Today, we’re diving into a topic that’s near and dear to us: the pathways into librarianship and the broader information professions—the credentials, the professional development, and, honestly, the things we didn’t learn in library school.

Right now, higher education is being squeezed from every direction. Financial pressures are mounting with cuts to research and development funding, and uncertainty around international student enrollment is making things even more complicated. This has ripple effects for library and information science degree programs, continuing education, and the critical training we need for support staff who are the backbone of library and information services.

We all bring perspectives from both sides of the desk. We’ve been librarians, taught in highly ranked LIS programs, and worked directly with librarians, library staff, and information workers on the ground every day.

In this episode, we explore what’s happening on campuses and in libraries, how professional pathways are shifting, and where the future of librarianship and the information field might be headed. Stick around as we unpack the challenges, opportunities, and maybe a few surprises about what it really takes to build and sustain a career in the library and information world.

This semester (Autumn 2025), Dave is teaching a course off AI in Cultural Heritage Institutions. For that he is talking with global experts in libraries and museums about AI and its impact.

We offer some of these conversations as bonus episodes, and here’s the first:

Aaron Chaote is Director of Research & Strategy at the University of Texas Libraries. He focuses, “on research and innovation in libraries, archives, and museums - working with and studying the impact technology innovations have on systems and services and the people that rely on them.”

Aaron and Dave talk about creating AI catalog records with “confidence scores.” The result is (perhaps) better access, but without human validation or sign off. Hmmm...we wonder, will libraries and librarians now have to to accept more randomness and less authority in our work.

There has been an assault on knowledge institutions in the past 8 months. Added to attacks on libraries are attempts to shape and control universities, museums, and federal agencies like the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the National Institutes of Health. Besides executive actions, there have been important judicial decisions that have massive implications for libraries, such as defining libraries as government speech and challenging book banning laws.

The goal of these attacks on our knowledge institutions is "enDumbification." "Dumbification" refers to the act or process of making something less informative or someone less intelligent, often to the point of decline in critical thinking skills. The prefix "en-" generally means "in," "into," or "cause to be" indicating a state of being or transformation.

In this episode, we dig into this ongoing enDumbification, aka epistemicide, playing out across our cultural and educational institutions. From the Smithsonian framing history through a sanitized, white-centered lens, to school curricula that erase Indigenous, Black, and marginalized perspectives, we’re seeing a dangerous pattern of knowledge destruction. It’s showing up in the surge of book bans targeting authors of color and LGBTQ+ voices, and in political moves from the Department of Education that suppress critical inquiry. We’re also living in a media landscape where celebrity fitness trainers like Jillian Michaels are bizarrely asked by major news outlets to comment on the legacy of slavery, while PragerU’s agenda-driven videos are floated as replacements for trusted information sources like PBS. It's time for us to talk about how we respond when truth itself is under siege.