Month: August 2025

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.