Book Launch

This blog concerns "Artificial Intelligence for Academic Libraries" (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group), which was published in June 2025. See the authors' book page with a detailed Table of Contents, errata, a link to this blog, and a link to Google Books preview of 43 pages, where you can read the Preface, Introduction (Chapter 1), and a bit of Chapter 2.

Clifford Anderson, Director of the Yale University Divinity School Library, and Douglas Fisher, a long-time Vanderbilt University AI researcher, teacher, and one-time NSF program director for AI, sought to create a book that was scholarly, wider in coverage than is popularly typical, and robust in the face of rapid change. We are thankful to have been writing for academic libraries and librarians, who are paragons of engagement, curiosity, rationality, and future orientation; for whom hype is anathema. We believe that others from varied walks and stages of life will find the book informative as well. 

This, the authors' blog, will typically address conceptually-focused updates to the book's material. For example, since November 2024, when we delivered the manuscript to Routledge, the publisher, so-called large reasoning models (LRMs) have been released. Thankfully, we anticipated reasoning systems, which add varying degrees and kinds of deliberation to a generative core. Notably, the book describes the two major AI paradigms of deliberative AI and reflexive (aka generative) AI, and outlines their ongoing hybridization (and undoubtedly eventual unification). As bumpy and rushed as this hybridization may seem of late, it goes back decades. 

Coming soon to this blog, we'll start to tackle how LRMs relate to (a) hybrid AI as described in the book,  and (b) academic libraries. We'll address other AI advances as they unfold, as well as insights on ethical and societal implications of AI, again using the book as important background, along with other sources as relevant.