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Reimagining Library Education in the AI Age: Syracuse University’s MLIS Vision for Community, Equity, and Innovation
27 Plays16 days ago
In this first-ever crossover episode of InfoVersity and Libraries Lead, Beth Patin, Associate Professor and Program Director of Syracuse University’s Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program, sits down with Dr. Jeffrey Hemsley, Dean of the School of Information Studies, to explore the future of library education in an era defined by artificial intelligence, misinformation, and social change.
The conversation examines how Syracuse’s MLIS program is evolving to prepare librarians and information professionals as ethical leaders, community builders, and information first responders. Beth shares her vision for community-responsive librarianship, emphasizing cultural humility, disaster readiness, and socio-emotional skills alongside technical expertise. Jeff reflects on AI literacy, information ethics, and how emerging technologies can amplify—not replace—human-centered information work.
Together, they discuss how libraries serve as anchors during moments of crisis, why engaged community matters more than ever, and how librarians help steward collective memory in times of uncertainty. The episode also highlights innovative library initiatives, from AI education to creative technology spaces and entrepreneurship.
Whether you’re a prospective MLIS student, librarian, educator, or information professional, this episode offers a compelling look at how libraries—and the people who lead them—are shaping a more informed, equitable, and connected future.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Crossover Episode
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to a very special episode that brings together two worlds of information, innovation, and libraries. Today we're blending the voices and themes of Infoversity, the official podcast of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, and Libraries Lead, the provocative podcast that dives deep into the many ways information shapes our lives and communities.
Meet the Hosts: Beth Potan and Jeffrey Hemsley
00:00:30
Speaker
I'm Beth Potan, Associate Professor and Program Director for the Master of Libraries and Information Science Program at Syracuse. You might know me as a co-host of Libraries Lead, and today I'm excited to bring you this first ever crossover episode featuring a conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Hemsley, Dean of the iSchool and fellow UW iSchool alumni.
00:00:53
Speaker
At Infoversity, we explore how technology, data, and information are reshaping our world from artificial intelligence and robotics to misinformation in the future of
Exploring Syracuse's Library and Information Science Program
00:01:03
Speaker
work. Over on Library Leads, we wrestle with tough questions around social justice, education, emergency preparedness, and of course, the vital role libraries and information systems play in building strong, informed communities.
00:01:18
Speaker
In this special joint episode, we'll focus on Syracuse University's Master in Library and Information Science program, exploring how we will prepare future librarians and information leaders to thrive in today's rapidly changing information landscape. Together, Jeff and I will talk about the program's vision, its innovative curriculum, and how our shared roots at UW's iSchool have shaped our approaches to leadership and education.
Episode Structure Overview
00:01:43
Speaker
So whether you're tuning in from info Infoversity, Libraries Lead, or just discovering us for the first time, get ready for a conversation about how the next generation of librarians and information professionals can lead, innovate, and transform communities in the information age.
00:02:00
Speaker
For this episode, we're going to follow a typical layout for Libraries Lead with four segments, a What's Up, AI Watch, our main topic, and then we'll close with our required segment, Awesome Library Thingy.
00:02:13
Speaker
So let's dive in. All right, let's get right to it with our What's Up segment.
Jeffrey's Academic Background
00:02:18
Speaker
Jeff, I'm thrilled to have you here today. For our listeners who may not know you yet, you're the dean of sarah interim dean of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, one of our premier information schools in the country, and the first iSchool, we like to say. We're proud to be ranked right now as number six in library and information science. You came to Syracuse from the University of Washington, where you earned your PhD there as well.
Integrating AI in Education: Opportunities and Challenges
00:02:42
Speaker
Your research focuses on social media, information diffusion, and computational social science. You've been leading the iSchool through an exciting period of growth and innovation, and you're passionate about preparing students to tackle the complex information challenges of our time.
00:02:58
Speaker
So Jeff, what's up with you? Well, I guess first I'll say at the iSchool, we're really leaning into the intersection of AI and information literacy, helping students not just use AI tools, but understand them critically and ethically.
00:03:15
Speaker
It's been exciting to see our faculty. In fact, it's been yeah exciting to see our faculty and students experiment with how AI reshapes how we find, share and verify information.
Personal Updates and Literary Work
00:03:27
Speaker
Outside of work, I'm working on building a new cabinet for our kitchen and I think it's going to turn out great. So thanks, Beth. Now let me turn the tables and introduce you to our listeners. okay Beth is not only the program director for our master's in library and information science program. She's also a scholar doing vital work on epistemic side, which is always hard for me to say. It's hard say. And epistemic justice and community responsive approaches to librarianship.
00:03:59
Speaker
She's also, as she mentioned, a fellow UW iSchool alumni, and she brings tremendous energy and vision to how we think about preparing the next generation of library and information professors.
00:04:12
Speaker
She's deeply committed to information access and ensuring that our students are ready to serve diverse communities with empathy. So Beth, what's up with you? Yeah, well, yesterday was Walter Jerome's first birthday. And so we started the morning with like a snuffle mat cake that had his kibble and a little bit of chicken and roast beef for a treat.
AI's Impact on Workflows and Employment
00:04:36
Speaker
Then he went to his pet sitter and she threw him a whole nother party. And there were three dogs there and three cats. And she sent a bunch of pictures of the cats kissing Walter. And they had a peanut butter bun cake and it was adorable. He had to wear lots of party hats, which he hated, but he...
00:04:53
Speaker
he He survived. And then work-wise, I've been working on my Harms of Epistemicide book with one of our former postdocs, Melinda Sebastian. She's now a researcher over at Data and Society. And also Tyler Youngman, are one of our former postdocs.
00:05:09
Speaker
undergrad, master's, and PhD students who's now a junior faculty member over at East Carolina University. And our book deadline is November 10th. So we are deep in the weeds with finishing our last chapter and making sure everything, ah all of our citations are right. And so I've just been deep into writing the last couple of weeks.
00:05:29
Speaker
So that's been What's Up With Me. That sounds great. All right, let's move right into our AI Watch segment. AI is certainly challenging both the educational landscape as well as job opportunities for our graduates.
00:05:42
Speaker
It feels impossible right now to have a conversation about information in libraries these days without talking about artificial intelligence. Jeff, what's one thing you're paying attention to right now?
00:05:53
Speaker
I have been thinking a lot about how AI is reshaping workflows. not just for information professionals, but for everyday life, I'm finding you new
Promoting AI Literacy and Upcoming Events
00:06:03
Speaker
i'm finding new uses for it all the time.
00:06:06
Speaker
What's really interesting is that even when I don't know where to start a task, which happens a lot, I can use AI to help me figure out where to start. Sometimes I even ask it to help me improve my prompts, which is its own kind of learning process because then I can see what it thinks a good prompt is and sort of modify my own behaviors.
00:06:28
Speaker
In that effect, I get more done in less time. And with the same amount of time each day, that means I can simply do You know, I know there's a lot of talk about AI reducing the number of knowledge worker jobs, but I wonder if that's the whole story.
00:06:42
Speaker
What if instead of hiring fewer people, organizations simply raise their overall output? It seems to me that if companies figured out how to do that, to use AI to amplify what their teams can accomplish,
00:06:56
Speaker
They'll end up outperforming their competition. And then also, just like so many previous technological advances, we might lose jobs, but there might be new jobs that arise that we can't even imagine right now. Like when the internet started, we didn't have web developers, and now web developers are kind of essential.
00:07:19
Speaker
So there could be whole new industries and whole new job titles that arise. So I know you're also thinking deeply about AI in the context of library education
Ethics and Trust in AI: A Panel Discussion
00:07:31
Speaker
and practice. What's on your radar?
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. We did that workshop on Friday thinking about prompts and you're bringing up prompts and I couldn't help but on Friday think this is nothing but an old fashioned reference interview. And the way that we train our students to think about people's information wants. So the things that they come in and they tell us that they want, which is not always the same as their information needs. Right. And so that like refining of prompts really makes me think of that kind of like skill that we're helping our students with. help their patrons and community members kind of suss out in that conversation. That's a great answer.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's been rolling around in my mind, I think. And we'll probably talk a little bit more about like the ways I see those kinds of principles, like you know, being embedded in different places.
00:08:17
Speaker
um I'm also thinking about our conversation from last night. um On November 11th, we're going to have a panel hosted here at Syracuse called the AI Moment in Libraries and what it means to our profession.
00:08:29
Speaker
I'll be moderating and we're bringing together Leo Lowe, Andrew Pace, David Lankus, Jeff Saltz, and Sanda Erdelys to tackle AI in libraries. Not just the technology and tools, but the real questions around ethics, equity, community trust, and how we prepare the next generation of library professionals for this moment.
00:08:48
Speaker
It's going to be a Zoom conversation, so we hope you all ah can show up. and we'll make sure to drop the registration link in our show notes. But I want to focus on the work of one of our panelists for my AI Watch this week. Leo Lowe is the Dean of the College of University college of university Libraries and Learning Services at the University of no New Mexico, and he is the former president of ACRL, that's the Association of College and Research Libraries, and his work is on AI literacy And it's been on my mind since our conversation yesterday, and i had been introduced to it before. And AI literacy is something I often talk about on the podcast. And he defines ai literacy as the ability to understand, use, and think critically about AI technologies and their impact on society and everyday life. And specifically, he's thinking about this in the context of academic librarians and librarianship.
00:09:43
Speaker
And something like 30% of the people that that graduate from our programs go into academic libraries. So this is something we really want to pay attention to. And he suggests that our academic libraries be literate in two places, professional development. So very much the kinds of things that you were just talking about, how you use it AI, but also in community engagement to make sure that we are the librarians that are are knowledgeable about its technology, that we can demystify it for our populations. So he wants to make sure that in those two spaces, we're thinking about our technical knowledge, our ethical awareness, our critical thinking, practical so skills, and the societal impact, right? He wants us to kind of have some understanding of all of those things.
00:10:25
Speaker
um And he thinks that it's really important that through partnerships with faculty, campus technology units, that librarians can and should be the people to integrate AI literacy into courses, to create learning communities, and to provide practical training on AI-driven tools. And in doing so, we as academic librarians can position ourselves as key players in shaping our critical conversations about and and guiding the next generation of scholars to engage thoughtfully and ethically with these technologies.
Vision for the LIS Program: Community and Resilience
00:11:01
Speaker
So that's my AI watch. Now let's dive into our main topic for today. From collections to communities, reimagining library education and the Masters of Science in Library and Information Science program here at Syracuse University's School of Information.
00:11:19
Speaker
Beth, as we noted earlier earlier, you've recently stepped into your role as program director for our LIS program. Tell us a bit about your vision for where the program is headed and what excites you most about taking this role on.
00:11:34
Speaker
ah So I've been program director for a whopping three months now. And it's I get a lot of these kinds of questions. What's your vision? And, you know, I didn't campaign for this position exactly. Maybe my behavior and efforts in the past got me here. I think that that's fair to say.
00:11:50
Speaker
But I don't know that I completely stepped in with like a set of visions and a complete set of goals. And I've kind of been taking everything in and learning. But of course, I have those things that are really driving me.
00:12:03
Speaker
um You know about my experience in Hurricane Katrina and rebuilding libraries there. And I want to make sure that we are training librarians and information professionals to focus on information access for every community regardless of what their current conditions and experiences are.
Practical Teaching Approaches
00:12:21
Speaker
um I want to make sure that we are graduating people who are building engaged community, not just focusing on community engagement. And I think of those two things. Dr. Gray taught me to think of those two things as very different things. Engaged community, it's kind of...
00:12:39
Speaker
um all of us working and building together versus community engagement as being kind of an outreach kind of thing and us motivating that versus all of us kind of motivating each other.
00:12:52
Speaker
And I think the last um the last part of my vision for our school is to make sure that our students are leaving with both the socio-emotional skills, the soft skills that we often say, although they're very hard skills, so we should not be framing them that way. um But those kind of socio-emotional skills that help us be good members of our community and that allow us to provide information access to people who are that are different than us, along with those technical skills that they are have the ability and the capacity to hit the ground running on day one.
Librarians as Historians and Societal Leaders
00:13:28
Speaker
um I think what's exciting for me is that like I'm a teacher first. I have a degree in education, in educational theory and philosophy and pedagogy.
00:13:40
Speaker
And so i think very strongly about our program goals, how we make sure we're helping our students achieve those goals, the process of assessment. None of that is that exciting, I think, for a lot of other people. But for me, I'm really interested in those things. But I love being in front of a classroom and talking to my students and having that aha moment, watching the light bulb go off for them and seeing them find that thing that they're passionate about and go out there and make that happen. um
00:14:12
Speaker
In my current class on community responsiveness, they're working on projects. And my advice to them was like, just learn by doing, not learning by so much thinking. And so my last advice for them last night, thinking about Anne Lamont's ah shitty first drafts, was to go out there and make something shitty this week. And then next week, we're going to make it even better. And so learning by doing, not just by thinking. ah Maybe preparing them to think first and then going out there and taking action.
00:14:41
Speaker
um And let's see, what was the last thing that you asked me? um i think right now what I'm... excited for and nervous about is that the stakes are high for librarianship and information. um I believe that librarians, educators, we steward what gets remembered and what gets forgotten.
00:15:04
Speaker
And we teach information, media, AI literacy ah at a time when generative AI and its capacity to hallucinate and create mis- and disinformation is spiraling out of control. And right now,
00:15:19
Speaker
um We are, we have, and we should be training our librarians to have the capacity to build community at a time when our world really needs
Training for Crisis Management and Resilience
00:15:30
Speaker
that. So I'm excited to try to prepare the next generation to take on that challenge.
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you said a lot of things that resonated with me, but one of the ones that I think about a lot is socio-emotional skills that you're talking about, those soft skills that are often hard. ah I think that those are the things that may be of value in our world that's becoming more and more AI-centric.
00:15:57
Speaker
So that's interesting. So where do you see the profession heading? um And how is the program evolving to meet those changes?
00:16:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, in the in the the comments about a i running totally out of control and thinking about how we build community, how we ensure information access at a time when information itself, education, higher education, books all seem to be under attack in different ways.
00:16:31
Speaker
um And these things to me scream that librarians and information professionals are more essential than ever. We are the folks that are kind of holding those threads. I think a lot, and I write about a lot about disasters, unfortunately and sadly, um And we know that the frequency of disasters is increasing, but also we feel this heavy weight of polycrisis. And polycrisis is this idea that there are so many different social systems breaking down at once that it's really hard for us to pay attention to any one thing because everything kind of seems to be crumbling.
00:17:06
Speaker
And a lot of people talk about this as like the great unraveling. Things don't often just break immediately and then we don't have them. We're not going to like wake up tomorrow and it's Mad Max 2, fingers crossed. um But it's often that like we see the slow pulling back of services. And so, you know, if we're thinking about the great unraveling, I want us as librarian and information professionals to think about ourselves as the ravelers. How do we find the threads that the things that are important to us and hold on to them and be ready to reweave them and when the opportunity comes to us. um
00:17:42
Speaker
I think that it's important, right, that we don't just prepare to how to reweave when the time is ready, but as the people who document and archive and preserve our history, that we're also making sure that we are not looking away in these hard moments and finding ways to document the hard things so that we can continue to learn from like our lessons in history.
Community Engagement Through Real-World Projects
00:18:06
Speaker
um Another thing I think, ah ah two ways I think that we should be thinking about preparing librarians to be these ravelers is adjusting our curriculum to think about external factors that our students are going to experience when they leave the school. safety of Heinz Hall. So thinking about crisis and disasters, thinking about resilience, thinking about the workplace challenges, legal book challenges, how to work with library boards, how to respond to communities that are in crisis and struggling, and making sure that our students are ready and prepared to meet those challenges.
00:18:40
Speaker
um The second part, I think, is about how we build community partnerships. And so not that we're just asking our students to go out and build an engaged community, but that we are actively modeling that now.
00:18:53
Speaker
um I think about the grant that Dr. Sebastian Madro and I have right now with the Modern 10th Mountain Foundation. Light Infantry Division, and we're working to help them build a digital community archive. And that has set up so many different relationships with local librarians, with local museums, the SU Library, and the SU Veterans Center. And so just continuing to kind of dig into those kinds of projects that let us be embedded in our communities so that we can continue to model that kind of behavior for our students.
Building Trust in Librarianship
00:19:21
Speaker
I want to make sure that I think... My goal for our students is that like we are graduating people that are adaptive, not just knowledgeable about our field.
00:19:32
Speaker
you talk about You talk a lot about community responsive librarianship. Can you unpack what that means and how it shapes our curriculum? Yeah, I think um i already I didn't think I'd talk about Hurricane Katrina so much, but I think that like that moment was so pivotal for me to think about how libraries, but also librarians and information professionals became like the center for collective collective trauma processing and dealing with the kind of information needs we had. um
00:20:05
Speaker
I was in Alabama. You had to fill out FEMA forms online. My friends were scattered all over the country. They didn't have their laptops. One by one, I called them. i filled out their forms on the computer. Right. And that was me being an information responder and I want my students to be thinking about those radical ways we can support our communities when they need us the most in a way that makes sense.
00:20:28
Speaker
um But we have to do that by earning trust through our presence in our communities. We see a lot of attacks on libraries, um on librarians specifically, book challenges, and I think one of the ways we combat this is by thinking locally and building those connections. So um We see librarians who are going out and earning this trust before something happening happens, something bad happens. And we see their community turning around and relying on them.
00:20:57
Speaker
For me in terms of teaching, i think about training our librarians to have humility. And that's really important for us as librarians and professors because we're tasked with knowing a lot of things and being knowledgeable, but probably just as important as to know when what you know in this moment, in this context is more important than what I know. And that's hard for some of us to like take a backseat when we, you know, when we maybe shouldn't. should be doing that. And so understanding and recognizing that communities are experts on their own needs and making sure that we are not gatekeeping what they should what we think they should be doing or omitting things because we think we know better. And those are two things that I want to make sure that our librarians are trained in.
00:21:48
Speaker
um And then one of the other interventions that I think a lot about is ah a paper that I wrote with Tyler Youngman that won the best Elise Award maybe in 2022. We won three years in a row, so it's really hard to remember which paper was which.
00:22:05
Speaker
um But the Sankofa intervention is really about going back and getting what was forgotten. And I think when we think about the foundations of library information science, they're often given to us from a certain perspective. We read the canon, um You have to cite these people because they're so important.
00:22:25
Speaker
And I want to make sure that we are going back and looking at the other voices in librarianship across the world that have made a difference in our practice and our field. So for me, part of this Sankofa invention as intervention as program director is going back and looking at our curriculum, noticing where those gaps are and making sure that we shore that up. um And I think that that's all of our responsibilities. And for me, that takes place in like my research with my Rocket City Civil Rights Project, making sure that I'm collecting the oral histories that the state of Alabama is not interesting and interested in saving.
00:23:00
Speaker
So I think um for me, right, community responsive, again, is how we can make sure that we are working with our communities, not for them.
Beth's Commitment to Social Justice and Equity
00:23:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool. I appreciate it.
00:23:15
Speaker
So you've done such powerful work around equity, community engagement, and social justice in libraries. So how did these values influence your approach to leading the LAS program?
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, this is this is really rooted in my family experience. My grandparents were civil rights leaders in Alabama. My grandmother got arrested when she was six months pregnant trying to order a cheeseburger at the Walgreens lunch counter.
00:23:45
Speaker
um My grandfather practiced medicine at a time in Alabama where there were very few black doctors. You could not get a medical degree as a black person there. um When he would go to conferences, he'd have to sit in the kitchen on the other side of the curtains. And when they finally let him be in the room, he'd have to turn his coffee cup upside down so he didn't actually accidentally get served food and eat with the white doctors.
00:24:08
Speaker
And they worked tirelessly to integrate Huntsville. And after they'd integrated the restaurants and the hotels and the parks and the restrooms and all of these things, that wasn't enough for them. And so they sued the Board of Education. So my father became the first Black person to desegregate schools.
00:24:26
Speaker
And my all of my work stems from that. ah lesson in advocacy and activism. um I think about our lived experiences. I think about the ways that like my education was challenged along the way, the times that when like my counselor told me I wasn't smart enough for college and I should go to train school, which is not a bad path, but pro but she was wrong. I think it's safe to say now. um So making sure that other people aren't experiencing those same kinds of harms when it comes to their education. My grandfather loved reading when he was a kid. He knew he wanted to be a doctor. He couldn't go to the library.
00:25:06
Speaker
And we promote libraries as these places of democracy and champions of equity and these places where everybody can get the same leverage. But that's just not how it's always been. And so I think a lot about what it means for me to be a professor when my grandfather couldn't even walk into a library.
00:25:26
Speaker
so I can't teach what I'm not willing to model. I have to bring my whole self into the classroom.
00:25:37
Speaker
I try to make sure that I demonstrate vulnerability with my students, that I demonstrate care before they even walk into my classroom or join my classroom online, depending on what the case is.
00:25:50
Speaker
I ask them what I need to know about them to help them be successful this semester. Right. And even if they don't have anything they want to share before the quarter starts or before the semester starts, I've already opened up that conversation so that if they need something down the road, they know they can come to me. Right. And that's the way um the kind of care that we have with our research group, the way that we create brave spaces. And I think this idea of we often hear of safe spaces But what I'm really asking for people to do is to be brave, to have these hard conversations, to get things wrong, to say the wrong thing, and to be able to take criticism to like make ourselves better.
00:26:30
Speaker
um If you've been in my class before, you know that I think that feedback is the love language of academia. And so like if I'm not correcting you, it's because I don't care enough, I don't love you, or I'm not interested in like maintaining the relationship the same way. um And so I think that like modeling that and how we act in our research, how we act in our classrooms, how we treat our colleagues, how we interact with our staff, all of that is so important when we're going to ask our students to go out there and have this moral courage and space. And then I also think about how I do this, right, not just through teaching and research, but also participation and service. So right now I'm on the New York State Regents Council for libraries. And so I get to talk to our state educators and the people who are making educational policies around the state of New York. And I get to talk to them and influence them and champion lirians libraries and librarians in that way. And all of that to me kind of um speaks to that level of equity work, right? It's walking the walk.
Graduate Goals: Skills and Engagement
00:27:33
Speaker
So um a lot of times when I'm teaching, i think about, like, um like what are some of the core things I really want my students to walk away from the class with? So now you're a program director. What do you want every graduate of the program to walk away being able to do or say or think, like, what is what is the key? What's the thing you want them to go away with?
00:27:58
Speaker
Yeah, this was a tough question. And i I jotted some things down and then I spent some time thinking about this last night and I shifted my answer and I changed my answer. But i kind of came up with four themes and I've touched on them a little bit today. So first, I want them to have the technical...
00:28:17
Speaker
research and advocacy skills that we need in the information age. I want them to understand that we design, build, test, and we critique things. It's not good enough if we're just critiquing. We have to be designing, building, testing, and then acting on those critiques.
00:28:36
Speaker
I want to make sure that they they have workplace and crisis readiness. I want us to think of ourselves as information first responders in our communities, that when people want to know things, we are the people that we they think of because we have the right information packaged the right way at the right time for the right community.
00:28:55
Speaker
I want us to have cultural humility. We don't need to know all of the things. And it's important to know when we don't know enough. We should make sure that we are listening first, asking questions, and then that we have the skills to work across our differences. And finally, I want to make sure that we are but we are graduating students that are builders of engaged community. um In my classes, i often say, and especially thinking about poly crisis, we don't all have to do everything, but we all have to do something. And I want to make sure that our students are leaving feeling empowered to take action and to do something.
Innovative Library Initiatives
00:29:36
Speaker
yeah I like this idea of cultural humility. I think in higher education, it's actually something we have to think about all the time with yeah our students. And I think that's becoming more and more true. Yeah.
00:29:51
Speaker
All right, well, we've reached my favorite part of the Libraries Lead podcast every month, and it is our awesome library thingy. This is where we highlight some of the amazing, innovative, and inspiring things happening at libraries across the world. Jeff, you're up first.
00:30:07
Speaker
What awesome library thingy do you want to share? Well, I think one of the things that i recently learned about is that at Syracuse universities, the libraries have become real hub for innovation and collaboration under Dean David Siemens' leadership. Sorry.
00:30:25
Speaker
They're building programs that connect traditional library values with emerging technology and entrepreneurship. One great example is the Orange Innovation Fund, which the libraries co-administer with the campus innovation ecosystem.
00:30:41
Speaker
So it's a micro grant that helps students take an idea from concept to prototype and sometimes even to market. and And to see this happening in the library is just really exciting.
00:30:55
Speaker
The program supports everything from data-driven startups to creative projects using AI and design. So you'll often find librarians working right alongside students, helping them navigate intellectual property, research methods, or access to specialized research.
00:31:13
Speaker
And I don't know, like... You know, the way I grew up, I had this kind of vision libraries. Yes, of course. You're not the only one. ah And I mean, since being a professor at an high school, that's been challenged in a lot of ways. To see this is really unusual and Yeah, Syracuse is doing so many great things in their library. I'm lucky enough to be on the Faculty Senate and in the Research Committee and head of the Library Committee subcommittee there. And so I get to spend a lot of time with the library leadership um and understand what their challenges are, what their needs are, and and and to celebrate the work they do. um They have made...
00:31:53
Speaker
Incredible strides around open source and creating relationships with our big publishers so that we in our fields can publish things open access. ah One of the things I think about and teach my students is like bad information is free.
00:32:08
Speaker
ah Good information often costs money. And that's something we need to think about moving forward. And especially as like AI AI is using algorithms that is parsing sometimes free information. And if it's bad information, right, we know how that works. um That's fantastic. ah My awesome library thingy is also celebrating an academic library library and it's the university of n librarian. It's the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and their library studio director, Emily Thompson. She just published a new book with some of her colleagues called a complete guide to creative technology spaces and academic libraries, media labs, maker spaces, and more. So really connected with what you just shared. Library Studio is a place where anyone can come, regardless of major or assignment or experience level, to explore multimedia production, including video, audio, 3D printing, and graphic design.
Conclusion: Explore and Support the Podcasts
00:33:06
Speaker
And um Emily tells us that literature has really changed. Articles are great.
00:33:11
Speaker
thinking about your preconceived notions of libraries, ah but we're seeing that a lot of information is transferred through social media and on the internet. So being able to articulate our ideas in visualizations and visual formats or an audio format in addition to writing really gives us the ability to talk to more people um and to get messages out there and to be understood in a way that we didn't have the capacity for previously. So she says students who create podcasts, videos, or graphic design projects are often more engaged because they're thinking about their audiences in new ways.
00:33:46
Speaker
um Just last week here at Syracuse, we announced the Center for Creative Economy, which is the first kind on a college campus focusing on building real world, ah real world skills in media entrepreneurship and digital strategy. And I bet we're going to see some collaborations there with the Syracuse library. So maybe a good resource for them to think about how we can continue to so support this creator economy that we see our students involved.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me in this crossover episode. It's been wonderful to have this conversation and share what we're doing in the MLIS program with both Infoversity and Library Leads audience.
00:34:28
Speaker
Well, this has been great. I've enjoyed it. I always enjoyed it. My fellow UW. That makes sense. this This concludes our first ever crossode crossover episode. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, please check out both podcasts. You can find Infoversity wherever you get your podcasts. That's the official podcast of Syracuse University School of Information Studies, where we explore how information, technology, and data are reshaping our world.
00:34:58
Speaker
If you're interested in learning more about the Masters of Science in Library and Information Science program at Syracuse, please visit ischool.syr.edu. We'd love to hear from you.
00:35:09
Speaker
And of course, of course, keep listening to Libraries Lead, where my co-hosts Dave Lankus, Mike Eisenberg, and I will continue to wrestle with the big questions facing libraries, information systems, and the communities they serve.
00:35:22
Speaker
Thanks again to our partner, Library Journal, for services and support. Library Journal is available on the web at libraryjournal.com and on its social media platforms. Please subscribe, pretty please, and rate us. This is how we get new viewers. Rate us, please, on Apple, iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And again, our resources and references um are always available through our website at librarieslead.libraryjournal.org. Until next time, keep leading with libraries and keep making the world more informed, equitable, and a connected place.
00:35:58
Speaker
Thanks for listening, Irv. Bye, y'all.