Four New Works of Library Technology Scholarship You Should Read 

Standout articles on AI, user experience, and more!

Posted on March 4, 2026 in Blog Posts

It has been a while since we have shone a spotlight on some of our recent reads in library tech scholarship, and not from want of material. Today, we are making amends for this lapse by highlighting four new journal articles we think you should read (or at least skim their abstracts). AI is, of course, a hot topic, but we provide some balance to our offerings by also featuring works on academic podcasts and content strategy. All warrant a read, so make a pot of coffee and let’s go. 

If you want more great reading recs, subscribe to the LibTech Insights newsletter. As a bonus, each week we include five links to under-the-radar articles from the open web on libraries, technology, and education.  

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🛑 “Academic Journals’ AI Policies Fail to Curb the Surge in AI-Assisted Academic Writing,” Yongyuan He and Yi Bu (PNAS) 

Typically, it isn’t a good move to begin a list of new library tech articles with a piece that isn’t about libraries. However, this piece from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is one I wish all librarians and academics would read.

Academics spend a lot of time worrying about students’ undisclosed AI use and maybe not enough time thinking about other scholars’ undisclosed AI use and its implications. Using a battery of tests, this study finds that, despite widespread AI-use policies, scientific journals “have failed to meaningfully curb or transparently govern the use of AI in scientific writing.”  

The findings of this paper merit wide-ranging discussion in higher ed to ensure ethical research standards. Beyond these immediate findings, the paper also includes some interesting data about the specific AI tools scholars disclose using in their publications and the purposes to which they are deployed. An essential read. 

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🎧 “Podcasting as Open Access: A Review and Discussion of Potential Impact on Scholarly Communication and Promotion,” Allison Symulevich et al. (Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication) 

Perhaps working at an organization that publishes an award-winning academic-inflected podcast has skewed my view (shameless promotion—I know), but I firmly believe that academics should consider podcasts and other forms of new media, such as Substack and YouTube, as channels for scholarly communication. Sidestepping the usual publication timeline allows knowledgeable and responsible experts to intervene in our accelerating information environment. 

This recent piece by four librarians at the University of South Florida discusses how librarians can help store and disseminate faculty-created academic podcasts, making them freely available to listeners and capturing relevant data for scholars, such as international impact. For libraries interested in working with faculty to create and publish podcasts, this article serves as an indispensable guide, outlining the hazy area podcasts occupy within scholarly communication, laying out the technical and labor requirements for such a project, and highlighting the measurable impacts of academic podcasts. 

👨‍🏫 “Hacking AI Chatbots for Critical AI Literacy in the Library,” Heather Ford et al. (Journal of Australian Library and Information Association) 

Over the past couple of years, librarians have become more comfortable with the concept of AI literacy and have started integrating it into their teaching, but I think the profession is still working out the most effective ways to do so.  

Librarians at the University of Technology Sydney propose approaching AI literacy through AI errors. In other words, instead of starting AI literacy by teaching what AI can do, start by showing where it can go wrong. The point isn’t to show that AI is bad or always erroneous, but to use errors to show how AI actually works and thinks. 

Many people have a rather limited understanding of how generative AI works, with some people reducing it to the predictive text suggestions in iMessage. I think it behooves everyone to have a more sophisticated understanding, and this team of researchers proposes a framework and several activities for teaching students how AI works and why it sometimes doesn’t. 

♟️ “Designing Content for Impact: A Content Strategy Approach for Libraries & Beyond,” Amy Hannah Deschenes (Weave: Journal of Library User Experience) 

On LibTech Insights, we have run a number of posts on content strategy over the years. If it were a straightforward topic, we would need only one, but content strategy involves many parts and must constantly evolve. (Indeed, the hot topic right now in marketing is how to adapt content to the rise of “zero-click” searches thanks to Google’s AI summaries.) In this article, a team of librarians at the Harvard Library outlines its easy, five-step process for content strategy: “documenting the content’s audience, goal, value proposition, validation, and measurement.” 

Using a library website and an email newsletter as case studies, this article makes clear how libraries and their users can benefit from adopting a content strategy framework. Be sure to scroll to the end of the article to read the appendixes, which provide more examples of this framework in action. 

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