Reimagining Leadership: Fritz Tackles AI by Transforming Library Leadership

Amy Stalker reviews a new book on fixing long-standing leadership problems

Posted on September 23, 2026 in Featured Reviews

As a part of our efforts to support scholarly work on the ethical and creative usage of technology in libraries and higher education, Choice highlights new and upcoming titles on this urgent topic through long-form reviews. In doing so, we hope to emphasize the importance of these issues and promising resources for addressing them. The following review, written by Amy Stalker, considers AI and Digital Leadership: Transforming Libraries, Archives, and Museums for the Future (Bloomsbury, 2026), and also appears in the October 2026 issue of Choice and online. We hope these reviews will introduce new titles to our audience for their personal or institutional collections.

---

By Amy Stalker

Fritz, Angela I. AI and digital leadership: transforming libraries, archives, and museums for the future. Bloomsbury Library Unlimited, 2025. 160p bibl index ISBN 9781538191071, $95.00; ISBN 9781538191088 pbk, $46.95; ISBN 9781538191095 ebook, $42.25.

Angela Fritz brings the perspective of a scholar-practitioner deeply engaged with the digital future of cultural heritage work. An Assistant Professor at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa, where she teaches digital preservation and archives, Fritz has also held national service roles connected to digital archives advocacy and AI literacy. She is the author of Sustainable Enterprise Strategies for Optimizing Digital Stewardship: A Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (2021). That background gives weight to this concise but forceful call for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) to meet the generative AI moment with more than reactive policies or piecemeal experimentation. For Fritz, accelerated technological change exposes the limits of long-standing leadership practices that can no longer support the ethical, adaptive, and people-centered work GLAMs now require. Her argument is both aspirational and pragmatic: if GLAMs are to remain trusted cultural institutions, they must rethink leadership culture, staff development, and collective advocacy with intention, urgency, and a willingness to reshape the field from within.

The opening chapter establishes one of the book’s most important claims: digital leadership cannot be understood as the simple transfer of traditional leadership habits into digital spaces, nor as a narrow ability to adopt emerging technologies for efficiency or modernization. Instead, Fritz argues for a more collective and collaborative understanding of leadership, one that can operate across levels of an institution rather than only from formal administrative positions. She is especially persuasive in showing how inherited leadership norms, if left unexamined, can become obstacles to substantive organizational change and digital transformation. That framing carries through the rest of the book as she connects ethical AI, organizational redesign, people-centered practice, and advocacy to the need for GLAMs to work beyond institutional silos.

---

🔥 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:

• Invisible Sources: Transparency and Attribution as Foundations of AI Literacy Instruction
• Building the Imagination Lab: A Manifesto for Libraries in the Intelligence Age
• Beyond the Job Title: Cataloging Systems and Linked Data Strategist

📣 Do you teach AI literacy? We want to hear from you. Check out our call for papers, “AI Literacy Across Disciplines.”

---

Across five compact chapters, Fritz moves from digital leadership to ethical AI, organizational redesign, people-centered practice, and advocacy networks. This structure is effective because the chapters build on one another without treating these topics as isolated concerns. AI is not presented only as a technical development, a policy problem, or an efficiency tool. Instead, Fritz frames it as a sector-wide leadership and stewardship challenge for the cultural heritage field. By addressing galleries, libraries, archives, and museums as part of a shared professional ecosystem, she speaks to a specialized field while still making a larger argument about institutional relevance, public trust, and professional responsibility.

The result is a direct and accessible book that is broad in scope without feeling diffuse. Fritz’s most compelling contribution is her insistence that the current generative AI moment is not merely a disruption to be managed, but an opportunity to reconsider the structures, habits, and assumptions that have already left many GLAMs vulnerable. The book feels especially useful because Fritz situates AI within the everyday realities of GLAM work rather than treating it as a trend separate from existing professional obligations. Her approach recognizes that cultural heritage organizations cannot address these challenges through technology adoption alone. They must also examine how decisions are made, how staff are supported, how expertise is distributed, and how institutions collaborate across professional and organizational boundaries.

One of the book’s most compelling qualities is its combination of earnest professional commitment and a willingness to name uncomfortable structural realities within the field. Fritz does not present AI as a problem that can be solved with a new policy, tool, or training module. Instead, she uses this moment to illuminate longer-standing issues within the cultural heritage sector, including outdated leadership norms, institutional silos, and uneven capacity for collaboration across roles and levels of authority. That makes the book a useful contribution to AI-related professional literature: it extends the conversation rather than simply rehearsing familiar concerns. Fritz’s larger point is that AI literacy and digital stewardship must be understood as leadership, workforce, and advocacy concerns, not as responsibilities that can be isolated within technical roles or temporary initiatives.

The book’s brevity ultimately strengthens its argument. Readers looking for a step-by-step implementation guide may want more explicit tools, checklists, or sector-specific instructions, but that is not the primary purpose of this title. Its value lies in offering a concise, research-supported framework that helps formal and informal leaders begin thinking and planning within their own institutional contexts. Supported by research, case studies, and professional reports, Fritz gives her audience a credible and accessible starting point for the leadership and organizational changes that GLAM environments must consider if they are to navigate generative AI with ethical clarity, public relevance, and a renewed sense of collective purpose.

AI and Digital Leadership is a worthwhile addition to academic library collections and to collections across the GLAM sector. It is especially appropriate for programs supporting library and information science, archival studies, museum studies, digital humanities, cultural heritage management, public history, and nonprofit leadership. Collection development librarians should consider it a recommended purchase for institutions preparing students, practitioners, supervisors, and administrators to think critically about AI’s impact on cultural heritage work. Fritz writes with urgency, but her argument remains accessible to readers throughout the field. The title is especially valuable for those committed to responsible stewardship that keeps people, ethics, and collective responsibility at the center of institutional change. In an age increasingly shaped by generative AI, Fritz offers a timely and persuasive reminder that the future of GLAM work will depend not only on new technologies, but also on the organizational values and leadership practices built to guide their use.

Summing up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and practitioners.

Subject: Reference – Library & Information Sciences

Related Posts