R. David Lankes, the Virginia and Charles Bowden Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin and co-host of the Libraries Lead podcast, recently published his latest book, Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship, in association with Library Journal. The following is the first in a series of excerpts from Triptych, which is a compilation of three lectures.

TL;DR

Librarianship is under stress and must adapt to fulfill its mission to improve society through knowledge creation. Librarians, students, volunteers, vendors, elected officials, and scholars who inhabit this library community must better understand the complex world they inhabit in order to save lives.

Libraries save lives by fostering greater social participation and combating the rising tide of deaths of despair. Libraries that serve towns and schools and hospitals and governments and law firms and universities will all be needed to push back attacks of anti-intellectual forces, take up opportunities for lifting communities, and fight a growing wave of anti-democratic trends in global politics.

This calls for bold actions: embracing the unorthodox energy of librarians without formal degrees or training (feral librarians), overhauling library science education, reimagining professional networks, and making innovation not just a goal but a driving force in library organizations. The future of libraries depends on our ability to move beyond evolving to rapidly adapting to a changing society—and the stakes couldn't be higher.

This is not just a challenge to public libraries, or academic libraries, but to all libraries and the people and institutions who support them. It is not going to be accomplished by librarians alone. It will take the commitment of vendors, politicians, educators, civil servants, and the communities we serve.

The way the library community must take on this task is not as a hierarchical whole but through aligning and enhancing our understanding of the hyperlocal, and the independent agency of everyone in the field. Taking on deaths of despair and affiliated afflictions such as social isolation and community disenfranchisement, the most pronounced social issue of our time, must happen quickly, but in a way that embraces the power of the local and diversity of community norms.

To meet this moment, we must expand the definition of librarians, seeing the feral and uncredentialled librarians as an important source of new ideas. We must recast our consortia and associations from agencies of standardization to networks of people focused on adapting ideas to the local, not adopting them as standards, toolkits, or so-called best practices. More cocktail party than committee meeting, or as Joan Frye Williams says, more acting like kitchens and less like grocery stores. We must reform library science education to be more responsive to the larger society; reject threadbare arguments of theory vs practice in favor of a wholistic participatory model with the field; and see the dangers of education as instruments of reifying practice instead of platforms for positive change.

The phrase "Deaths of Despair" refers to deaths caused by drug overdose, suicide, and alcohol-related diseases. These deaths are often linked to feelings of hopelessness, economic stress, social disenfranchisement, and a lack of purpose or community. The term was popularized by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their research on rising mortality rates among middle-aged Americans, particularly those without a college degree. Their work highlights how economic and social changes, such as declining job prospects and social structures, contribute to these types of deaths. It has also been seen as a trend in the United States as well as the United Kingdom, and reduced mortality has also been linked to educational attainment in the Netherlands.

In countries where this trend is not identified, there are equally alarming statistics around social isolation and increased ideological fragmentation through things like social media and online radicalization. There is a real cost of social isolation, and libraries must be mechanisms of inclusion and meaningful connection.

The worry of the role of large tech firms on society and social exclusion has only grown larger with the rise of generative AI. We now have the same organizations that swapped connection for confrontation in social tools (realizing angry people spend more time seeing ads and enrich large tech companies) now pushing artificial intelligence into the public sphere. Organizations such as Google, OpenAI, and Meta often do this with little consideration for the quality of information being proffered or for the rights of human artists, writers, and journalists whose work was used to train these systems. The library community must shape AI toward ethical use and as a means of greater inclusion of authentic voice into the global conversation.

The lectures contained within Triptych ultimately attempt to capture in written form something that does not fit into linear and static containers of text. At the heart of this expanded view of librarianship is dynamism and change. Why librarianship has lasted for millennia, and why it is a thriving field today, is because it changes. Tools and associated skills change quickly, values on a much slower (centuries) basis, and a mission, I would argue, has held fast for most of the 4,000 years of libraries in service of knowledge. These lectures, with some overlap, present three building perspectives on librarianship.

1. Members of our communities are increasingly isolated and feel excluded from the larger society leading to despair.
2. Librarians should both embrace joyand help support communities at a time when artificial intelligence upends traditional concepts of information literacy: from making people skeptical to supporting people under the stress when every bit of information is automatically suspect.
3. To meet the challenges and opportunities presented to librarianship, we must better define what a librarian is beyond questions of university degrees and titles.

Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship is available now in print and ebook.