Andrew Cox is the author of the forthcoming book AI for the Information Professional: A Critical Guide, an important work for all information professionals.
In this interview, he discusses the cultural narratives surrounding artificial intelligence, their implications for libraries, and the themes covered in his writing.
Please introduce yourself.
I am a senior lecturer at the School of Information, Journalism and Communication at the University of Sheffield in the UK. I have been there about 20 years. We are an iSchool. My research has often been about how academic librarians develop new roles, so some of my first work was around RDM, then around wellbeing, and most recently about AI.
As well as having authored many recent peer-reviewed journal articles on AI and my forthcoming book from Facet Publishing, I am co-author of the 2025 book, AI for Knowledge, published by CRC Press.
I am convenor of the IFLA Special Interest Group on AI, which has been quite active in trying to bring a broad understanding of AI to librarians, regardless of sector or geographical location. I am also a former chair of ASIS&T’s AI Special Interest Group (SIG AI).
Briefly summarize AI for the Information Professional: A Critical Guide.
I seek to do three things:
1) Explore the cultural meaning of AI in an open-ended way, encouraging the reader to recognize it as an idea that they can resist/question/influence, albeit also as an industry with a material reality and a focus on geopolitical struggle, or a rather banal set of technologies.
2) Think about how AI might be used by libraries and impact libraries in both a conceptual and practical way.
3) Link AI to the importance of narratives. We use narratives, including fictions, in professional life, such as in design scenarios, or in developing future strategy or ethics scenarios. By engaging with narratives and writing, the reader can explore the concept of AI in an open-ended way.
Why did you decide to write this book?
I wanted to express how I see AI—as an interesting idea—the many stories, metaphors, and discourses around AI (evolving, exciting, powerful, opaque, dangerous, resistible, trivial, annoying) and either a central story, a distraction, a recurrent myth.
What are two things you hope all readers take away?
I hope the book provides a starting point for exploring the complex cultural debate around AI, and also its concrete implications for everyday library work. I hope it highlights the genuine value of narrative imagination in professional work and in research.
In what ways do you see the role of the LIS professional changing in the next 10 years due to AI?
A decade is a long timeframe for prediction. AI’s evolution (as an idea and as a technology) is unpredictable, and there are many other uncertainties changing our world with which AI will interact. AI is rapid access to information. AI is uncertainty. AI is inequality. AI is war. AI is geopolitical struggle. AI is both a financial savior and a bubble.
Yet your question is a good one, challenging us to think beyond the horizon of institutional strategies. The LIS role has certain enduring values, such as promoting the sharing of knowledge of all kinds. Through the decolonization debate, we have realized that we have not always fully understood how to do this.
AI, in the same way, may reshape our understanding of our core values without totally transforming them. With generative AI, accuracy comes to the fore. With both generative AI and agentic AI, the question of human agency and expression is at the fore.
The ways that AI interacts with information to both create overload and slop and to filter information will be of continuing concern.
This is all exciting—and alarming—but I believe that librarians who curate and advocate for equitable information access remain important.
For those interested in continuing to learn beyond this book, what other resources do you recommend on this topic?
Read speculative fiction about AI, read some of the many reports being published outside the library sector, and if possible, read grey literature; peer-reviewed LIS literature is not really keeping up.
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