Lorcan Dempsey.net

This is an excerpt from a longer contribution I made to Responses to the LIS Forward Position Paper: Ensuring a Vibrant Future for LIS in iSchools. [pdf] It is a sketch only, and somewhat informal, but I thought I would put it here in case of interest. It occasionally references the position paper, and the longer piece of which it is a part. It is also influenced by the context in which it was prepared which was a discussion of the informational disciplines and the iSchool in R1 institutions.

This is an excerpt from a longer contribution I made to Responses to the LIS Forward Position Paper: Ensuring a Vibrant Future for LIS in iSchools. [pdf] It is a sketch only, and somewhat informal, but I thought I would put it here in case of interest. I have not revised it. This is the introduction and summary, and it extensively references the full response and the Position Paper itself. I link to the position paper, my response, and sections excerpted here below.

This is an excerpt from a longer contribution I made to Responses to the LIS Forward Position Paper: Ensuring a Vibrant Future for LIS in iSchools. [pdf] It is a sketch only, and somewhat informal, but I thought I would put it here in case of interest. It occasionally references the position paper. It is also influenced by the context in which it was prepared which was a discussion of the informational disciplines and the iSchool in R1 institutions.

This is an excerpt from a longer contribution I made to Responses to the LIS Forward Position Paper: Ensuring a Vibrant Future for LIS in iSchools [pdf]. It is a sketch only, and somewhat informal, but I thought I would put it here in case of interest. It is also influenced by the context in which it was prepared which was a discussion of the informational disciplines and the iSchool in R1 institutions.

Cliff has left a major legacy and a large gap. Read the touching tributes from ARL and CNI. I first met Cliff in 1990. I was on a study trip to the US and Canada, commissioned by the British Library to prepare a report on emerging network trends in libraries, with a special emphasis on the US. It was an early activity associated with UKOLN at the University of Bath, which the BL partly funded (the UK Office for Library and Information Networking, which has since ceased to exist).

This is an excerpt from a contribution I made to Responses to the LIS Forward Position Paper: Ensuring a Vibrant Future for LIS in iSchools. It is a sketch only, and somewhat informal, but I thought I would put it here in case of interest. In the unlikely event you would like to reference it, I would be grateful if you cite the full original: Dempsey, L. (2025). Library Studies, the Informational Disciplines, and the iSchool: Some Remarks Prompted by LIS Forward.

Introduction: boundaries between reading, interaction and workflow are blurring It is useful to think about AI as a new cultural technology, a phrase development psychologist Alison Gopnik has been using. Instead, these AI systems are what we might call cultural technologies, like writing, print, libraries, internet search engines or even language itself. They are new techniques for passing on information from one group of people to another.

I am trying something new. I have recently been presenting about AI and libararies. I have annotated and augmented the presentation so that it is a little more self-standing than my usual more elliptical powerpoints. By the messy middle, I mean that libraries are having to grapple with real questions about AI deployment, procurement and use. They may participate in discussions about bold futures or about grave risks.

Smile is a very engaging novel. It is the most popular of Raina Telgemeier's works, if measured by Amazon sales. I bought it last year, prompted by the enormously successful exhibition about her work at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University. The graphic novel version came out just too late to be a big part of our own children's reading, so I was not familiar with it before.

We can recognize the importance of 'soft skills' while acknowledging that 'soft' has multiple associations that may be misleadingly at variance with the importance of those skills. In this post, I look at some contexts which are making such skills both more visible and more important before making some general concluding observations. It is clear that such skills are core needs for the library which is increasingly networked, relational and community focused.