Librarianship “at a Crossroads”: Navigating AI, Critique, and Labor (Part 2)

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

Posted on August 5, 2026 in Blog Posts

Maxwell Gray

Welcome to the second half of our exchange with Chip McAuley and Ed Sanchez. (Read the first half of our exchange in Part 1.) Together, they served as the cochairs of the ALA AI Policy Working Group, which developed the new document to guide the use of AI in libraries (“Guidance”) adopted by the ALA Council at the 2026 Annual Conference earlier this summer. Chip is Reference Librarian in the Hamilton Township Public Library in New Jersey, and Ed is Head of Library IT in Raynor Library at Marquette University in Wisconsin.

In the first part of our exchange, Chip discussed how anxieties about work and automation are shaping how some library workers are approaching (and maybe resisting) AI in this moment, and Ed wondered about the timeliness of collective bargaining in response to AI utilitarianism and efficiency in libraries and their parent organizations.

Relatedly, I noticed that labor is the subject of a part of the new Guidance document that didn’t appear in the draft version shared with ALA members for feedback, but that did appear in the final version adopted by the ALA Council, seemingly in response to feedback from ALA members. In this part of the interview, I asked Chip and Ed:

• Based on your experience coleading the Working Group, how did labor emerge as a topic or problem over the course of the document’s preparation, and what is your sense of how we are approaching AI in libraries in light of the value and dignity of human work and workers (both for library workers and for library patrons)? How can we protect library work and workers from devaluation in the context of budget reductions and vendor products that may easily be implemented to replace human labor in library services and workflows?

Lastly, I wanted to ask a more meta-question in response to the new Guidance document about how we as a profession are approaching AI in libraries at this moment. The document represents guidance on AI use in libraries from ALA and ALA members in terms of professional values and decision points. I wondered how the document may have appeared differently if it also reflected direct feedback from library patrons.

• Based on your experience at and beyond the Working Group, what is your sense of the values and desires of patrons for AI use in libraries, and where may patron values and desires guide and orient us as a profession? How are we navigating AI use between library values and patron values (or is this framing in terms of various library and patron values misleading)? How may the problem of “where we are headed” change when “we” purposefully includes both library workers and library patrons, and the ways these groups are in community and solidarity together, and, at the same time, often interrupt and disorient each other in valuable, critical ways?

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Chip McAuley

Labor was always intended to be part of the final document. It remains my central concern regarding AI and librarianship. In fact, it first came up at the 2025 Annual Conference in Philadelphia during a discussion with the ALA Council when we were getting feedback on the initial work coming out of the ALA Information Technology Advisory Committee. While the document went through different drafts, we tried to integrate it more and then came to the conclusion, following feedback and our initial instincts, to reemphasize the labor section as we originally intended.

Part of the reason labor is vital to include in the Guidance is that we are at a point in the evolution of AI and librarianship where the approach to AI in libraries is, in many ways, nascent. We hope that the Guidance will help influence library workers to focus all related decisions in terms of labor and AI to emphasize human labor and dignity over a private-sector model of pure efficiency for profit or simply for the sake of efficiency. Librarianship is an innately human endeavor—from both the patron and professional perspectives. A library worker using a tool that helps enhance patron service would, in my opinion, be considered the most philosophically and ethically coherent approach to any adoption of AI in library operations. The Guidance is meant to give libraries a human-centered foundation to build upon as they create their internal and external policies regarding AI.

The bottom line is that, regardless of shrinking budgets or vendor products that may be able to automate some aspects of library operations, the field of librarianship must agree that an inherent, core value (both ethically and philosophically) is an ironclad commitment that AI should never be used to replace a library worker. If a library adopts AI in operations, it should only do so under the aegis of that vendor product being used as a tool by the library worker. People who have and will devote themselves to the field need to make sure that we are using the tools and that they are not using us. Some would argue that the tools are already using us in terms of how industry is attempting to mainstream and integrate AI so quickly in the private and consumer sectors. How we approach AI and labor is going to be the defining aspect of artificial intelligence and librarianship—and indeed, society in general—now and into the future.

How do we protect library workers from being automated out of existence? First, as a field, we need to commit ethically to the concept of the dignity of human work and of library workers. We emphasize librarianship as the inherently human endeavor it is and must always be. After that, with the emphasis on efficiency and tightening budgets being what it is, there will very likely need to be formal labor protections that come as a result of collective bargaining and guarantees in contracts. It comes down to: just because something can be done in terms of adopting different aspects of a technology, should it be done? Commit philosophically as a field to library workers, and that will mean that this inherently human philosophical stance influences all the rest of the work that needs to be done to protect labor.

At the intersection of all this is the ecosystem of library workers and library patrons. We are in a service profession. We are here, exclusively, to serve the patrons. With regard to AI, this means meeting somewhere in the middle, with both viewpoints helping to guide the other. For instance, a public library must be responsive to the needs of the community it serves. This means that different communities will respond in different ways to how and whether AI is used at the library. There will be an absolute need for AI literacy for everyone. This puts libraries in the unique position to help guide ethical AI use, so that patrons are fully educated on not only the use but also the potential impact of the use, in a manner similar to how information literacy is shared today. The informed use of AI, as with any other technology, will be key to all of this.

Each section of librarianship will need to approach the issue of patron engagement with AI in a somewhat different way, while still being based on the same core philosophy. For instance, K–12 and colleges are going to have a number of issues related to AI that public libraries will not. Public libraries will be more focused on teaching AI literacy and helping patrons navigate the tools that they wish to learn and use, particularly those that come into widespread adoption and those that may become necessary for jobs and the remaining viable participants in the economy.

It’s important for everyone to remember that, at this point, AI adoption and use is a choice. If AI integration continues at this pace, that may not remain the case. When patrons and library workers are grounded in the same basic philosophy of the dignity of all human work and the idea of using AI as a tool to enhance that work rather than replace it, we are in a much more beneficial place for everyone across all sectors.

Ed Sanchez

From the outset, the Working Group prioritized human labor over capital, human agency over artificial intelligence and automation, and people over tools. While there is evidence of AI-related job loss across multiple sectors of the workforce, there was no indication that AI efficiencies are being widely adopted in technical services departments of Working Group libraries, nor did we see any data available on AI-related layoffs in Working Group libraries or across US libraries in general. In this vacuum, the Working Group proposed a preemptive moratorium on AI-related layoffs of library workers despite the power differential mentioned earlier, which might make enforcement of this moratorium unlikely.

Ubiquitous in the routines of daily life and educational systems and increasingly part of our daily decision-making processes, AI is everywhere, but it is not value neutral. Like all products being sold to us, it takes on the values of its creators: profit, time to market, and adoption. This, in turn, raises the question: what anthropological view of humanity is at work in the relatively few but very powerful private companies reaping the benefits of AI development, and does that view align with any notion of the common good?

Because of the ubiquity of AI, many libraries expressed the urgency for policy development guidance and a framework for evaluating AI in their own settings. Of primary concern were the labor issues and the related importance of professional development with respect to AI. This refers not only to the ability of library workers to understand and explain AI to patrons (AI literacy) but also to support for field-level communication, such as the sharing of AI adoption/refusal experiences via institutional or regional AI task forces, conferences, webinars, and one-on-one conversations with other library workers across the United States. In other words, the benefits of AI needn’t result in job loss—how about better working conditions!

The final question underscores the deep cognitive impact of AI in our culture and posits a distinction between library worker values and patron values, which in some respects are based on each other and their particular communities, but also run across our common identity as human beings. How may AI impact an 80-year-old library user for better or worse? Or a preteen? And would their expressed values be different from the profession’s?

I think the values-based recommendations in the AI Guidance document—human agency, oversight, judgment, responsibility, and the common good—together with the protections of intellectual freedom and data privacy, address the values and needs of both groups, but the degree to which these protections can apply, where library use is involved, depends less on the public in these two cases and more on library workers. This isn’t to say that solidarity across both populations isn’t necessary; it is, and I think many groups are asking themselves as they learn more about AI: Now that I know, what can I do?

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