May 2025 – A Passion For 'Puters

Of Goblins, Grok, and Getting AI Right in Libraries

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.

Structure

An image of the mountains as seen from the YMCA of the Rockies meeting room in Estes Park, Colorado.

I recently spent a week in the lovely Colorado mountains, attending the MPLA Leadership Institute as a mentor to the 30 new and mid-career librarians who came to learn all about leadership from Sharon Morris and Jamie LaRue (who has a blog post/column about his experience at that event as well!).

Between that, and the book I just finished reading, Driven To Distraction at Work (that’s a rare metadata fail from Worldcat – the book is not as pictured in the record there, it’s really about productivity, not Java….) I had some thoughts about productivity, structure, and leadership.

First, I’ve often said that you can’t just wholesale take a productivity process, bolt it into your life and use it effectively. Productivity/time management/workflow management has to be personalized to your particular brain and how your work presents itself to you – trying to fit someone else’s system into your life is rarely successful in the long run. That being said, productivity systems are, in essence, structures that you use to bring order to your work and life. Those structures that you create, whether they are cobbled together from a number of different systems as mine is (hello GTD, and Pomodoro, and Action Powered Productivity, and probably a few more) or use a single system as a base from which you produce your own productivity structure, must be personal and adapted to fit your learning, working, and thinking styles.

A scaffold-like structure with productivity and time management tools bolted on among the gears and struts of the structure. — Image created with Nightcafe AI

This structure that we create – whether it’s deliberate after much reading and experimenting, or accidentally lucked onto while watching other people in the workplace – is the foundation of our ability to work and to lead. One of the conversations I had with fellows at the Institute involved overwhelming amounts of work with underwhelming amounts of direction from above. I helped them set up a structure based on a calendar (their “calendar of truth” that everything goes into so that they can trust how they choose to allocate their time without fearing they are missing things) that gave them some structure to the massive amount of work they were looking at over the next couple of months and that will hopefully evolve into a way that these folks can ensure they are getting the important stuff done. This feeds into leadership in a number of ways…

One way is that leaders need to be reliable – if you say you’ll do something, you need to follow through and that’s hard to do if you jotted that “thing you need to do” on a post-it note somewhere and then promptly lost it. Leaders need structures that take in information, put it where it needs to be and (most importantly!!), surfaces it when it’s needed so that it can be acted upon. Most people use a calendar to surface things that need to be done, but others use task lists or Gantt charts or other time management tools that ensure they see what they need to do in a timely manner.

Another way is that leaders need to be constantly learning and adapting what they learn to their organizations. Having a structure where notes go that are easy to pull out and use later is vital to not only learning, but making use of those things that are learned. Bullet journals and digital note taking tools like Obsidian or OneNote are useful if you trust that everything you need to remember or know will be filed away in that note-keeping tool in a way that can bring it up quickly when you need it.

Finally, leaders need the space to dream – to visualize the future and strategize for their organizations and themselves in order to move forward. The structure of productivity can give leaders a platform from which they can safely consider the future and how they plan to get themselves and their organizations there. There is no single source of this platform, in my opinion, it’s an amalgam of tools and techniques that allow leaders the chance to take in information, process it, store it, and ultimately, use it when it’s relevant.