Reflecting on Reflecting, After Thirty Years

Public Services Librarianship and Accelerationist Technology

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash

Librarianship is about to be transformed by a revolutionary computing technology that will put unprecedented searching capacities in the hands of library users, threatening to upend the traditional relationship between librarians and researchers.

Welcome to 1994.

Rapid technological changes came at us then, with Internet protocols like FTP, WAIS, Gopher, and Usenet to be learned, while maintaining expertise in the print environment. We continued to be responsible for the enormous collections of print indexing and abstracting services, along with required knowledge of classification systems and their deficiencies. We constantly adapted to the “networked environment,” whether through LANs (local area networks), and with the rapid shift to the graphical web with the advent of Mosaic (the first graphical browser).

If we previously learned information structure and database searching protocols through classic Dialog or BRS searching principles, we also transitioned to the new generation of “user-friendly” library catalogs and integrated library systems that produced, hypothetically, more productive searching experiences for students, faculty, and community members—without the need for librarians as expert guides in many cases. We promoted the principles of what was then called “end-user searching,” based on layers of easy-to-understand interfaces and “guided searches” for the “end-user” to search independently. Clinics, consolations, and workshops on searching became common offerings, even as the move toward “user-friendliness” accelerated.

The rapid mental shifts required because of multiple interfaces, and constant vendor system enhancements, produced an ongoing unsettledness. There was often either a clinging to familiar print-environment mental models, or a wholesale adaptation to the dissolving boundaries between databases with peer-reviewed sources, and the uncertain digital world of Google and other search engines, with their mutability and lack of clear signposts and markers for searching and indicators of information quality. The information landscape lost its well-known markers as these changes accelerated, with various forms of digital publishing, electronic datasets, and early experiments with digitization of archival materials. Clear markers and signposts were often only temporary in this morphing landscape. The need for ongoing updates became ever-pressing.

The uncertainty introduced then in public services librarianship has achieved only brief moments of stability in the digital world, with evolving professional roles continuing into the present. The global advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence, and its promise to make searching, finding, and “evaluating”, surpassingly easy, amplifies the unsettledness. Now, our students readily gather summaries of previous research limited only by the ingenuity of the prompts that they develop, and by the overarching understandings of scholarly inquiry. Lacking that ingenuity and that knowledge, searchers may employ cognitive shortcuts that become habitual, and reduce the capacity for curiosity, an awareness of the information ecosystem and its odd nooks and crannies, and the ability to generate questions that guide further exploration and learning. Our future challenge requires imagining how to adapt, yet again, to a transformed information environment.

Quotes for Reflection

I offer here quotes from leaders in the library and information technology fields from the decade of the 1990s that identity the ongoing influences of the technological revolution first felt then, with their suggestiveness about pathways forward.

I. “There’s Just Not Enough Time to Process”

— Systems Librarian, mid-1990s

This anonymous quote comes from Lori Arp’s RQ article, “Reflecting on Reflecting,” from 1995, in which she gave some typical –and illuminating--examples of responses from librarians in different functional roles under the waves of technological change coming at them. These include quotes and paraphrases from administrators, reference librarians, technologists, and others, about their attempts to “keep up” and process what they were experiencing. The quotes came from interactions at conferences with vendors, from workshops on new information products or sales pitches and trainings from vendors, and in conversations with colleagues. The uneasy shift between the ordered print environment of traditional libraries and the digital revolution was underway.

Arp was a leader in the ACRL Instruction Section (she brought about its renaming, in fact), and led the movement away for the older “bibliographic instruction” nomenclature toward the more general “instruction/teaching” model based on cognitive psychology and conceptual learning. Because of this background, she called for a shift in mindset in the profession that encompasses all the phases of Kolb’s “experiential learning” theory—from direct experience to reflective observation to abstract conceptualization, and then cycling through active experimentation. back to direct experience again.

According to Arp, this more encompassing approach to the confusing and chaotic changes then occurring in technology affecting librarians’ roles, and their ability to adapt, was necessary to avoid getting caught in the morass of unreflective, unprocessed direct experience. She identified the need for reflection and “thinking about thinking”—actually, a metacognitive mindset—as necessary in order for the profession to process the rapid changes then occurring, where librarians were straddling the older print environment but were expected to become agile in the digital one.

That a systems librarian of that time would concede that “there’s just not enough time to process” is surely a sign of the rupture then occurring that continues into the present.

Learning to cope with, and transcend, that great shift, was the calling of Ann Lipow of the University of California/Berkeley Libraries.

II. “Librarians must become comfortable with the idea that they are not the sole intermediaries between users and information.”

— Ann Lipow, Crossing the Internet Threshold, 1993

“There is something deeply reassuring about the physical presence of books. Their weight, their texture, their smell—they anchor us in a world of knowledge that is tactile and enduring.”—

— Ann Lipow; from Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow - UNT Digital Library

Long known as one of key figures in moving the library profession into the online future from the print-only past, Ann Lipow’s influence is intergenerational. She was an early Internet trainer, and an innovator in educating reference and instruction librarians—actually the entire profession—to think beyond place-bound conceptions of the library as only a repository. She urged reimagining service alongside the library user wherever they were geographically. She was instrumental in shaping the first generation of “virtual reference” experimentation, in challenging public service librarians to think of their roles beyond priestly interpreters of bibliographic mysteries for the uninitiated. Lipow “lived the future” with the rapid changes brought about by the Internet, early generation online catalogs, first-generation networked databases, and all the new Internet protocols that librarians were then learning.

For Lipow, the necessary mental adjustments for librarians involved facing role redefinition, and becoming metacognitive in the way that Arp recommended in her RQ article—in learning to reflect on, and not just react to, the rapid shifts in technology then occurring. Even as a pioneering Internet trainer and consultant, however, she identified the mental models tied to the print environment: the card catalog and archival finding tools with their tangibility; and the visual evidence of accumulated knowledge, versus the fleeting and mutable online world. Lipow pointed to the signposts of guide words, subject headings and indexing terms (even with their limitations), and the ability to touch and see these cues, and feel mastery over that more contained environment.

But for Lipow, the imperative to move into the virtual world without these anchors created opportunities for new professionally integrated roles in interpreting and guiding, and forging new collaborative relationships, and professional identities, alongside students, faculty, and community members in an online world. With Lipow’s guidance, we have learned to accept that digital world for its uncertainty, along with constant need to “process” and create provisional meanings to understand it.

When she retired from UC Berkeley in 1991, Lipow started the Library Solutions Institute as a training institute, then expanded it into the Library Solutions Institute and Press, drawing on training materials first offered at an ALA conference and publishing other notable books that marked milestones in the going transition of the field toward a reconceptualization of professional roles. These included Crossing the Internet Threshold (co-authored with Roy Tennant); Building Partnerships: Computing and Library Professionals; Rethinking Reference in Academic Libraries; and the Virtual Reference Librarians Handbook. Lipow’s influence was crucial in encouraging the shift in mindset—the metacognitive, reflective shift—necessary to become adept in the digital environment in its constant mutability, even while retaining some professional anchors in the print world.

By the end of the decade of the 1990s, however, the accelerating drive for ease and facility of searching came to the fore. Roy Tennant’s famous quote, first published in 2001, marks another inflection point.

III. “You know you want it. Or you know someone who does. One search box and a button to search a variety of sources, with results collated for easy review. Go ahead, give in—after all, isn’t it true that only librarians like to search? Everyone else likes to find.”

— Roy Tennant, “Digital Libraries: Cross-Database Search: One- Stop Shopping,” Library Journal, October 2001

Tennant’s quote—surely one of the most famous in the library field—is often reduced to “librarians like to search, users like to find.” But the essential drive toward the Googlization phenomenon, with “one search box” and rapidly produced results, is so accepted by now that it remains unquestioned, its own orthodoxy.

Ease of searching and “finding” became the standard for all user-centered design of databases and their interfaces and search protocols. Reproducing the universal “single search box” and turning it into an “answer machine” was a harbinger of the new chatbots and their ability to reproduced neatly collated results, with continuing personalized interactions to refine searches much more sophisticated than Google’s ever less satisfactory “black box” characteristics based on its own algorithm. Tennant’s work, and that of others, led to perennial usability testing, and improvements in online catalog interfaces, to mimic search engines, because of patron expectations and increasing impatience with “unfriendly” opaque interfaces and library jargon.

The suggestion in the famous Tennant quote that librarians divide sharply from their clients in the affective domain, in enjoying searching, circles back to Lipow’s statement about the emerging disintermediation that librarians were experiencing, with user-centered design in the Internet making users more independent without reference librarians’ intervention. Lipow called for giving up the exclusionary interpretive role for public service librarians, and entering into a sensemaking and partnering role with students and faculty in guiding them through the morass and complexity of the Internet concealed by the “black box” of the facile search window. That partnering, sensemaking role, for Lipow, would elevate librarians’ intellectual life to create further professional opportunities.

Even as a colleague and fellow-advocate for Internet facility with Lipow, Tennant with his famous quote emphasizes a different role—a more disintermediated role for public service librarians, involved more in user-centered design and perhaps less with the personal touch and the affective domain of the classic reference interview.

That queries of various types should all be reduced to quick searches and “finds” without further refinements and a growing understanding of the information ecosystem itself—in multiple formats and repositories, in informal and formal channels, and with various levels of credibility and appropriateness—is the perennial temptation of the user-centered design phase for online catalogs and databases first launched in the 1990s.

It is now an ingrained habit, the expectations for ease of searching, without the essential expectations from faculty in courses, and librarians in research consultations and even reference interviews, to guide the development of better questions and more informed understanding of the information landscape itself.

“Quick hits” in producing search results, without the sense-making and provisional understandings of that information landscape, enable convenience—but not necessarily capacities for critical inquiry. In fact, four studies show that the “Google effect” reduces memory capacity in searchers, where sustained memory about information content itself is reduced while searching, because the search engine itself becomes the off-loaded transactive memory for the searcher. Finding information becomes ridiculously easy, but the cognitive shortcuts involved create an opportunity cost. That cost looms in the loss of long-term memory in the search about a line of inquiry, or in any information search conducted over time.

The “Googlization” effect has just gone to accelerationist extremes with Google’s own Google A.I. mode, as Stephen Fitzpatrick describes. The world’s still most frequently used search engine now contains within it a seamlessly embedded A.I. “agent” that packages information in a way that eliminates initial screening and review of results for the searcher. As Fitzpatrick notes,

Rather than providing haphazard results for students to evaluate, AI Mode instantly delivers a curated overview with pre-vetted citations and a synthesized summary. While Google has used AI Overview blurbs for months, AI-powered search will now become the default mode.

Fitzpatrick notes, rightly, that future teaching will need to focus, more urgently, on deep reading, contextual understanding, nuanced judgment, and developing of arguments challenging the seamlessly produced search results from Google AI mode and other generative AI “agents” (which are still not the emerging “agentive AI” now in testing, which involves autonomous decision-making AI systems). .

Users do indeed “like to find,” and now we face the reality of many cognitive shortcuts made possible by the advent of A.I.-mode “enablers” (chatbots and embedded search agents). These agents which may be helpful in accelerating research if used appropriately, but also, like the “one search box” itself, may produce “satisficing” without the needed reflection that Arp noted even among her colleagues in the early 1990s. “There’s no time to process” has become a perennial challenge, that must be counteracted with a metacognitive professional ethos.

Where does the richness of the reference interview or research consultation go, when “satisficing” from facile interfaces becomes the guiding motivation, perhaps for both librarians and their clients? What happens to the tacit knowledge of the reference or subject librarian when searchers rely totally on A.I. “agents”? Can that tacit knowledge be renewed or recaptured elsewhere?

How do librarians work with faculty in designing curricula (assignments, experiences) to ensure the core academic abilities are still developed in the face of “frictionless” AI-packaged search results? How can they develop a new professionally reflective stance toward creating conditions for students to engage in the necessary “cognitive struggles” that Fitzpatrick urges, the “desirable difficulties” that are core to learning?

Enlarging that metacognitive ethos that would address such questions, combined with relationship-building, was the work of another advanced thinker and leader in the field, Patti Iannuzzi, for whom the integration of librarians into the life of the campus was necessary, no matter the latest technologies, interface designs, or passing vendor spiels. For Iannuzzi, the library should be a site of knowledge creation, of knowledge-in-becoming.

IV. “The library is not just a repository—it’s a laboratory. A place where students and faculty can engage with information, technology, and each other to create new knowledge.”

— Patti Iannuzzi, “The Library as Laboratory,” Presentation at the Reinvention Center Conference, College Park, Maryland, November 2002

Patti Iannuzzi’s perspective enlarged the mindset begun by Ann Lipow on the role shift for librarians, from the custodial or bibliographer function to that of the active liaison and campus partner. One of her most cited articles encouraged librarians to “invert their thinking” and look outward to the needs of their campuses, in a strategic way, instead of inwardly focusing on the perfections of library workflow processes.

Iannuzzi’s perspective on campus and community partnerships coalesces much of the previous thinking among leaders in the profession. Iannuzzi’s signature themes included the move outward into the life of the campus; thinking strategically with partners; transcending the ephemeral “training” model for instruction into one addressing scholarly inquiry and curriculum design; deeply understanding faculty culture; and activating the library’s resources in a generative way. This metacognitive mindset also becomes relational by forging communities of inquiry, involving both faculty and librarians, who create new knowledge together.

Iannuzzi was a forerunner of what a current leader in scholarly development, Steven Mintz, has referred to as “collaborative knowledge construction,” with the Wikipedia ethos, at the campus level, with reciprocal vetting and editing obligations and content contributions. Searching as “consumers,” through the “quick takes” of information searching, matters ever less, and obligations as members of epistemic communities, matters much more.

Future-Facing Questions

“No time to process” because of technology-driven change has posed serious opportunity costs for the field over three decades, even as the leaders quoted here have laid down markers for changes in professional roles, and even with the tensions within those leaders’ vantage points. Arp, Lipow, Tennant, and Iannuzzi lived through inflection points, and led others through them, while pointing the profession into the future, with continuing questions and opportunities.

Among those questions are: how proficient should frontline public service or reference librarians be with information technology beyond the basic features of searching varying databases? How conversant with a wide range of research tools (citation management software, presentation software, data analytics tools, visualization software) should most librarians be in order to become integrated into the workflows and research practices of their academic departments and community members? How adaptable should public service librarians be in engaging with ever-changing expectations for what has been called “IT fluency,” writ large?

Some of these questions have become perennial. But they also herald a newly urgent set of questions in what we can now describe as another, but much faster, “accelerationist technology” period.

• How does the public services librarian role shift in the rapidly evolving age of Generative Artificial Intelligence? how will public-facing librarians change their role again when students, faculty, and community members are taking the previous process of disintermediation and independent information searching with the “one search box,” or Tennant’s cross-database searching, to another level of “information packaging” for themselves? Does this frictionless “information packaging” created by chatbots or other agents reduce the “hard cognitive labor” involved in learning even the fundamental processes of scholarly inquiry? What interpretive information guidance is needed in this emerging environment?

• How can the older model of “tiered” reference service, which grew up in the 1990s and pioneered by Massey-Burzio, be adapted to the emerging A.I.-driven environment in which librarians will be working? Experimentation with automated and chatbot-like answering services, “expert systems,” FAQs, and other approaches has been in place for years. How will reference librarians adapt the much more “intelligent” A.I. agents in working alongside students and faculty, as Lipow suggested?

• How can subject and liaison librarians position their expertise into the workflows of scholars when the latter are discovering that A.I. agents greatly speed up their own investigations, in writing articles, books, and grant proposals? The suite of tools and workflow processes identified across all phases of the lifecycle of research, identified through interviews with faculty and graduate students at the University of Minnesota over fifteen years ago, created a map of professional roles for public service and liaison librarians, and may potentially provide markers for them even as research processes change yet again with A.I. tools.

• What new forms of professional development do librarians need to experience in order to become more proficient in the new arena of information-seeking and packaging enabled by A.I. agents? Leading scholar of professional learning Anne Webster-Wright has found that “authentic professional learning” is not best enabled by one-off workshops and single events, or even by short courses. Based on interviews with professionals in a variety of fields, she advocates for a repertoire of professionally-driven activities in daily, ongoing practices. These include individual readings, viewings, experiments, guided conversations with colleagues, action-research and “proof-of-concept” projects, and reality- and assessment-testing of provisional hypotheses with the feedback provided by the work environment itself.

How can the profession move away from the familiar workshop and “training” model into a more reflective, metacognitive, workplace-based one that leads to individual and group transformation? Webster-Wright imagines professions developing a “professional practice landscape” for themselves in which they are the agents responsible for their own learning. How can A.I. agents be guides and metacognitive amplifiers in that professional practice landscape?

These questions, and many others, will multiply in the coming years. Librarians are caught in the inexorable march of technological changes whose consequences are not yet clearly understood. It may be the greatest “reflecting on reflecting” act yet to occur for the profession—in living between the catastrophized predictions about A.I replacing human agency, and whole professions, and the messianic forecasts about A.I. changing all professional life for the better, in removing what is routine in professional work, in the interest of higher cognitive goals, to be defined through further reflection in a continuing cycle.

Our ongoing reflections will be needed to navigate between these responses. We will need to draw on the best thinking of previous leaders in the field in retaining our core professional ethos, and reimagine new roles for ourselves, with a renewed sense of agency, in an uncertain future.

In a recent article, Robert Pondiscio, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recalls the influence of E.D. Hirsch and his insistence upon a knowledge-based approach to learning. That approach calls for sustained cognitive effort and building up knowledge over time. Pondiscio warns about the automating of the thinking skills that, in fact, creates an illusion of learning. He calls for “intellectual vigilance” against that illusion, and suggests that we not be stampeded into extreme reactions for or against A.I., but notes that “the civic mission of education is not to make students efficient consumers of information but to form judicious minds—citizens who can weigh evidence, detect bias, and recognize coherence or nonsense when they see it.”

Librarians will perform a signal contribution to epistemic institutions in reflecting on, and developing, a renewed “civic mission” for themselves in the midst of the new acceleration.

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This article was AI-enhanced only through identification of the quotes included, by using the CoPilot chatbot.