British Library boss: We%u2019re still healing emotionally from 2023 hackAfter two and a half years recovering from a cyberattack likened to a %u2018dirty bomb%u2019, the new interim boss hopes it%u2019s finally starting to turn a corner
Jack Kerouac’s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctioned
Jack Kerouac%u2019s 37 metre-long, first draft scroll of On the Road to be auctionedThe draft %u2013 one of the Beat Generation%u2019s defining artefacts %u2013 will be part of a wider sale of pieces from the Jim Irsay Collection at Christie%u2019s in March
English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings
English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readingsAmid the rise of artificial intelligence and concerns about distraction, more English professors are turning to no-technology policies that prioritize physical books and reading packets
Ten Stories That Shaped 2025
It’s time for our twenty-third look back at the notable library stories from the past year.
10. Tariffs Impact Interlibrary Loan
Caught up in the sweeping and haphazard tariffs enacted by the Trump administration this year was the use of international lending networks by research libraries.
9. AI Bots Ravage Library Websites
As a swarm of web crawlers seek to ingest anything and everything they can find, driven by the boom of “a vast scraping operation to build large language models (LLMs) that train generative AI programs,” many library servers found themselves under attack this year.
8. Grokpedia Forks Up Wikipedia
In October, Elon Musk launched an AI-driven encyclopedia, billed as an alternative to Wikipedia’s “propaganda.” Critics were quick to point out that Grokpedia, however, clearly shows its own bias.
Dishonorable Mention: Presidential Library Grift
Donald Trump has funneled money from multiple legal settlements, as well as an unconditional “gift” from Qatar in the form of a Boeing 747, into his presidential library fund, raising eyebrows. (see also, the Marc Rich scandal)
7. AI Guardrails Censor Library Searches
Love them or hate them, natural language searching, automated summaries, and other “artificial intelligence” features have become mainstream, even in the library vendor marketplace. One of the more curious quirks that cropped up this year, thanks to the outsourcing of chatbots which restrict information deemed harmful for liability purposes, was the observation that library discovery tools could be shown to limit certain results accordingly.
6. Whither IMLS?
In March, President Trump issued an executive order to eliminate the Institute for Museum and Library Services, a government agency that, among other things, helps fund some interlibrary loan programs. Layoffs and service cuts ensued, although a lawsuit challenging this order is currently making its way through the court system.
5. AI Lawsuits Aplenty
Several class-action lawsuits (targeting, for example, Meta, Midjourney, and Anthropic) are underway, thanks to the rampant practice of LLMs and the like obviously being trained on copyrighted materials without their owners’ permission. The insurance industry is retreating from covering such parasitic business models.
4. Political Firings
In May, shortly after a conservative group Tweeted, “The current #LibrarianOfCongress Carla Hayden is woke, anti-Trump, and promotes trans-ing kids,” Donald Trump fired the Obama-appointed Librarian of Congress. As explained by the White House Press Secretary, “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the [national depository] library for children.” Trump also fired the head of the National Archives and the head of the Copyright Office this year.
Honorable Mention: The Return of Reading Rainbow
Don’t take my word for it, but in September, a reboot of the popular television series was announced. Library advocate Mychal Threets will be the new host.
3. Anti-DEI Policies Lead to Government Censorship
Throughout the year, the Trump administration has sought to remove government publications that conflict with its agenda. Victims of this campaign include topics such as STD prevention, African-American history, scientific data, race and gender studies, colonial evidence, climate change, and, last but possibly least, accessible typefaces.
2. Yet More Moral Panic Over Library Books
1. The AI Slop Avalanche
It’s no secret that chatbots, in their attempt to mimic human conversation, simply make stuff up. As this type of AI becomes more prevalent, libraries are feeling the impact of an increase in fake citations, procedurally–generated books, and other “AI slop.” It remains to be seen if we can prevent the “enshittification” of Internet content.
What are your predictions for 2026? How will the AI bubble impact libraries?
Books are inefficient, and the internet is training us to expect optimized experiences.
If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?
Does that mean that people are less literate in general? Counterintuitively, there has never been a time in history when people have spent more time reading words, even if it’s just text messages on their phones. We can agree that most of this reading is less edifying than books are, but I do wonder if the downturn in book reading, and its relationship to our online habits, might be more complicated than we are inclined to conclude. It is, for instance, much easier to find information now—information we might once have looked for in books, say, and also information about the books we might consider reading. Maybe, in the age of the internet, many of us, as informed readers, only want to read one book, tailored very specifically to our interests, every couple of years.
Requiem for Early Blogging
Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication.
Advancing Emergency Planning for the Performing Arts with Low-Cost AI Tools
Generative AI tools are becoming increasingly capable at helping people organize, analyze, and make sense of complex information. For many performing arts organizations, low-cost AI-powered tools are now within reach and unlock features that make emergency planning more efficient and consistent.
It’s their job to keep AI from destroying everything
Spoiler: the nine-person team works for Anthropic.
People’s jobs, their brains, their democratic election process, their ability to connect with others emotionally — all of it could be changed by the chatbots that are filling every corner of the internet. Many team members believe they’ll do a better job guiding how that tech is developed from the inside rather than externally. But as the exodus of engineers and researchers elsewhere shows, that idealism doesn’t always pan out for the broader AI industry.
One of the hardest problems in digital humanities has finally been solved
The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition
At this point, AI tools like Gemini should be able to make most digitized handwritten documents searchable and readable in transcription. This is, simply put, a major advance that we’ve been trying to achieve for a very long time, and a great aid to scholarship. It allows human beings to focus their time on the important, profound work of understanding another human being, rather than staring at a curlicue to grasp if it’s an L or an I. Could we also ask Gemini to formulate this broader understanding? Sure we could, but that’s the line that we, and our students, should resist crossing. The richness of life lies in the communion with other humans through speech, the written word, sounds, and images.
A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress
A nationwide internet age verification plan is sweeping Congress
The bill is set to be discussed in a hearing before a powerful House committee that’s considering the large package of kids online safety bills. It comes just as the bill has picked up a new industry supporter, Pinterest. “We need to ensure that our kids are safe and parents have peace of mind from the moment their device is first turned on,” CEO Bill Ready says in a statement. “By making app stores the center for age verification, the App Store Accountability Act sets a clear standard for youth online safety.” Companies like Meta, Snap, and X have also expressed broad support for the app store approach and applauded the federal bill when it was introduced.
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