epistemic inequality problem, and AI has [ ]
There s something genuinely strange about this moment for libraries. The tools that seem most likely to make us obsolete are also the ones that most clearly reveal what we were doing all along. More information is available than ever before, synthesized, immediate, apparently authoritative. And yet the questions that matter most are only getting harder [ ]
There are two camps in most AI conversations, and by now you probably know which one is yours. In one camp: the enthusiasts, the builders, the people who are busy using the technology so regularly that they barely have time to read and reflect on the critiques. In the other: the scholars and critics who [ ]