Librarians have often stood at the precipice of massive changes in information technology: the dawn of the fax machine, the internet, Wikipedia and now the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which has been creeping its way into classrooms. “This does change things, but in a very good way,” said R. David Lankes, the Virginia and Charles Bowden Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin. “Librarians, every decade or so, are getting good at dealing with an existential crisis of ‘Do we need librarians?’ But with this one they’ve been very open to embrace, discuss and analyze this.”
