Reclaiming our Seat at the Table

This is the final post in a series based directly on my keynote at the EBSCO User Group Meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, in which I explore what it means to reclaim information sovereignty by defining “open” through the lens of AI. Just as I did for my WOLFcon Plenary and iPres Keynote, I want to bring the substance of that talk into written form so that the conversation can continue -- and also, I had to cut a TON of content from the talk that I think is very relevant to the conversation as a whole. You can explore the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Reclaiming Information Sovereignty

• Part 2: The Forcing Function

• Part 3: The Ideological Storm

• Part 4: A Shared Reality

• Part 5: Governance and the Commons

• Part 6: Reclaiming our Seat at the Table (this post)

We began this series with my confessions of struggle, skepticism, and sheer exhaustion. But as I look at the issues facing society, I’ve realized that giving up isn’t an option.

Here are the three things I urge our profession to do in order to reclaim its own intellectual sovereignty:

1. Move into ‘The Medium Place.’ For too long, our profession has built silos that treat technologists as a support service rather than intellectual partners. I am asking you to dismantle these dynamics by ending the isolation within our own organizations. Building a digital commons requires more than just hiring IT staff; it requires us to build cultural competency in technology. We cannot simply adopt the vocabulary of computer science while ignoring what makes the technology work. Instead, approach technologists not with a support ticket, but with a seat at the table. Consider asking your systems administrator or developer to chat over coffee because you want to understand more about them, how they got on their career path, and what it is that they work on. Engage them. Learn their language with the same rigor you apply to your own. If you don’t understand a concept, do the hard work of researching it yourself before you ask for an explanation. Doing so fosters the mutual trust necessary for a robust digital commons.

2. Reclaim the philosophy of our values. This is the answer to my second confession—the skepticism I felt when I first heard Bohyun talk about AI. I didn’t have the foundation to judge it fairly. But after spending some time with the technology, I see I had the toolkit to understand it all along. I’ve always been frustrated that Library School teaches us how to do the work but rarely why it matters on a civilizational scale. We need to rethink the profession’s curriculum so that we read the great philosophers who argued for understanding truth, knowledge, and epistemology—how we define what is actually true and how we know it. Even better, take the time to understand how different societies learn and preserve their cultures—I’m trying to do that right now by studying non-Western traditions of stewardship, which prioritize relational accountability and community permissions over extractive consumption. You cannot architect a new knowledge infrastructure if you haven’t studied the foundations of knowledge itself.

3. Embrace AI to get to Human Reclamation. Finally, I’ve realized that I cannot keep living under the old rules because the world has already changed. To survive the demographic storm and the loss of institutional knowledge, I’ve embraced AI to reclaim my own humanity. I wrote the majority of this keynote using voice typing; I use Speechify and News Over Audio to ‘read’ while walking my dog; I use the Zoom AI Companion to capture the endless to-do lists I am too overwhelmed to write down myself. All of this has been made possible by AI and serves as a personal lifeboat, carving out the space needed to remain present for my family and my community. But while AI may be my personal lifeboat, we as a profession must use this reclaimed capacity to build the collective shore. And we must do this with our eyes wide open. I am acutely aware of the paradox here: I am relying on a lifeboat built by the very forces threatening to flood our ecosystem. But we must lean into them because, as Sun Tzu famously advised, we must ‘know thy enemy.’

Within our profession, there is a dangerous tendency to ignore AI out of a sense of moral purity, but we are being left behind in the process. So I’m advocating for the profession to develop a deeper, more practical understanding of these systems. We cannot architect a future that protects our values if we don’t understand the machinery currently destroying them. If we are to heed Hannah Arendt’s warning and prevent our institutions from becoming an ‘infrastructure of denial,’ we must set up an account and play with the tools so that we can be the auditors of the black-box technology corporations are creating.

I encourage you to use AI to automate a manual task—whether that is asking an LLM to proofread your writing or having it summarize a dense 50-page PDF you already read but can’t quite remember (or maybe that’s just me?). Only by using these fallible tools can we develop the empathy to understand why our users are succumbing to them. But more importantly, through using them, we will gain the expertise needed to lead our communities back to a shared reality.

Last month, Cecilia Preston reminded me that in 1876, the founders of the ALA met in Philadelphia to solve “the educational problems of the country.” They weren’t just minding the books; they were attempting to architect the infrastructure a democracy needs to survive. Today, the “Frontier Labs” are trying to architect a world of engagement and profit, all while pretending it is a new infrastructure for knowledge. Don’t let them do that.

Your role—our role—is to provide an alternative AI infrastructure. Using Ostrom’s principles, we can come together to define what open means in this new age. We need to define clear boundaries around the content we steward to protect it from bad-faith harvesting. We need to help communities identify how they want their content used on the open internet. And we need to build nested enterprises that link local curation to a global, non-commercial network that we trust. The intent of these big technology corporations is to capture our attention and never let it go; our intent is to nurture the independent mind so that it can improve society. Like in 1876, we are once again the heroes democracy needs to survive.

I am asking you, the members of our profession to do this work so that we can reclaim our seat at the table. Not as a group of people minding the books, but as the architects of information infrastructure that belongs to the people.

It’s time to start building.