Category: Worth Reading

For postings that mention a good article, book, study, etc.

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.

AI Refusal in Libraries: A Starter Guide

This week I was on a panel at the Generative AI in Libraries (GAIL) virtual conference. Along with my fellow panelists Andrea Baer and Emily Zerrenner, I joined moderator Sarah Appedu to discuss the cognitive dissonance that we recognize between the widespread exhortations to adopt GenAI tools in libraries and the harms that we see in the usage of these tools. The panel was well attended and well received, with the most frequent comment we received in the chat was that attendees hadn’t heard about the concept of AI refusal before. 

AI refusal can refer to a spectrum of approaches to AI, whether that’s refusing to use AI tools entirely, refusing the use of AI as much as possible, refusing to prioritize the use of AI, refusing to accept either boosterism or doomer narratives, refusing to accept the idea that AI is inevitable, or some other refusal. It can also refer to more cheeky ways of refusing AI, such as using scare quotes around “artificial intelligence” to indicate disbelief that these tools are actually displaying intelligence (hat tip to librarian Dave Ghamandi!).

Stained glass window in the Windmill public house, Westhoughton, England, representing the Luddite attack on Westhoughton Mill. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Many readings were suggested in the chat during our panel presentation. If you’d like to learn more about AI refusal, in libraries and beyond, here are some approachable, mostly non-scholarly resources I recommend. As our moderator Sarah Appedu emphasized, it’s vital to read and learn across disciplines on this topic, so we’re not siloing our discussions at this crucial moment.

Zines

  • Shard volume 31 by Thomas Vose (2024). Subtitled the “A.I. in Libraries” issue, Vose discusses the disconnect between library values and AI adoption. He asks readers “Who benefits? Who suffers?” 
  • AI Is Very Bad, Actually: A Manifesto by Julie Setele (2024). Using just one sheet of paper, librarian Setele lays out their primary qualms with GenAI, including their distate of the way it’s integrated into everything and framed as “magic.”
  • A Librarian Against AI; or, I Think AI Should Leave by Violet Fox (2024). My 32-page zine has been popular especially with library school students. I use the ALA Code of Ethics as a starting point to discuss how using AI tools is antithetical to several of the stated values of librarianship and share potential approaches to AI refusal.

Blog posts and news articles

  • Saying No to AI in Education by Allie Lopez on the blog Front Porch Republic (2024). Lopez describes the impact of educators and professionals uncritically adopting technology on the students they serve and argues against the passive acceptance of AI in educational settings.
  • AI in Academic Libraries (part 1: Concerns and Commodification; part 2: Resistance and the Search for Ethical Uses) by Ruth Monnier, Matthew Noe, and Ella Gibson, published in the College & Research Libraries news column (2025). Librarians Monnier, Noe, and Gibson discuss their doubts and concerns about AI use in libraries.
  • The People Refusing to Use AI by Suzanne Bearne at the BBC (2025). I despise the framing of this article, in that the AI ethics expert states it’s too late to opt out of using AI (that’s true for certain AI tools, but certainly not all). Interesting to note that it features a series of women describing their approaches, then a man saying they’re all wrong (!). But if you need more proof that this is a newsworthy topic even outside of academia, here you go.

Guide

  • Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies: A Quickstart Guide by Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Megan McIntyre, and Maggie Fernandes (2024). I’ve come back to this guide frequently in considering what AI refusal looks like. The authors describe “ten premises that ground refusal as a disciplinary response to GenAI technologies,” many of which are rooted in ideas also discussed in LIS scholarship.

Popular books 

  • The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (2025). An enjoyable, informative read! I especially love their “strategies for popping the hype bubble” section, which include AI refusal methods as a consumer and as a worker.
  • Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant (2023). You’ll note that many discussions about AI refusal grapple with the history of the Luddites, especially as that term is frequently used as a pejorative to describe anyone supposedly fearful of new technologies. This book is a great introduction to the real history of the Luddites and the parallels between their story and the current day environment of the gig economy and tech industry overreach.
  • Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Dan McQuillan (2022). If you’re looking for a more in-depth political approach to AI, McQuillan lays out the case for why GenAI is inherently anti-worker, leading to a more precarious state for those on the margins.

Podcasts

  • Everyone’s Writing with AI (Except Me!) by Maggie Fernandes and Megan McIntyre (2024–present). Writing studies scholars and coauthors of the quickstart guide mentioned above, Fernandes and McIntyre discuss what they’re reading and invite guests to talk about the harmful impacts of AI.
  • Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna (2022–present). I appreciate the approach from Bender (a linguist) and Hanna (a sociologist) in examining the hype that powers the impetus to adopt AI immediately. A wide range of topics and guests keep these episodes from feeling repetitive.
  • Better Offline by Ed Zitron (2024–present). Zitron rants about the “rot economy” of the tech industry. If you want to learn more about the economic basis of the business models behind companies investing in AI, this is a great place to start.

Discord server

  • Alliance for Refusing Generative AI (2025) founded by Cara Marta Messina, Stacy Wittstock, Kat Gray, Maggie Fernandes, and Megan McIntyre. A community space for discussing AI refusal “in writing studies, the humanities, and beyond.”

Keep an eye out for the writings of my copanelists, Sarah Appedu, Andrea Baer, and Emily Zerrenner, who all have such insightful things to add to the conversation—I’m grateful for their inspiration. I encourage everyone to learn more about GenAI from critical sources. Keep learning, keep sharing!

Parenting as an Academic Librarian

Being a working parent is challenging; there’s a lot to manage and prioritize. Thinking of both your personal and professional lives — how do you make it work with an extremely busy schedule? I recently read Courtney Stine’s, Sarah Frankel’s, and Anita Hall’s interview “Parenting and the Academic Library” in C&RL News. Hearing about other parents’ experience is great to hear, and these three bring up a lot of salient points: work-life balance, childcare, academic library support for caregivers, and precarity.

I’ve done a fair amount of writing about being a parent, especially during the pandemic. My daughter was born in February 2020, as my son was two and a half years old. In 2022, I wrote about how important it is to feel a part of a community of parents, and connection more broadly:

I find comfort in the fact that I’m not alone in feeling challenged as a father and as a husband. I’ve felt this with other aspects of my life, like job searching or dealing with challenging parents and family. I like knowing there’s others with similar experiences to myself, others that are living parallel lives, with aspects of your lives matched up.

I want to know about other people’s lives and experiences, and get their perspective on similar situations that they’ve found themselves in; to know that it’s not just me, to hear their insight and advice, and to learn and grow.

It’s rooted in this sense of finding common, universal experience that I want to share with others and have others share with me. I learn so much from others and I really appreciate that. There’s solace to be found there, among others who find parenting challenging.

After attending a great writing workshop offered by my institution, “Writing Your Parenting Journey,” I’ve revisited some of my pandemic reflective writing. I’ve thought a lot about what’s required of you to be both a parent and a librarian (or, really any other profession). Working while parenting is challenging!

During a recent CALM 2024 presentation from Courtney Drysdale (“…Supporting Librarian Parents & Caregivers”), she outlined parental supports in academic libraries, specifically aimed at women caregivers. I was struck by how little maternity and paternity leave academic librarians get, especially in the United States. I’m very lucky that in Canada we have substantial maternal and parental leaves.

Through parenting two young kids while working as an academic librarian, here’s what I’ve learned and try to model:

Prioritize

You have limited time as an academic librarian parent. Okay, I’ll admit it, on occasion I work in the evenings. Sometimes it’s something time-sensitive, sometimes I didn’t have enough time at work to finish or work on something. It’s not common, though, and I prioritize my to-do items during the workday so this doesn’t become more common.

You have to prioritize what needs to get done, and what can be left for another day.

Ask For Help

Ask. For. Help. Always! I get help from a lot of different people in my life: my wife, my parents and in-laws, my friends, and of course my coworkers. My colleagues have helped me a lot in a lot of different ways: I’ve asked them for advice, I’ve leaned on them when I’ve been overloaded with work, and I’ve listened to –this can help you in immeasurable ways.

Sometimes just having someone you can talk with, and work something through, is enough.

Learn to Say No

This is something I struggle with and I’m sure it is something you have at times in your life. I’m working on getting better at saying no and figuring out where I want to put my energy.

As Sarah Frankel says, “learning how to say no is hard, but it does get easier. I value my job and the people I work with, but my family has to come first. As my kids get older, I may find myself with more time to do career-related things that I have had to put off since becoming a parent, so that is something to think about for the future.”

You don’t have to do everything or be everything to everyone.

Take Advantage of Flexible/Remote Work (If You Can)

Those of us lucky enough to have some sort of remote work arrangement or having flexible schedules should take full advantage of those perks. Pick up from childcare, early soccer practices and dance lessons, your kid’s doctor’s appointments – it never stops.

For all those administrators, managers, and supervisors who don’t recognize how nice it is for your employees to have flexibility on your schedule – you do now! Flexible and remote work don’t fix everything, but it helps. I’m working on a research project that explores engagement, burnout, and the effect of remote work and flexible scheduling on academic librarians. Stay tuned!

In her closing keynote to CALM 2024, Katherine Goldstein says she “normalizes caregiving through sharing stories.” I think we’ve all got a story to tell. What’s yours?

What’s Bringing You Joy? An ACRLogger Collaborative Post

For this month’s ACRLoggers collaborative blog post, we’re talking about things that are bringing us joy these days. We hope this post also brings you joy and or allows you to reflect on things bringing you joy this month.  

Ramón – I do my best to not think about work in my free time, so currently I’m reading Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis – The illustrations are amazing, of course. The last book I really enjoyed was Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammed Ali and Malcom X.

Alex – I’m trying to become more of a “podcast person.” I haven’t found any library podcasts to add to my list of regular listening, but I’m trying an episode here and there of any library podcasts that sound interesting! (And I’ve finally listened to the “Room of Requirement” episode of This American Life. It only took 3 years of recommendations from others!)

Emily – “lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to” on Youtube. This isn’t technically library-related, but makes me feel like an undergrad again! Instrumental music always helped me focus on homework, and these Lofi Girl videos fill my office with fuzzy, beat-forward good vibes.

Maura – I’m almost finished reading The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson and it’s such an amazing novel that I’ve found myself recommending it to people practically nonstop in the past couple of weeks. (I may also be dragging my feet a bit on finishing it, it’s that good.)

Jen – While I’m definitely finding joy in the various things I’m reading, watching, and listening to right now, those things aren’t explicitly library-related either. But I do enjoy when I can follow the thread of an idea I’ve been working on or thinking about in my professional space into whatever recreational book or movie I’m immersed in. For example, I just finished Writers and Lovers by Lily King (highly recommend, by the way) and was struck by the insights into the writing process (among other things) that it offered. I love to see those moments of connection across divides or contexts. 

What’s something bringing you joy in the workplace? 

Alex – I’m working on a lot of things with different committees and groups, and they’re all actually moving forward. None of the groups are stuck in that space of “what do we do next” or “let’s table that indefinitely,” and it feels great.

Ramón – The 10 plants I keep in my office! Whenever my eyes are tired from looking at screens or I feel stressed, I turn around in my chair & admire my green friends. 

Emily – Little flashes of community amongst students has brought me joy lately. After being virtual, then hybrid for so long, it felt like students stopped seeing the library as a lively, social place. It was getting lonely and sad! It’s great to see students study in small groups again, or meet with friends between classes in the library.

Maura – Like Emily I’m also enjoying seeing more students in the library again. While we were open last semester it was still fairly quiet on campus as most of the college’s courses were still mostly (or solely) online. Welcoming students back to the library to study, use our resources, or catch a nap between classes has been a bright spot for sure.

Jen – It’s been a hectic few weeks and I feel like I’m working just about five minutes ahead of every deadline — which is not my favorite context to work in nor the one in which I feel I’m able to produce my most thoughtful work. But at the end of the workshop I facilitated today (after having finalized it only this morning), a colleague who participated commented how helpful it was, that it was “just what I was looking for.” The point I want to make here isn’t that this particular comment from this particular colleague brought me joy, although it did. Reflecting on this brief exchange today in light of this prompt reminds me how much it matters to recognize each others’ effort and impact. I used to hesitate to share acknowledgements like this because I thought my small comments were expendable, disposable. But I feel exactly the opposite now: that such comments, however small, acknowledging that we see the work that our colleagues and our students are doing, that we appreciate their efforts, that we recognize their significance can go a long way. With them, I think we can create a bit of joy for each other and ourselves.

What’s a win (big or small) that has brought you joy in 2022? 

Ramón – Feeling more comfortable teaching my library research course & looking back on my previous work plan to see that I accomplished almost everything I set out to do!

Alex – A colleague and I got a chapter proposal accepted! The actual writing is not currently bringing me a lot of joy, but once I’m on the other side of the first draft, it will bring me joy again.

Emily – In Fall 2020, we started using LibGuides CMS to embed LibGuide pages into Canvas. This semester I’ve noticed more and more instructors requesting our “Ask a Librarian” feature (our embedded chat and contact page), and even embedding resources all on their own! It’s been good to see it catching on.

Maura – We’re hiring (again)! Near the end of last semester one of our IT staff moved on to another opportunity, and I’m grateful that we’ve been able to recruit for their replacement so quickly. I’m also grateful for my colleagues in the library who are taking the time to run the search so thoughtfully. I’m looking forward to welcoming our new colleague in the (fingers crossed, not too distant) future.

Hailley – During the fall semester, I spent a lot of time facilitating conversations around our reference services. These conversations led us to make some big changes this spring, including launching a new form to help track our interactions on and off the desk, across multiple departments. Watching this form come to life (and knowing all the hard work and conversations that went into creating it) is definitely bringing me joy.

Featured image by Bekka Mongeau from Pexels

Metaphors That Resonate

This Change magazine article, “#HashtagPedagogies: Improving Literacy and Course Relevance Through Social Media Metaphors,” which suggests using social media vocabulary to describe academic concepts that are familiar to faculty and professionals, but not students, has been rattling around my head this month.

The author, Micah Oelze, models his strategy by choosing a central hashtag for lectures and discussions, and teaches students to apply Instagram vocabulary, like hashtags and @ signs, as note-taking symbols in the margins of readings. He says, “By borrowing language from social media, longstanding critical reading strategies can be taught in a way that feels intuitive for students of the millenial and Z generations.” I like how he repurposes the @ sign (used on Instagram to tag other users) to relate another author’s ideas to the text at hand, which supports the “Scholarship as Conversation” frame.

Oelze says this social media language is second-nature to many students, which is why the metaphor is so successful.

“When educators point out the overarching principle and label it with #, something powerful happens. As an automatic reflex, students recognize this is no longer actual text, but rather a concept, one that is distinctively searchable and can be applied to any number of relevant cases.” 

In the classroom, I’ve compared subject headings to hashtags, particularly the hyperlinked subject headings in many of our databases. But I like that this article takes it a step farther, having students organize and “curate” class topics by choosing the hashtags themselves. This is no different than creating metadata or assigning subject headings, but without the scholarly name for it. 

In order to comprehend new information they’re reading, students must be able to make connections that are text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. Forming connections between the reading and oneself is one of the easiest to teach, and there are excellent prompts to get students thinking about how a text might apply to the world. But I see students struggle to master synthesizing sources with other texts and their own arguments in papers. Using hashtags to track overarching concepts is one great way to practice this text-to-text connection.

A student’s research process, the way they organize information, is an important component to their success. I’m interested in the literal ways that they go about a school project: Do you use Google docs, or citation managers like Noodlebib? Do you write your draft on paper first? Do you outline, or highlight as you read?  I’ve found that the students that have some type of research process, a routine they consistently follow for each project, are more prepared for assignments and able to build on their skills over time. 

In the one-shot classroom, I encourage students to consider their research process. “How I organize my research might not be the best way for you to do it. But it’s important for you to discover the way that works best for you.” When students take ownership over their process, confidence and efficiency emerge. 

If hashtagging your way through a scholarly article helps you connect the concepts, that’s great. A single metaphor won’t resonate with every student, so I’m always looking for new ways to describe this important part of college success. This article got me thinking, and I recommend checking it out! 

Are there ways you communicate scholarly concepts to students so that they’re less intimidating? What are some metaphors you’ve used to translate academic jargon into relatable language?

Image: Pexels