A Passion For 'Puters

I’m back from my combined trip to Nashville and trip to the Lake of the Ozarks vacation. I did more email triage than I would have liked while officially “vacationing”, but still have more email to deal with as I’m coming back than I’m happy with…

I started my vacation way back on Thursday the 14th by driving to my parent’s house in Jefferson City, Missouri after work in order to spend the night there so we could get up and head into Nashville on Friday. My brother joined us and we took off. We had a blast – we ate at a wonderful restaurant Friday night (404 Kitchen) and stayed in a cute little condo through AirBnB after we were done. We got up on Saturday and went for breakfast, then boot shopping – and yes, I got a lovely pair of hand-tooled cowgirl boots – and then on a quick tour of the city before a very quick lunch, then a rush back to the condo to change and head out to the Dolly Broadway Show. We got into our seats with 15 minutes to spare and spent the next few hours thoroughly entertained. The show is in Nashville in order to work out some kinks before it starts a Broadway run in NYC in 2026. There were some small kinks, but nothing that affected our enjoyment of the show! Sunday morning we got up, wished Mom and Dad a happy 56th Anniversary and, headed out of town early. We stopped at a Cracker Barrel (pre-logo controversy…) for breakfast. We got home Sunday afternoon and rested!

Monday morning, I got up and after running a couple of errands, headed 40ish miles south of Jefferson City to Osage Beach where my in-laws have a house on one of the millions of little coves off the Lake of the Ozarks. I hit the grocery store on my way down and got settled in by lunchtime on Monday and started to read. I read all day and into the night until Wednesday evening, when I put down my books and went into town to meet my parents for dinner at a local Mexican restaurant. After that, I went back to the house and picked up my books and didn’t put them back down until I left just before lunch on Friday. I stopped in Sedalia for lunch at LeMaire’s where I had some excellent catfish and made it home in time on Friday to cook dinner and catch up with my husband and son. They managed to survive for over a week without me. I was impressed.

I have no pics from the Lake – there were no action shots of me reading my way through the days… I did step outside a couple of times to enjoy the sun and watch it dip below the condos across the cove, but otherwise, I read from 5:30am to 9pm for 3 days and for 1/2 the day on Mon and Fri. I worked through a number of books, not one of them, however, was my book club book that I’m supposed to be able to discuss intelligently on this coming Tuesday (tomorrow). I did get it started over lunch on Friday, so maybe I’ll be able to read enough to sound like I know what the book’s about!

Anyway, I have a crazy busy few weeks coming up, but I’ll post as I can. I am working on finishing up the AI Policy Report and am doing a webinar on this coming Wednesday on AI Basics for librarians in FL. I’m also needing to spend some time on the new tech disaster book that is due next year, but the presentations that I need to do at the upcoming MPLA conference the first week of Oct. will take priority for a bit, I think!

We are currently in a technological limbo. Some of us are actively documenting our work in order to create AI prompts that will effectively do that tedious work for us, while also waiting for our jobs to change (or worst-case-scenario disappear) as AI gets better at doing more and more of our work. My colleague Dan commented on this as I was telling him about the AI prompt I’d created while working on getting some magazine statistics together. I wrote the prompt as I did the work, until it came out right. Once I’d done that, I asked the AI to create a prompt that I can use each month to get these exact numbers and information from the identically formatted spreadsheet the vendor sends me each month. Dan noted that this process is prompting us to document workflows that should have been recorded long ago. He’s right. My final command to the AI was to create a workflow and put it and the prompt in a PDF I could share with my coworkers so that they knew how to get those numbers should I get hit by a bus – or fired by an AI employment decision*. This struck me as funny; a sort of “AI documentation paradox”.

I don’t really believe that my job is in great danger. Librarianship did not became obsolete with any of the previous technological “revolutions”. These revolutions have not, in the past, eliminated jobs as a whole even while they might eliminate specific jobs. They transform them, create new ones, and change the environment of everyone’s job, really, but they have historically never created a net loss of jobs. From the printing press to the personal computer to the Internet to Wikipedia, all of these revolutionary steps in technology have only increased employment and available jobs for humans. I don’t see much different, in the long run, with AI. What’s funny, though, is that this revolution is actually forcing us to do the sort of thing we’ve always needed to do, but never have time for (as software coders around the world can agree) – document our work. Libraries are no different – we may have organized workflows and streamlined processes, but we don’t document things any better than your average junior coder does. This kind of documentation is necessary for passing on institutional knowledge, if nothing else!

So, what we each need to decide is how we’re going to meet this AI revolution. Shall we meet it halfway, giving it the tedious, mind-numbing, annoying work that we all must do every month for our continued employment? Or shall we hide our heads in the sand and pretend that this new technology isn’t going to revolutionize** our jobs and our working environment and just continue on as we’ve been doing, until we get replaced. Not by AI, but by someone who knows how to leverage AI to better do your job.

* This is not actually anything I’m worried about right now. AI can do a lot but it cannot talk panicky librarians down from the proverbial ledge when things go wrong at their library, so my job is relatively safe for now.

** I’d say no pun intended, but it totally was intended. Completely so.

I’ve been a bit busy lately, so I haven’t been thinking out loud in my blog so much. I figured I’d stick my head out of the water (in which I’m not exactly drowning, but there may be a bit of extra flailing going on these days…) and catch everyone up on what I’m keeping myself busy with.

In chronological order:

I have a couple of AI basics type webinars planned for this fall, both of which will be based on the first chapter of the Special Library Report (formerly known as Library Technology Reports) from ALA that I’m writing right now. I will have the first webinar at the end of August, the manuscript for the report is due Oct 1 and the second webinar is in early November.

I’m also going to be presenting at both the MPLA and KLA conferences on the Neal-Schuman Technology Companion book which just came out last spring. I’ve already done one webinar based on that book, so the bones of the presentation are in place, I just need to update and refine for the particular audiences I’ll be presenting to.

As mentioned above, I’ve been busy diving *deeply* into library policy around AI as I write up a report for ALA. That manuscript is due in early October, as mentioned above, but I also have a brand-spanking-new contract to write a book about using technology in Disaster Planning with Jason Bengtson of the University of New Mexico. He’ll concentrate on the academic side of the topic while I write up the public library side. That one isn’t due until late next spring, but we’re getting going on it now so that we aren’t panic-writing as winter wraps up in 2026…

I do move from MPLA president to past-president in early October as well, so I will be handing over those duties to Erin Wahl (also of the University of New Mexico, funnily enough) and taking over the duties that Amadee Ricketts has been so capably doing over the past 18 months (which does include doing the budget for next year – not exactly in my wheelhouse, but I’ll have help!). To keep me from missing the work of the president, I’ve been appointed to two ALA committees on policy – one general policy and one technology policy – to serve for the next couple of years.

This is all, of course, adjacent to my full time job as NEKLS consultant, where we are working on all kinds of interesting projects right now as well.

Anyway, if I go back underwater and don’t stick my head up again for a while, please be understanding… 😉

It seems like a good time, just post ALA 2025, to talk about my approach to learning from conferences (and webinars and e-courses and everything else, really). I’ve been providing handouts at my recent conference sessions (and using them at others’ sessions myself) that give space for attendees to note 1) 3 take-aways from the session 2) 3 people they know in the session that they can contact after for conversation about the session topic and 3) 1 – 3 actions that they will take when they get back to work.

The first item is really just reflecting on the session and deciding what was most important to you, from the information presented. It’s a chance to do a minute of reflection after each session you attend. The second item is all about accountability and is important, but not to this blog post, so we’ll move right on to the third item, which is the action item(s). You can enter one to three things that you will do when you get back to the office that can go directly in your to-do list and that will support the learning you’ve done in the session.

Between the ability to reflect, even if for a moment, on the stuff you’ve learned and to distill the really important *for you* stuff from it and then the decision to make (at least) one action back at home that will make use of what you’ve learned, you have a recipe for not just remembering, but activating the cool stuff you pick up at conferences or in webinars. The handout is attached and is freely available for you to use either at your sessions that you lead or in sessions that you attend as a learner – either way, it’s something that can be useful and can really help get the information being presented into your organization in a useful way!

Having recently read the book The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes, and having recently read similar books (such as Attention Span by Gloria Mark and Shift by Ethan Kross) I’ve been thinking about attention and the currency we use when we “pay” attention and if that should mean that we need to have an attention budget. This sort of ties in with the idea that productivity isn’t really about getting more stuff done, but about getting the right stuff done so that you have time for other things, besides work, in your life. How you “budget” your attention relates directly to how effectively productive you are.

I’m sure we’ve all had days where we have been super busy but at the end of the day, realized we really hadn’t gotten anything of any value done. Those days happen occasionally, and that’s just life, I think, but if they happen *every day*, that becomes a problem. Your goal in becoming more productive can’t be checking off more boxes or producing more mental widgets, it has to be moving your goals forward in a tangible way every day.

Attention, unfortunately, is a finite resource – you can pay attention for only so long before your battery drains and you need to recharge it. This is why having a plan for your day (doing the stuff of productivity gurus everywhere) can be useful – it’s a budget for your attention. It’s also why having recharging times (as my colleague Sharon Morris puts it, refreshes throughout the day) is so important to being able to budget your attention evenly throughout the day. Staring out the window for 20 minutes is part of your work on keeping your attention budget in line! Who knew?

The other issue that comes up in my reading on attention is the connection between your ability to stick to your attention budget and your emotions. Properly regulated emotions help you control where your attention goes. Just as with your monetary budget, going on retail therapy to soothe emotions can wreck your finances; having an emotional meltdown can wreck your attentional budget as well. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you always have to be positive and optimistic to do the best, most attentionally focused work. You just have to be able to manage the emotions you have while you are focusing on your work – and that takes those refreshes and resets and recharging times to properly do that!

So, in all the reading I’ve been doing about attention and how it’s stolen from us, how our emotions can affect how we “pay” attention to things, and how productivity requires recharging and refreshing our brains so that we refill our attentional balances, what I’ve come up with is…

Take your breaks! Take walks in the middle of the day! Stare out the window and contemplate the nature of trees for a few minutes *every day*! In order to do your best work and be the most productive you can be (while you are working, which should leave you with time to be unproductive with your family and friends – don’t forget that!), take time to recharge. If you are a practitioner of mindfulness meditation, spend some time in meditation throughout the day, resetting your brain and getting yourself back into having lots of attention to spend. This will help not only your attentional budgets as you work, but your emotional regulation mechanisms might be improved as well and you might find it easier to deal with the little annoyances that crop up throughout the day without melting down or blowing your top…

David Lee King, a library tech guy I’ve worked with over the years, just put up a great post on AI Policies over at his blog (check it out at https://davidleeking.com/ai-policies-for-libraries-some-observations/). I’m doing a bit of research on the topic myself, for a possible new project, and one of the things that I have done in response to the lack of info out there about how libraries should approach AI policy making is to try to walk the walk, as they say. Right now, the only thing I’ve gotten done is a policy that I’ve put in my Library Juice Academy class syllabi that outlines expectations around AI use in class. The one I am using in my Project Management class, which is currently in session, says:

AI Policy

          This course acknowledges the usefulness, at times, of Generative AI. The only times AI will be used by the instructor is to create case studies or scenarios for projects and assignments to be completed by the class. Gen AI will not be used in any way for grading or providing feedback to students. Students are welcome to use AI as a tool to help brainstorm, identify risks, consider different ways to manage time, money, resources, etc. Students are not welcome to use Gen AI to write, wholesale, project plans or discussion posts or other text based assignments in this class. If there are questions about the suitability of Gen AI use in this class, please contact the instructor at robin.hastings@gmail.com.

I’ve decided to take a middle road here – something that allows use of AI for things it does well (I could see students using a chatbot to brainstorm project risks or to come up with ideas for how to arrange resources in some way, things like that) and does not allow use of AI for actual writing of the homework documents wholesale. It can be useful, but at least for my class, it can’t take on the role of actual person managing a project. The students have to do that! I’m going to put a similar paragraph in my other class syllabi with small changes for the specific class needs, too. I just have to ride that line of being specific enough to be clear about what is and isn’t allowed and being so specific that I give them what amounts to instructions on what to use AI on in their work for my class…

Whichever way you personally lean, some sort of guidance on how staff, administrators, patrons, and other library adjacent folks (vendors? community partners?) are expected to use – or not use – AI will be necessary as more and more of our patrons and vendors and whatnot dip their toes in the waters of Artificial Intelligence!

I got a newsletter the other day that made me think (as I suppose is the purpose of most of these newsletters, right?). In it, Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes about using your voice to clarify and help produce thinking in ways that silent contemplation might not achieve. Essentially, she claims that talking to yourself helps you think clearly and understand what it is you are doing/what needs to be done more effectively than silent consideration of your to-do list or schedule. I’m all for talking to myself – I’m a pretty decent conversationalist when my audience is just me and I’ve begun doing this myself over the last few months for different purposes that I will attempt to codify and regularize in my daily routine. Mostly, what I’ve been doing is talking through my processes that I do irregularly or not very often (yearly, for example) so that I have a record of what it is I do when next I need to perform those processes. These range from setting up and managing a new director retreat for Kansas library directors to working through uploading new episodes of Ninjio to our LMS for our NEKLS librarians.

I use Tana to record and then transcribe those ramblings and I have a custom process that reads the transcription and pulls out enumerated steps for the process I’m describing as I do it. These steps are then used the next time I do that process to help me remember what it is I need to do – basically I’m self-documenting as I go.

However, I also tend to use voice memos when I’m otherwise busy (driving, walking, reading) to remember quick things and to set up future to-dos. On my way back from the Leadership Institute a couple of weeks ago, I dictated a few notes of things I wanted to remember and follow up on based on some coaching/mentoring conversations I’d had with a few of the fellows at the Institute. Those points were then transcribed to my Tana inbox, where I stuck a Task supertag on them and gave them a due date and they’ll pop back up in my daily calendar/to-do list on the appropriate date in a week or two.

Since reading Anne-Laure’s blog post about using your voice to help with thinking, however, I intend to do even more voice memos, process transcriptions, and general thinking aloud while my phone sits next to me, faithfully recording every um, uh, like, and so that I say (and I say those a lot – sorry about that to anyone who has to listen to me think aloud…). You might want to give it a try too – even if you don’t have a Tana subscription, many chatbots can transcribe voice (and some are purpose built for it, like Otter.ai) and give you a very good set of words to use in your work!

And yes, I did tap my Tana Capture voice memo button on the home screen of my phone and dictate in a “hey, write a blog post about voice capture and Anne-Laure’s newsletter” with some other thoughts about how the post might go. And those thoughts are now immortalized (ha!) on my blog for posterity… 😉

Just finished reading a book by Jenny Wood (Wild Courage) that suggests a technique for clarifying thought and producing a project plan quickly and efficiently called “pencil sharpening”. Her idea is that as you get an assignment or start on a project, you sit down in the first 24 hours and write out a one-page or so “plan of attack”. How will you start the work?, what are your metrics?, who will be important stakeholders?, how long will it take to do this work?, etc. As I was reading through her description of this technique she uses to get work off the ground, I was reminded of a sort of similar technique called Chair Flying.

Chair flying is something that some pilots do to prepare for flights. It involves visualization of the flight, essentially. You consider what you need to have when you take off, what kind of atmospheric conditions you might encounter, traffic at your end point airport, and so on. My version of chair flying is one of my first stops when I embark on a new project and it just involves me turning to my trusty pen and legal pad, writing the name of the project across the top and then visualizing what needs to happen to get to “success” at the end of the project. What kinds of info/materials/resources do I need? What sort of roadblocks might I encounter? What are my deliverables as I create the project and when might those be reasonably expected? I basically work through, in my head, what the project will entail and list out everything that pops into my head while I do that. I prefer to do this on paper, but there is no reason this couldn’t be done with Google Docs and a keyboard instead.

The same flexibility seems to be in place for pencil sharpening. Jenny says that she does it on a Google doc, but it can be done on paper if you’d like. I think that, despite the fact that I prefer to chair fly on paper, my first attempts at pencil sharpening will be on a Google Doc because I imagine that my doc that I come up with will be the heart of my project plan and it might as well be born digital because it will need to become digital at some point anyway.

Those two techniques, put together (have a chair flying section in your pencil sharpening document, even if you don’t actually refer to it as chair flying) would make for a really strong project plan right out of the gate – and the fact that the pencil sharpening doc is recommended to be produced in the first 24 hours after receiving the work/project helps to combat procrastination and that panicked feeling you get when you realize a big project is due in two days and you have hardly even started on it…

One of the classes I teach is a Library Support Staff Certification (LSSC) module on Technology for folks who are going for the certification. In the most recent class I taught, one that has just finished, I encountered a couple of different attitudes toward AI that I found interesting and wanted to explore in writing – so here we are.

First off, one person was uncomfortable with the use of copyrighted materials on AI training and wanted me to remove AI mentions from the assignment to find and discuss how emerging tech might be used in libraries in the future. My response is, as a published author with 5 copyrighted books to my name along with articles and contributed chapters and whatnot, that I really want people (for a wide definition of people in this case, I agree) to read and learn from what I write. It’s why I go to the trouble (it’s not for the money, trust me). I can’t see much difference in an AI ingesting my text to learn from and a library staffer checking my book out from their professional collection to learn from. Other than the couple of dollars in royalties I got from the library’s purchase of my book, I don’t see any material difference in who or what is making use of my writing in order to learn things.

That being said, I am one person with one take on the subject and there are numerous other, equally valid takes that can be had on this subject as well, so I’m definitely not speaking for all authors here! Just myself.

To be honest, while I’m less concerned about the copyright issue for myself, I am concerned about the environmental impact of all this computing power being put to the task of coming up with catchy titles for presentations… but I’m of the opinion that green energy is nearly unstoppable at this point, despite efforts being made in that direction, and we’ll eventually get the right balance of renewable energy sources and less energy-hungry chips. Again, just my personal belief, yours may differ.

So while AI is a thing that is happening in the world and, therefore, in libraries, one thing I’d like to see more of is strong AI policy around it’s use in our organizations. Most libraries seem to be holding off, but putting something in place now that at least puts boundaries around personally identifying information (PII) being uploaded to a chatbot or not using it as a substitute for a search engine without thoroughly checking sources or not editing whatever comes out of the black box thoroughly (see “white genocide in South Africa and Grok” for more info on that – https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/opinion/grok-ai-musk-x-south-africa.html?unlocked_article_code=1.IU8.1ur3.ZoMkQPUgkZmz&smid=url-share for a gift article link).

Blanket prohibitions on its use (as Wikipedia endured in its early years) is not going to be useful or helpful for our patrons. They use it, we need to understand how to help them use it more effectively and SAFELY. Those patrons may find things like the Goblin Tools suite of tiny chatbot prompts that help do things like break down large “to-do” items into smaller steps or check the tone of a body of writing or help people estimate the time and work involved in doing something to be really useful and it is our job to help them find it and use it SAFELY.

I’m in the process of writing an AI policy for my classes – what isn’t allowed, what I won’t do with AI (grade or provide feedback, for example), and what might be useful ways to use AI in my particular classes (still ruminating on whether to add that bit in or not, to be honest) – to put in the syllabus so that we all start off with a common baseline of what is and isn’t appropriate for AI use in class. I strongly suggest libraries do the same – come up with some policies that will guide staff and patrons on how to best use this new technology without forbidding it entirely.