Emily Zerrenner

All we’re doing is reading today.

Sometimes, the simplest instruction turns out to be the best.

A few weeks ago, I taught two classes that turned out so well that I’m still riding that wave as I write this now. The professor and I’s entire class plan was to bring down carts of books related to the class topic, have the students pick something they were interested in, and then read for about an hour. This was the first class after spring break, to ease them back into their studies.

I gave the barest minimum of library instruction at the beginning of class; I showed the students the library website, where I searched for books, and how to limit to the physical books we have in the library. I also took this opportunity to show them our new shelf map which attempts to simulate the serendipity of being up in the stacks. (Sidenote: our technology librarian, Chris, is a wizard for making tools like this.) Their professor then stepped in to explain what we were doing today, which was to find something that caught your eye and give it your (reading) attention for an hour. It was fine if they didn’t stick to the same book the entire time; they were encouraged to switch them out and read something else if they wanted to.

The professor and I also read for an hour with the students. We couldn’t very well ask them to do something and say it was important without modelling it, right? I had the book Algospeak by Adam Aleksic, but their professor pulled multiple books and switched them out throughout the class. I played lo-fi video game music in the background. And you know what? It worked so well.

None of the students in those two classes were on their phones or their laptops for a significant amount of time in that period. By the end of both classes, 7 students had voluntarily checked out 8 books. The one who checked out two had never checked out a book before in her college career. These were not necessarily related to class projects or papers, they just chose a book that captured their interest and read. We shared in groups and in a class setting.

When their professor asked how the experience felt, they had some amazing takeaways that we can sometimes only dream of actually teaching and passing on:

“Being friendly with yourself when reading dense things.”
- This student further talked about having to read passages multiple times (who hasn’t been there?) or looking up certain words they were unfamiliar with.
“Looking up stuff referenced in the book revitalized my want to keep reading.”
- This student had chosen a book from 2004. It referenced a country that would run out of water by 2015, and they were curious enough to go see what they’d done about the water crisis, since this country still exists.
  - They were doing lateral reading without knowing it!
- They also talked about using the index – which, to be clear, I did not talk about at all.

They also said that it was hard. Around the 15- or 20-minute mark, they said their attention started to waver, and I’ll be honest – mine does too. All of our attention spans have been decimated by the tiny computer in our pockets, and this deliberate class session to prioritize reading is trying to help remedy that.

The professor I did these sessions with happens to be the chair of their department, so after the fact, they emailed all the other faculty about how well it went. This led to another day of reading class, this time for a First Year Seminar. These students were definitely a little less focused than my 200- and 300-levels, but even so, some of them expressed how excited they were that class was going to be focused on reading. The professor and I did another debrief with students afterward, and at least two students from that class went on to check out the books they were reading.

A week or so after, the chair of the department caught me to chat in the library to let me know that one of those students in that First Year Seminar actually changed her major to Environmental Studies largely based on the book she got to check out in that class. That’s the kind of thing a librarian fantasizes about! Talk about getting books into their readers’ hands.

Clearly, it was worth it for us to take a step back and let curiosity guide some structured reading time. I know it’s hard to carve out time like that when everything feels like it needs to hurtle forward, especially with classes that have to cover so much content in a semester. It did take a lot of time on my part to both create the book lists for the classes and go up and pull them myself, though if I were really strapped for time, I could have passed that off to a student worker. (I just like getting my hands on real books whenever I get the chance.)

If it’s at all possible, though, I think the benefits speak for themselves. Books were checked out, students were reading, and it led to more library sessions and other initiatives. For instance, for finals season, we are hosting a “silent reading club” every Wednesday from 2-4pm until the semester ends in mid-May. I am excited to see this continue into other disciplines next fall semester, since all the other liaison librarians were just as jazzed as I was about the success of these sessions.

Let me know if you try it and how it works for you!

A year of reading: 6 books from 2025

Is it too late for a round-up post of the books I read this past year? I don’t really think so (or care, actually); I’d love to talk about a few of the 56 books I read this year. This has been my highest reading year since I was probably a middle schooler, and I’m really pleased with the mixture of work-related books versus the fiction I read for pleasure. I’ll focus on those work-related ones, since this is a blog about academic librarianship, after all, but I’ll throw a few novels in there for good measure (and maybe for you academic librarians to add them to your leisure reading collections?).

During 2025, I spent a lot of time co-authoring a book chapter that addresses Generative AI, libraries, and social justice. I also did a few presentations that addressed GenAI, inevitability narratives, and critical interrogation of the technology. This informed most of my work-related reads, which included two of my seven 5-star reads of 2025: Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin and The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna.

Imagination is a book I’m going to continue coming back to again and again as a guiding principle for my life as a whole, but most certainly in the career I lead as a librarian. It’s a short read, only 192 pages, but those 192 pages make you remember that imagination as an essential part of social change; there has to be a vision, and you have to dare to have that vision despite what the world is telling you. Imagination is not something that should be relegated to the very young or to the creative professions; it can and should lead us to questions, to answers, to a dream that seems impossible but maybe it’s not. The main voices we are hearing right now are the “techno-utopianists,” those lauding things like Generative AI as what’s going to save us. Save who? From what? This quote from the book continues to resonate with me: “Meanwhile, the dominant story told by techno-utopianists to lull us to sleep is that the world’s major crises can be solved with even more investment in their energy-intensive digital dreams, which usually also means less public participation and collective dreaming” (108).

The AI Con is an accessible rebuke to the AI hype that we’ve been seeing not only all around the librarianship profession, but in the world at large. Bender and Hanna do a wonderful job of laying everything out in an approachable format. Bender has been writing in this field for a long time; she was a co-author on the instrumental conference proceeding, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” from 2021. Hanna is the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). Bender and Hanna run the podcast, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. If you’re going to read anything that addresses Generative AI, make it this book. I really appreciated that they had a section for information literacy and libraries specifically near the end of the book as well. They talk about the inherent lack of friction when you do a “search” with a chatbot LLM interface rather than using something like a database. Many of us as librarians know that friction is a good thing; it forces you to think more deeply and critically about your topic and the keywords, you might find sources that cause you to think differently, and friction will make you more likely to ask for help from the experts. This quote I think captures a lot from the book: “AI hype reduces the human condition to one of computability, quantification, and rationality” (32).

I also read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sara Wynn-Williams and Empire of AI by Karen Hao, which are both deep dives into two of the biggest tech companies and their founders: Facebook/Meta and OpenAI. Wynn-Williams’ book is very focused on her personal experience while at the Facebook company with Mark Zuckerberg, which Hao is an outsider looking in on Sam Altman and OpenAI’s many controversies over the years. Hao also makes an explicit connection between GenAI, empire, and colonialism: “they, too, seize and extract previous resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers” (I read this one on Kindle, so I don’t have a page number). Both of these books gave me a solid foundation and things to consider about these tech companies that infiltrate so much of life and the information landscape these days.

Finally, I wanted to talk about a couple of the fiction books that reminded me of how much I love the written word. The first 5-star read of my 2025 was Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, which is a beautiful pondering on what it means to be human. The premise is that Adina, born in Philadelphia, is able to contact her extraterrestrial relatives via a fax machine. She sends regular reports on how Earthlings behave and act. It’s one of those books where I had to stop after certain passages and just think and feel what I was feeling. One of my other 5-stars was Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth, which I read in a single day. It is set in the early 1990s in the Irish village of Crossmore, following main character Lucy as she navigates falling in love with her school friend Susannah in her very traditional small town. Howarth’s prose is truly beautiful and sends you on a winding emotional roller coaster (because that’s how adolescence feels). I bought this one from a local bookstore for our book club, and it is FULL of highlights and notes from me. This book too is absolutely one that I will be returning to.

What were your big books from 2025? Are there any that you’re really looking forward to reading for 2026? I am currently making my way through Critical Data Storytelling by Kate McDowell and, like most librarians, my to-read list is never ending.

EBS-No; or, a rant

A search in EBSCO’s Academic Search Ultimate to show what I’m talking about below.

Please, permit me to rant about EBSCO’s new UI for a little while. Ours changed over in August, and up until this point, I’ve been quite busy with teaching and the general chaos of the beginning of fall semester. I had time today to sit down and really lay out the issues I have. I am surprised I haven’t seen more talk about this, though it’s completely possible I just haven’t been in the spaces that it’s happening in. I cannot imagine that a single librarian who actually works with patrons was consulted in this update process – this UI is, in a word, terrible.

The lefthand sidebar, which includes options like “My dashboard” and “research tools”, makes little to no sense in its new location. These kinds of features are most often in a top bar menu, and do not nearly take up that amount of space. We can look at any kind of website, really, and find that that is the case. It used to be so in the Classic UI from EBSCO!

When you do a search in EBSCO, that left sidebar stays, which limits what we can view in the database at all. Additionally, the only sticking filters that a researcher can access without an additional click are full text, peer reviewed, a drop-down menu for date with only 4 options, and source type. To add more filters, I have to click on “all filters” which opens on the… RIGHT side??? The website convention has always been to have filters on the lefthand side, which is now taken up by things that a researcher does not need to have constant access to in such a visible way. Every non-EBSCO database that we have, which includes JSTOR, Choice Reviews, Dynamed, ProQuest databases, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science (just naming a few) adheres to the norm of having filters for a search on the left side. Even websites made for shopping design their interfaces in this way. It really gives off the impression that they made changes simply for the sake of making changes as opposed to doing it based on data, research, or convention. When you do add filters that aren’t in the chosen 4 that stick to the top of the results, you again must click into “all filters” to see what you have selected. In Classic, this was always visible to the researcher.

Now let’s talk about the search results themselves. There are now bigger icons for each resource than there used to be. In the previous interface, the icons differed based on the type of source that it was. Now, we get a constant tirade of the same generic blue paper that takes up a great deal of valuable screen space (that we have even less of because, again, the lefthand sidebar is just a constant). It’s not clickable, despite being the same color as the clickable title of each resource. On my normal-sized laptop, there is now only ONE source above the fold (or before a scroll) in my results list. We also no longer have the option of pages of research – only the prompt to “show more results” and continue scrolling on the same page. This is in line with social media platforms where it’s largely impossible to scroll to the end, but this is not at all useful in a research database, especially for those doing a review article.

I will concede that the mobile version is better—in fact, I think some notes could be taken from that interface. The lefthand side is hidden behind a hamburger button, so only if a researcher clicks on it do they get to dashboard and research tools. Filters are behind a click here too, but that makes sense because of the limited screen space as opposed to a computer. Those useless icons aren’t there unless I turn my phone horizontal. I think it’s good overall that we have the “University” banner at the top; it can be confusing for newer students especially to see a database with completely different branding.

Overall, this is indicative of a long-running problem in librarianship; we are at the mercy of the vendors whose products we rely on. We don’t have total control over these databases and discovery layers, despite some of our patrons thinking we do. We’re currently seeing it with AI assistants being forced into every possible product (with worrisome results). How many instruction librarians have stood in front of a class and had to figure something out on the fly either because the vendor made an unexpected update or because the product was just not working in some way? Or how many e-resources librarians have been sent scrambling to fix a vendor-caused problem? These are just a few examples off the top of my head; I’m sure there’s plenty of others that other kinds of librarians can point to.

Thank you for allowing me this rant, and if you feel similarly, please do let me know.

PS: A former version of the title was thus: “Ebsco, more like Ebs-Whoa, Librarians Say Heckin’ Ebs-no: How Search Got Harder and Librarians Went Harder In Response” from my coworker, Katie

Continue operating as normal?

Not a day goes by that I don’t read a headline, article, or hear about something that really just punches me in the stomach. It’s not an easy time to be somebody in higher education or a library, and my lucky self happens to be both. The systematic dismantling of higher education, as well as K-12, terrifies me in a time where hallucinating large language models are dominating the information landscape. Reading for pleasure is on the decline. There is an outright attack on our LGBTQIA, but especially our trans, friends and colleagues. Will I be able to afford basic items as tariffs trickle back to us, the consumers? Who’s to say, really.

That’s the national landscape. What we’re facing in Maryland isn’t easy, either – the state has a huge deficit to overcome in the budget, and because of that, the higher education budget has been cut. What makes this even harder is that as federal employees are laid off, many of whom live in Maryland, this leads to less income tax revenue and makes the deficit even worse. As a public university employee, this has been dominating the conversation in the last few weeks. Per usual, those of us in the library are working our butts off to help make up the cut we’re now facing; everything easy is already gone.

I have found it interesting the ways that different constituencies at my university have reacted to this news. A flat or shrinking budget is nothing new to those of us in libraries, so there is a certain grudging acceptance. That is not to say we’re not advocating for ourselves; that IS to say that we’re telling our higher-ups what exactly it means if we cut this resource or service. A cut here means this, and a cut there means that, and so on. Without getting too deeply into the specifics, that acceptance is not there for other populations at this university, and that worries me. I do not want the library to end up shouldering more of the cuts because we are cooperative.

Finally, there are heavy personal things that cast a thick shadow over everything I’m doing. They aren’t my story to tell, but it’s incredibly hard to give a shit about the pettiness in academia when such dire things are happening. I am interested in keeping my job and my income in order to deal with said things. It’s also hard to not compare – I’m 12-month faculty, whereas a majority of our teaching faculty are a 10-month contract. That 10-month contract would be a godsend to me and my family right now. Perhaps that’s where the budget divide lies, too.

What we’re all experiencing is not normal, but it feels like we’re pretending that it is when we go operate as usual. But then again – what other option is there? My dog depends on me for walks, food, and water. I have to take care of myself to even begin addressing everything above.

I keep coming back to this Dan Savage quote: “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”

That joy is key in this long haul we’re facing. For me lately, that’s manifested in craft projects, binging the entirety of West Wing, and reading way more than I have in years. It’s the student thank you notes, it’s a snuggle with my dog, and it’s a weekend trip back home in Michigan to meet my new nephew. None of it is normal. But we’ll keep going anyway.

A strange, but rewarding, side quest

January has been a very long month. Many times, I’ve felt particularly useless in the era we’re living in, and that came to a head on January 20^th. I posted a video on TikTok asking if folks wanted to learn how to find information, and when I woke up the next morning, I had 500 followers, 10k views, and a resounding number of yeses. Right now, I’m sitting at about 1400 followers and 32k views. I want to reiterate – I didn’t have ANY of that before Monday 1/20.

I didn’t set out to be a content creator, and to be honest, having that many people view what I do makes me deeply uncomfortable. I want to retreat into my turtle shell and delete the account all together. But that’s just my first impulse; I think about it longer, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a good uncomfortable. I am appalled by what is happening in the United States right now, and while I can’t change it by myself, posting videos about information literacy is something that’s in my sphere of influence. To be frank, it’s been a great way to redirect my rage and energy about it all.

I also think that this is making me a better librarian. Planning out and writing the scripts for the videos forces me to slow down and consider what a very general audience might know or not know. I either cut down on jargon or explain it, go slower, and put some big concepts into bite-sized videos. It’s content I could definitely reuse to flip some of my instruction, but it’s also good practice for those 50 minute one shots where it feels like there’s just too much to cover in very little time.

It’s clear to me from the response to my initial wonderings that people want to learn this. Given the information landscape we live in, with AI nonsense proliferating search engine results, uncertainty in who and what to trust, and government websites going down with the rise of the new administration, it’s needed. That is unequivocally a space that academic librarians can contribute to, and I’ve found a lot of renewed purpose in this side quest.

I don’t know how long the algorithm will be on my side, or how long I’ll keep making videos. Honestly, I don’t really feel capable of planning that far in advance right now – we still don’t even really know if TikTok will be a viable platform in a few months. The app still isn’t currently available in the app stores. I do know that over 1,000 people have favorited my tip about adding “LibGuide” to a Google search and at least one person has gotten a library card because of my video explaining the process. To me, that’s well worth it.

If you have any suggestions for videos I should make next, I’d love to hear them. My handle is @interstellar_ed if you’re curious. And remember: January will be over very soon, and we will keep going.