Librarianship “at a Crossroads”: Navigating AI, Critique, and Labor (Part 1)

An exchange with the cochairs of the ALA AI Policy Working Group

Posted on August 3, 2026 in Blog Posts

Maxwell Gray

Last fall, the ACRL Board of Directors approved a guiding framework for AI competencies for library workers. In the academic library where I work, this set of competencies has represented a core frame of reference for individuals and groups to discern where and how to engage with AI and AI literacy in academic librarianship, including (sometimes) where and how to refuse or resist AI in the library and in the profession.

Zooming out, in its review of top trends in academic libraries for 2026, the ACRL Research Planning and Review Committee reports that, at the same time that AI is becoming increasingly integrated in libraries and librarianship, a “countermovement rejecting AI adoption and use has surfaced,” opposing poorly designed and opaque AI tools, and refocusing on the unethical aspects of AI implementation and use.

How is the profession navigating these various trends of AI engagement, adoption, and refusal? Are they in competition with each other, or do they complement each other, and how so? At the same time, how are forces from outside the profession, like library budgets and vendors, shaping how the profession is approaching AI in libraries?

To help me think deeper about this moment and where we may be headed, I invited the cochairs of the ALA AI Policy Working Group to share their perspectives from their engagement in the process of developing a new document to guide the use of AI in libraries (“Guidance”), which was adopted by the ALA Council at the 2026 Annual Conference earlier this summer. Chip McAuley is Reference Librarian in the Hamilton Township Public Library in New Jersey, and Ed Sanchez is Head of Library IT in Raynor Library at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Over the course of a week in the beginning of July, I asked Chip and Ed two sets of questions about how we are navigating AI in libraries in this moment. Below is the first half of our exchange, beginning with my questions:

• Based on your experience preparing the new Guidance document with the other members of the Working Group and receiving feedback on the document from other ALA members, what is your sense of where we as a profession are in terms of these various trends of AI engagement, adoption, and refusal? Are most of us approaching AI from some shared perspective, and if so, what is this perspective and approach? Or what different perspectives are we approaching AI from, and how are we as a profession navigating these different perspectives and approaches?

• I’m also interested in how we in libraries are navigating local financial contexts and relationships with vendors. How is financial austerity shaping how we are approaching AI in libraries? How are vendor products and their specific affordances shaping how we are able (and not able) to approach AI in libraries? In other words, what is your sense of how outside forces like budget reductions and specific vendor products and processes are shaping how we are approaching AI in libraries?

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Chip McAuley

When it comes to artificial intelligence, librarianship is really at a crossroads. My feeling is that there is no consensus in the field when it comes to AI and AI-related issues. Library workers’ feelings run the gamut. If I were to choose one word to describe the relationship librarianship has toward AI—and this goes even for the AI enthusiasts—then the word would be skepticism.

I say skepticism because, whether a library worker feels that positively or negatively about developments in AI, everyone wants to know how exactly AI is going to impact us and our lives. And no one really knows—they are futurecasting. Beyond the philosophical issues—which are critically important—there is also the very practical aspect of this skepticism, which is that people want to keep their jobs and want to make sure they are not replaced by AI.

This skepticism also takes the form of people reflecting on AI and how it relates to some key areas of human concern, including the environment, labor, ethics, copyright, intellectual property in general, and many others. Different library workers are coming from different places on this, and that really does make for a profession that probably has as many views of artificial intelligence as there are library workers.

Higher education, in particular, has had to move fast in dealing with many aspects of the issues that arise with AI, mostly involving LLMs, but also pivoting very quickly in developing education-enhancing uses of the technology, which would be a best practice. This goes for schools in general. Public libraries are in a place to provide AI literacy to the community and AI access to members of the public. Should AI development continue at the rate it appears to be, AI will impact most jobs in some way. The public will need equitable access to those resources. The heart of the skepticism in the profession is the unseen aspect of AI development in libraries and society.

When it comes to budget issues and vendors in relation to AI in libraries today, your relationship with one is determined by the other. But this, then, goes right back to a library deciding whether or not to adopt AI and to what extent—which could be a financial issue, or a philosophical issue. These things are happening in the same moment and are impacting each other.

Ed Sanchez

Some library workers are struggling to rationalize their visceral response to what AI is and represents. Is it ethical to use a product, an artifact of an emerging industry that claims authority over all intellectual property in the name of Fair Use? I read Kate Crawford, Karen Hao, and other authors for background info on AI, and almost fell out of my chair upon reading that OpenAI had ingested the LibGen database of pirated scholarly work. If I learned anything early on as cochair of the Working Group, it was that we would not be writing a mandate for the adoption of AI, nor the rejection of it. Rather, what library workers were asking for was a rationale to do either, depending on their particular situation.

The Working Group was asked on several occasions for a simple dos-and-don’ts list. Our compromise was the section “Guidance on Use,” yet even that was difficult, given the range of library types and settings. As the AI adoption landscape becomes clearer in the coming months, perhaps a “12 Rules of AI in Libraries” document based on the Guidelines could be written. I’m certain it would be a welcome addition to the literature, particularly for small libraries with little to no time to review our AI Guidance document and forge an AI policy for themselves.

Basing the Guidance on the ALA’s Core Values, not a new or competing set of principles (the Luciano Floridi-based ethical guidelines had to go into the Appendix), opened up the evaluation of AI adoption/rejection within a framework familiar to most library workers. Moreover, there are deep issues concerning human judgment, professional expertise, intellectual freedom, privacy, and public trust that remain central to discussions about AI adoption.

Of chief concern is that what we value most as information professionals—our capacity for judgment, wisdom, dialogue, and empathy within the information literacy space—will be replaced by algorithms and unfiltered data. Is the value of our work as information professionals with decades of earned public trust being overshadowed by cheap texts generated for a fraction of the cost of materials created under modern publishing standards? Our humanity should not be exhausted by intelligence alone. Nor should our capacity to care for others be exhausted by efficiency alone.

Efficiency leads us to the issues surrounding budget reductions. As in most organizations housed within parent organizations, what is feasible is largely predicated on what is in the budget. Efficiencies created by AI within the larger organization, whether in payroll or cost savings, can create expectations for similar results within smaller units like the library, and there can be tremendous top-down pressure to comply with cost-cutting measures like layoffs. It’s difficult to know whether this is a moment for collective bargaining or not. The same potential power asymmetry can apply to vendor/library relations, with costs for AI enhancements being passed on to libraries whether they are used or not. Addressing this power differential at the association level on behalf of library workers makes a lot of sense, but I have yet to see movement in this area.

➡️ Read Part 2 of this exchange

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