Beyond the Job Title: Digital Literacy Librarian

A library tech job interview with Bronte Chiang

Posted on June 16, 2025 in Job Profiles

Core to LibTech Insights’s mission is demystifying the broad and dynamic field of tech librarianship in higher ed. In this series, we interview a librarian every month to learn a little more about their position. As library tech jobs proliferate, they sometimes come with unfamiliar, jargony, or intimidating titles. We want to go beyond the title and look at the responsibilities, skills, and joys that make up the job. We hope this series will increase your knowledge of library tech jobs and skills and offer you greater insight into the working lives of your colleagues.

For this installment, we spoke to Bronte Chiang to learn more about her job as a Digital Literacy Librarian. Check out our archive of job profiles. 💫

---

What is your job title and responsibilities?

As the Digital Literacy Librarian at Libraries and Cultural Resources (LCR) at the University of Calgary, my work centers on encouraging responsible and reflective engagement with technology among faculty and students. Whether aiding students in navigating AI tools or designing workshops on bias and information systems, I aim to create space for critical reflection on how we relate to the technologies and knowledge systems we engage with. My research and instruction emphasize the importance of positionality and bias in digital literacy. These reflections open up broader conversations about applying critical thinking skills to research and information systems.

A significant part of my portfolio involves AI literacy. I work within the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Ethics, Literacy and Integrity (CAIELI), a student-focused initiative promoting ethical and effective AI use in higher education. This includes creating thoughtful responses to artificial intelligence trends, like supporting an AI literacy microcredential, consulting with faculty and students on AI integration in research and teaching, and teaching AI-focused library workshops.

In addition to my digital literacy portfolio, I serve as a STEM liaison librarian. These disciplines sometimes view themselves as objective, making them ideal spaces to hold conversations about relationality and bias in scientific inquiry. I also co-chair LCR’s Indigenous Strategies Working Group, which advances the University of Calgary’s Indigenous Strategy, ii’taa’poh’to’p. Our work focuses on embedding Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Doing, Connecting, and Being into LCR’s practices, spaces, and relationships.

---

🔥 Stay up-to-date with LibTech Insights by signing up for our free newsletter. Just one weekly email with our new blog posts, top tech news stories, and other bonus content. Check out some posts from our archive:

• Five Choice Interviews with Digital Archivists and Curators
• Virtual Reality and the Academic Library: Getting Started
• Understanding Bias in AI through Guardrails

---

Can you describe your career trajectory leading up to this position?

I began at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool (then SLAIS) in 2018, where I completed the First Nations Curriculum Concentration (FNCC) as part of my MLIS. This program grounded my studies in Indigenous information systems and initiatives. During this time, I worked as a student librarian at Xwi7xwa Library, the only Indigenous branch of an academic library in Canada. After graduating with my MLIS, I joined the Indigenous Initiatives team at UBC’s Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT).

These experiences deeply influenced my understanding of knowledge stewardship and the principles of reciprocity, relationality, and humility. In a field that often privileges expertise and authority, learning to approach knowledge work with humility was transformative and continues to shape how I teach, collaborate, and lead.

I came to the University of Calgary community as a librarian in December 2021. Although I now work in a role not explicitly focused on Indigenous knowledge systems, these values remain central to my practice. Decolonization is not the work of a single role or department; it is a shared responsibility. My work continues to be guided by the belief that digital literacy is not just about technical fluency, but about encouraging ethical, inclusive, and relational approaches to learning and information.

What does the field of digital literacy look like these days?

Digital literacy today is more than technical digital skills; it focuses on stewardship. It’s about helping learners become not just competent users of technology, but critical, ethical, and reflective participants in digital life. It’s looking at the intersections of the skills we expect in information literacy, digital literacy, and AI literacy. It focuses on critical thinking skills and the idea of trust. What is making students trust what they’re reading, finding, and learning? We are working to help learners understand how technology shapes our world, our identities, and our relationships with knowledge.

It’s no longer sufficient to teach students how to search databases or evaluate a website. Librarians are teaching deeper questions that examine how knowledge is created, who benefits, who is excluded, and why students should trust what they are reading. To have these conversations, participatory learning environments, in consultations or classrooms, must be created where students can examine their own positionality and engage with technology in an ethical way.

In this way, digital literacy becomes a site of transformation for both students and institutions. It invites us to reimagine our roles as educators, to question the neutrality of our tools, and to build more ethical digital futures.

For people interested in embracing a decolonial approach to their work in the library tech space, what’s a resource you would recommend?

The “What I Learned in Class Today” research project out of UBC is a fantastic example of technology being used with care and consideration to record Indigenous voices and foster opportunities of dialogue. For digital-focused librarians, the project showcases Indigenous perspectives through interview archives, student films, and discussion guides, and models how libraries can honor community authority. For researchers, this project has published their research process to demonstrate a process that takes time and doesn’t always fit the academic timeline. It has resources for instruction librarians to learn about infusing their instruction with critical reflection on relationality, power, and ethical stewardship regarding research methods and information that students come across while researching, and how to hold those conversations with care into a classroom. And the stories from the students in the project are powerful. It is a great demonstration of an Indigenous-focused digital interface that puts Indigenous data sovereignty at the forefront. 

And if someone is looking for a fiction book for the summer, my favourite fiction read by an Indigenous author is Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline.

Your position seems very dynamic, on the pulse of a lot of big and sometimes tentative changes. How do you keep up with changes in the field?

For me, staying current isn’t about tracking every headline; it’s about relational engagement with my campus and professional community to understand what will work best for them. Rather than acting as a lone expert, I embed myself in a network of educators, librarians, technologists, and students having an ongoing dialogue. This allows me to take a community-centered approach. For instance, I treat AI tools not just as tools but as something to be constantly curious about. By experimenting regularly, I observe how these systems evolve and how their affordances, limitations, and ethical considerations intersect with pedagogy. I also listen to what other librarians are doing with it, ask librarians, teachers, and students how they are using AI or what they are curious about, and then that informs what outputs my position focuses on.

This process is iterative and reflective. Through coffee chats, workshops, and informal conversations, I stay responsive in a field defined by complexity and possibility. Participation in professional listservs, online programming like LibTech Insights offers, and scholarly blogs further extends my community outward. In other words, staying current isn’t an individual pursuit of “keeping up,” but a reciprocal, ongoing exchange within my community.

This post was written with the help of ChatGPT, prompting the generative AI to act as an editor for clarity and conciseness. All content was reviewed, edited, and refined by Bronte Chiang, who bears full responsibility for its accuracy and originality.

Related Posts