The Practitioner

For librarians who don\'t have time for this, or who don\'t want to read a practitioner\'s take, close the document. You\'re not my intended audience.

This reflects my personal experiences, interpretations, and opinions based on past roles and publicly available information. It is not a statement of current practices or a claim of undisclosed wrongdoing. It is not professional, legal, or technical advice.

For the rest of you… buckle in. You\'re in for an honest, wild, fucking ride. Also, my memory is shit, so it\'s possible I'm misremembering some details (hell, it was over 10 years ago).

The AI Discourse Gives You Two Options, and Neither Helps Monday Morning

The AI discourse gives you two options: engage or refuse.

Neither one helps you Monday morning.

The practitioner's position is a third option.

Build enough understanding to know when a tool serves you and when it captures you. Build your own small tools when you can.

Refuse when refusal makes sense.

Engage when engagement makes sense.

The goal is agency, not ideology.

And here\'s the twist nobody\'s talking about: the AI everyone's telling you to be afraid of might be the thing that finally gets you free. If you use it on your terms.

What Eighteen Years Taught Me About Library Technology

I started my library career as employee #69 (I think) at OverDrive in 2008.

First female on the Support Team at an unknown startup in Cleveland, Ohio.

Back then we were still crammed into the old Valley View offices. The boys were ripping CDs of public domain classics in the back for audiobooks; I was one of the folks on the frontlines teaching librarians how to walk their patrons through resetting their hidden Windows DRM.

Imagine this workflow: sign into the library to retrieve your ebook hold that you've spent weeks on, then get redirected to OverDrive, then directed to sign into Adobe Reader, then transfer to a third-party Kobo/Nook with their own software.

I remember getting the Nook from the cabinet, updating it and making that first transfer. We were so excited when the firmware update came out that supported DRM-EPUBs. We (OverDrive) pushed Borders and Barnes & Noble to make their hardware compatible. We were young and naive; the tech wasn't evil… yet.

Those experiences changed me. The desperation of librarians trying to help patrons who just wanted to read a book. Why are there so many goddamn barriers? Patrons who didn\'t understand why it was so hard when the technology was supposed to make it easier. I didn\'t understand why it was so hard. I was the vendor and it was frustrating me. I went to library school because I wanted to be the change I wanted to see in the world.

How I Met The Sandusky Library

Sandusky in Ohio is basically Cedar Point, Ohio. I had no idea growing up that Sandusky was even a town. We just went to "Cedar Point!". Turns out, it\'s real. Back in the late 2000s, I think there was 25 or 50k, I can\'t remember. Small enough not to know how the fuck they were.

Before shit started hitting the fan in the late 2000s, libraries were flushed with money in Ohio. Seriously, as an Ohio resident, living in Cleveland which is Cuyahoga County, here\'s all I could access to - Cleveland Public Library (& branches); Cuyahoga County (& branches); State Library of Ohio and I\'m sure so many other wonderful services. I don\'t remember the story, but somehow libraries were able to squeeze into the State of Ohio\'s annual budget. Don't get too excited. It was like a sliver of a percent. Pennies, like… "please sir, may I have another" penny. No rags to riches over there. BUT, it helped. A lot.

All the while, I'm pumping out library school. Balls to the wall; trying to crank through that shit so I could get a promotion at OverDrive. We had just switched into different titles and I was an account manager. With how quickly OverDrive was growing, I was hoping to transition into a higher level position. Hell, they sent me to Alaska for a 45 minute presentation. Yup. They had a slot as a conference speaker that year.

I went to Kent State, they required a 100 hour practicum to complete their program. This was going to be tricky with work, but I assumed with all the opportunities around me. I'd be fine. No. I quickly learned, CPL and CCPL were/are unions at the time, so practicum students were sidelined and not many openings otherwise. There was no opportunity. There was no other option but to delay graduation. Sucks, but not having to pay those undergrad student loans for a few extra months was kinda nice. I had come to terms with it.

I watched the list-serve early that semester and noticed an email from a director was forwarded through. They were looking for a practicum student to help them with technology. And it reads like my ideal practicum experience… help them get going with tech. That's my jam! But the Library was an hour away, closed at 8PM and open a few hours on Saturday. There was no way I could get the practicum hours done in time. Super cool opportunity… for someone else.

Is late in 2010, and I mean December 31 late. OverDrive Advantage had just started to kick off that fall, the Digital Bookmobile was touring, we were busy.

The way the OverDrive platform was built at the time was for single system/county library with multiple branches. Consortiums were a totally different ball game because of the cataloging and lending rules. Holy fuck. So. Many. Goddamn. Rules.

Somehow they "figured it out" (aka I have no idea where patron data was going at the time; I\'m sure it\'s fine now) and opened up this Advantage program so members of the consortium could purchase titles for their patrons. Super thoughtful, right?

At that time, libraries could sign up and receive a "content credit" to exchange for their first year of platform fees. Depending on size, it ranged (I think the lowest was $2500, which is a shit ton of money for a small library!). You'd use your OverDrive credit to kick off that digital collection. Not a bad deal to receive $5,000 in content credit, and it scaled depending on size.

On paper it looks like a zero deal invoice, your platform fees were waived as a "first time signee" and you were given a content credit). Holy fucking shit. Libraries hit a little jackpot, right?

Wrong. First, platform fees. It\'s zero in year 1, but what\'s it in year 2 and 3. I have no idea what the platform fees were/are; that shit changed like the win. Depending on who you were, is what you paid (think based on serving population; not potential usage..).

Again, I\'m not a math-er and I did not put together contracts; I oversaw accounts. But… never understood how platform fees were computed, especially in year one. You\'re stuck on a shared server with no idea what resources you're using. And how do you charge for a "digital file?" But the Digital Bookmobile will come visit you! JFC.

Monday through Friday I was at OverDrive as a project manager, helping libraries set up their first ebook collections.

Anyways, what the fuck are you going to do with $5k if these digital titles were ~$100 per title, per 26 clicks. I\'m not a math-er, but Siri tells me it\'s 50. 50 goddamn titles!

And shitty ones, at best. Do you know how many Harquelin Romance titles i had to manually update the subject heading for. MANUALLY UPDATE in the "main system" called Frankie because it was FRANKENSTEINED together.

The code was shit; it was duck taped together.

Again, this was 10 years ago. I\'m sure they have a solid full stack nowadays. They are a Corp-B, right? Have you asked them? Aside from AWS servers… where else are they using your patron\'s data? Just curious.

There was an embargo so you couldn't get best sellers until they were 6 months out.

SO YOU WERE PREPAYING FOR CONTENT THAT YOU CAN\'T HAVE FOR ANOTHER 6 MONTHS.

Holy fuck. It was a mess. I hated every day of it. I believed in what we were doing; helping libraries launch their first digital ebook and audiobook collections.

Anyways, Saturdays I was at Sandusky Library for my practicum. Same week, both sides of the problem. I helped build the scarcity and then sat with the patrons frustrated by it.

Within three months of my practicum, I was asked to sit down with a regular patron. The reference staff called him "the crusty old dude." WTF, guys? Already throwing me to the wolves. Thanks. I helped him download ebooks to his Kobo. He was frustrated that the library didn\'t have more. The same frustration I\'d been hearing on those phone calls. I just listened and helped, for 2 hours. Painfully looking for titles that were in ebook format at Borders but not at the library. I'm sure they had plenty of Harquelin ebooks, though..

Turns out he was chair of a local foundation. I get an email from the director on a random Tuesday to my OverDrive email, fuck.

The library got $50,000. Pure luck. But I was in the chair.

Shit got real when the 26-checkout model got announced. Someone requested we not take notes; they framed it as "just informal conversation, more formal documentation to come." It never came. That\'s exactly when I knew it was my time to leave. I couldn\'t take advantage of libraries like that.

I won a Library Journal Mover & Shaker award that year for digital literacy programs, eReader lending, and the foundation donation. This was my first taste of: if you can\'t beat them, join them. We purchased 24 Nooks, loaded them with NYT bestsellers we couldn\'t get through OverDrive, and lent the devices. When we noticed the streaming divide (Netflix wasn\'t in everyone\'s home yet) we purchased Roku boxes with WiFi hotspots and lent those too.

I realized I couldn't "bridge the digital divide" myself, but I could find ways to provide everyone the opportunity. The Library was giving patrons their agency back.

Then retirements happened, leadership philosophies changed, and technology (me) wasn't part of the new vision. I stuck around in libraries as an administrator, but became restless missing the practitioner part.

Eventually I landed at a software company that Baker & Taylor had acquired. Customer success this time, not support. Entirely different ball game when you're wining and dining directors for contracts.

I watched a sales director buy Johnnie Walker Blue Label at Elway's Steak House. Fifty bucks a pour, after a three-course meal for ten. Just to keep one large library account happy. That contract increased 7% automatically, annually. The dinner was a rounding error.

Every time. Find something libraries need. Wrap it in a subscription. Build in switching costs. Extract until the host dies or someone builds an alternative.

Trellis charging for what Google does free. OverDrive building artificial scarcity into digital books. OCLC suing over MARC records like metadata is a profit center. (MARC is the standardized cataloging format libraries depend on. Think of it as the metadata backbone.) Baker & Taylor ignoring practitioners until the whole thing collapsed.

Same pattern.

Four industries over eighteen years.

Same pattern every time.

The people with power protect their position. The people doing the work get squeezed. The customers have no exit.

I\'ve seen this pattern enough times that I can recognize it before it finishes playing out. That\'s not wisdom. It's scar tissue.

And it's fucking exhausting.

The Pattern Has a Name: Enshittification

I\'ll be honest: I never paid much attention to Cory Doctorow. Corny sci-fi covers, big academic words. Not for me. I don\'t do polished. I do "what the fuck is happening and how do we fix it."

But when I finally sat down with his work, it was the same damn message. Platforms start helpful, solving an actual problem. Then they squeeze users to serve their investors. Then they extract maximum value before the whole thing collapses and you're left holding the bag. Enshittification.

His words are prettier. Mine have more swearing. Same diagnosis.

There\'s another pattern underneath. Librarianship is 80% women. It\'s been systematically devalued for a century. The same playbook that turned teaching and nursing into underpaid, overworked, feminized professions happened to libraries. And one of the ways that devaluation works is through tool dependency. You don\'t give the nurses control over the medical records system. You don\'t give the teachers control over the curriculum platform. You don\'t give the librarians control over the ILS. (That\'s Integrated Library System. The software that runs circulation, cataloging, everything.) You make them tenants. You make them dependent. You make them ask permission to access their own work.

Enshittification isn\'t just a business model. It\'s just what it is. How else are they going to leech money out of you? (Cough:: give us your ideas in a customer panel, so we can turn you for it once we release it 6 months later, with bugs. That drifted out of your original scope.

I was on Facebook when it was thefacebook.com; when you needed an .edu email to get an account. Somewhere there\'s a picture of me in a toga from those early days. I watched it turn into what it is now. I\'m so disgusted that thinking about Facebook gives me anxiety. I've cut myself off from my own family because I refuse to use it.

That\'s not ideology. That\'s scar tissue.

I\'ve watched this arc so many times I can predict the beats. Platform launches, platform helps, platform captures, platform extracts, platform collapses or becomes unrecognizable. Facebook. OverDrive. Baker & Taylor. Trellis Law. The names change. The pattern doesn\'t.

I left startups eighteen months ago as a Director of Customer Success in legal tech. Burnt out. Chewed up and spit out. I had reached a career goal, salary milestone, only to find that I had become enshittified. I had nothing left to give; I had no agency.

I\'m Not Against AI. I\'m Against Enshittification.

Give people what they need and get out of the way. That\'s it. That\'s the whole philosophy.

Build tools that solve problems without creating dependencies. Don\'t capture data you don\'t need. Don\'t lock people into contracts they can\'t exit. Don't buy $50 pours of whiskey to keep accounts while your product rots.

Here's where my head explodes: how are we going to turn our backs on the one tool that could actually free us?

Yes, the LLMs scraped everything. Anna\'s Archive. The open web. They ripped the whole internet without asking. I\'m not pretending that's clean.

But OCLC has been hoarding and monetizing information that should be shared for fifty years. Suing libraries over MARC records. Treating metadata like a profit center. And the LLMs just... did it anyway. Scraped it all. Got too big to sue.

The old gatekeepers are screaming about theft while standing on fifty years of gatekeeping.

The tool that exploited us is the same tool that can free us from the people who\'ve been exploiting us longer. That\'s not a comfortable position.

We don't get clean hands. We get choices.

I know the counterargument: just because OCLC is bad doesn\'t make OpenAI good. That\'s logically valid. Philosophers call it tu quoque, the appeal to hypocrisy. I\'m not making a moral equivalence argument. I\'m making a leverage argument. The harm already happened. I can't undo the scraping. What I can do is use the resulting tool to build things that free practitioners from systems that have been extracting from them for decades.

That\'s not absolution. That\'s judo.

OCLC spent fifty years suing anyone who tried to share metadata. Now I can build an ILS that doesn\'t need their blessing. OverDrive built artificial scarcity. Now I can build a platform where authors submit directly. Baker & Taylor told me my ideas weren\'t good enough. Now they're bankrupt and my ILS is running.

Practitioners don't get clean hands. We get leverage.

The Practitioner: A Definition

A practitioner is someone who knows their domain well enough to guide a tool, constrain it, and shut it down when it's wrong. Not an expert who hoards knowledge. Not a user who pushes buttons. Someone with enough understanding to make judgment calls in real time.

Three components:

Domain knowledge. You have to actually understand the work. If you don\'t know your field, you won\'t know when the tool is lying to you. AI doesn't replace judgment. It exposes the absence of it.

Tool fluency. You have to know what the tool can and can't do. Not worship it, not fear it. Understand it well enough to use it deliberately.

Judgment. You have to know when to stop. When to override. When the output is technically responsive but contextually wrong. This is the part that can't be automated.

A patron comes to the desk: "My daughter needs books about death, she's seven, something happened."

A librarian with domain knowledge knows this isn\'t a subject search. This is a readers" advisory interview wrapped in a reference question wrapped in a human being in pain. They know the difference between didactic "explaining death to children" books and narrative fiction where a character experiences loss.

Tool fluency means knowing that "books about death for children" will get you a generic list, half not in your catalog. You ask for "middle grade fiction featuring grandmother loss with gentle treatment" and cross-reference your holdings.

Judgment is the moment the AI suggests "Bridge to Terabithia" and you think: great book about loss, but that death is sudden and traumatic. This kid's grandmother probably had a slow decline. Different grief. You make the call.

The AI is just helping you see the road. You're driving.

How I Make Decisions Now

Practitioner judgment isn\'t intuition or vibes. It\'s a repeatable process.

1. Name the problem. "We need AI" is not a problem. "Staff spend six hours weekly cleaning MARC records" is a problem. If you can\'t describe it in one sentence, you're shopping, not solving.

2. Assess leverage. Three questions:

• Can we turn this off without breaking core services?
• Can we export our data in a usable format?
• What happens if the vendor disappears tomorrow?

If all three answers are no, proceed as if you're being captured. Because you are.

3. Choose a posture.

• Engage when exit is possible and the tool serves your goals.
• Refuse when risks outweigh benefits or the tool can't be explained.
• Build when neither option works.

Building doesn\'t mean build everything yourself. It means build the smallest thing that gives you leverage you didn\'t have before.

4. Constrain scope. Minimum data. Minimum users. Minimum time. Scope creep is how experiments become liabilities.

5. Test in the wild. If it only works in demos, it doesn\'t work. If staff hate it, it doesn\'t work.

6. Decide. Keep it, kill it, or formalize it. Killing a tool is a success when it prevents long-term harm.

Seven Questions That Will Piss Off Your Vendor

If you can\'t answer yes to at least three, you're being captured:

1. We can export our data in a non-proprietary format.
2. We control our own data schema.
3. The system runs in degraded mode if the vendor goes offline.
4. Pricing scales with usage, not dependency.
5. Core workflows are documented and understandable by staff.
6. Contract termination doesn't penalize exit.
7. We could replace this system within 90 days.

Good vendors pass this easily. They're not afraid of you having options.

Bad vendors rely on you never asking. Run your current ILS through this list. Run your ebook platform. See what happens.

Start Small. Start Now.

If you do nothing else after reading this:

Reread one vendor contract with exit in mind. Look for data export clauses. Termination penalties. What happens to your workflows if you leave.

Identify one workflow that could be solved with a disposable tool. Something annoying. Repetitive. Something you've accepted as permanent. Build something small enough to delete without regret. A form. A script. A dashboard. Document it. Something that takes an afternoon, not a quarter.

If it works? Put some back into the ecosystem. Sponsor an open-source project. Buy from a local author. Hire a local designer.

You develop judgment by making things, breaking them, and choosing when to stop.

If you want to build it with me: unhingedlibrarian.com

What Control Actually Feels Like

I have a kid now. And I think about this constantly.

I don't want him controlled by the algorithm. Optimized and engagement-hacked and dopamine-looped into whatever platform figured out how to capture his attention.

I\'ve seen where that road goes. I\'ve got the toga pictures and the family estrangement to prove it.

I want him to use technology. Responsibly. Not dependently. To build things, break things, understand how it works well enough to know when it's working him.

But mostly I want him to know what it feels like to turn it off.

Not sleep mode. Not closing the laptop. Actually powering down. Walking away. Going outside. Feeling the absence of the thing and being okay with it.

That\'s the practitioner\'s position in one sentence: knowing when to turn it off.

Can you turn this off? Can you walk away? Do you control it, or does it control you?

The librarian who can power down the AI assistant and help the patron herself? That's a practitioner.

The library that can switch off the vendor platform and keep serving the community? That's agency.

The kid who can close the laptop and go outside without feeling like he\'s missing something? That\'s freedom.

I didn't write all this about AI and enshittification and vendor capture to end with a parenting metaphor.

But here we are. Because it's the same lesson at every scale.

Give people what they need and get out of the way.

Build tools that serve instead of capture.

Know when to turn it off.

That\'s librarianship, right? Knowing when to stop exploring other people\'s ideas so you can form your own.