Hope in the Library
How Libraries Can Help Shape Our Future with Artificial Intelligence
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Product details:
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)
- Date of Publication 19 February 2026
- Number of Volumes Paperback
- ISBN 9798765136188
- Binding Paperback
- No. of pages184 pages
- Size 214x138x12 mm
- Weight 280 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 10 bw illus, 2 tables 697
Categories
Short description:
Argues for the importance of libraries in an age of artificial and automated intelligence to create a better information environment for human as well as artificial agents.
MoreLong description:
What is the role of the library in an increasingly complex information environment filled with and redesigned for artificial intelligence?
Hope in the Library presents a compelling case for the continued relevance of libraries in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Michael J. Paulus, Jr., shows how libraries, as human-centered and human-scaled institutions, have enduring roles as archives for reflection and understanding, sites of imagination and hope, and catalysts for human agency. This book argues that, by providing an essential counterbalance to impersonal and automated systems, libraries are essential for not only surviving but thriving in our emerging information environment.
Hope in the Library is structured as a series of essays organized by explorations of the library in the past, in imagined futures, and in our digitally-enhanced present. Firsthand narrative and
archaeological history are interspersed with literary meditations from writers including Mary
Shelley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book can be read a few different ways: from beginning to end; following topical pathways suggested in the final section; or in any other order chosen by the reader. Each essay and section, like a book or section of a library, may be read independently.
Informed by over two decades of leading and studying libraries, these essays include the author's professional as well as personal reflections and encourage a more radical reframing of how AI may be integrated into libraries and society to help create a better future.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
I. Prologues: Revisiting the Meaning and Purpose of Libraries in an Age of AI
0. On Order
1. Portals to Hope
2. Pandemic
3. Becoming a Librarian
4. Why Libraries?
II. The Library as an Archive: How Libraries Are Sources of Hope
5. The Emergence of Attention and Imagination
6. Living Libraries
7. The City
8. The Beginning of the Book
9. The Beginning of the Library
10. The End of a Library
11. The Library as a Transformative Technology
12. The Industrial Imagination
13. Archival Fevers
14. On Inexactitude in Libraries
III. The Library as a Site of Anticipation: How Libraries Are Signs of Hope
15. The Antilibrary
16. The Apocalyptic Imagination
17. Libraries of Babylon
18. Libraries of New Atlantis
19. Promethean Hopes
20. A Canticle for Libraries
21. Facing the End with Libraries
22. Library 2041
23. Trusting a Future Library
24. The Postdigital Library
IV. The Library as a Place of Action: How Libraries Are Structures for Hope
25. The Library at Dawn
26. The Archival Cycle
27. The Future of the Book
28. The New Media Library
29. Library Automation and Intelligence Augmentation
30. From Alexandria to Alexa - and Back
31. The Library and Virtue
32. In and Beyond Buildings
33. On Enduring Institutions
34. Finding Oneself in the Library
V. End Matters
35. After the End
36. Acknowledgements
37. Bibliographic Essay
38. Appendix: Topical Pathways and Explorations
Index
