Review of Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship (2025) by R. David Lankes, Jain Orr, and Qianzi Cao. Self-published, 89pp, $25.00

by Joel Blechinger

R. David Lankes, Jain Orr, and Qianzi Cao’s new book Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship is a wildly uneven text.¹ Within any one of its sections—even across the span of several pages—Lankes may genuinely provoke the reader only to follow up a compelling insight with a nearly meaningless declarative statement. Though, as its title page asserts, Triptych is published “in association” with Library Journal, what this association amounts to is promotional muscle,² and, regrettably, not editorial assistance. Lankes—Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin’s iSchool and author of past titles from MIT Press, like 2011’s The Atlas of New Librarianship and 2016’s The New Librarianship Field Guide—elected to self-publish Triptych due to the urgency of the topics he covers.³ While working one’s way through the short text, one wishes that its author would have felt perhaps less urgency to meet the moment and more desire to shape and refine the book’s arguments.

Triptych consists of three related lectures: “From Serving to Saving,” “AI, Joy, and Social Connectedness,” and “Librarians and Their Feral Kin.” These sections are rounded out by a foreword, a brief introduction, a glossary (where Lankes attempts to clarify some of his key terminology), a short coda, and a separate “supplement” (“Librarians and the ‘Loneliness Epidemic’”) authored by Orr. The high-level arguments that Lankes makes in each lecture are relatively easy to gloss, though, in each section, he tends to indulge in confusing digressions that—had he not chosen to go the self-publishing route—a skilled editor likely could have reined in. “From Serving to Saving” is, as its title suggests, about how “we in librarianship must focus on saving lives” in response to “deaths of despair.”⁴ Along the way, Lankes digresses—with varying degrees of coherence—on the importance of narrative, the threat posed by the parental rights movement, the war currently being waged on libraries by American courts, abandoning neutrality for “professionalism,” how more librarians and teachers need to run for office, and, finally, he recounts a story about an extremely alienated Uber driver that served him in Springfield, Illinois.

“AI, Joy, and Social Connectedness” is, by far, the weakest of Lankes’ lectures, and, as a result, perhaps the hardest to try to summarize. As far as I have been able to piece together from combing through the section multiple times, essentially, Lankes’ argument is that libraries and librarians are facing a polycrisis comprised of “dark and hard topics,”⁵ including climate catastrophe, war, the decline of western democracies, book banning, social media-fueled disinformation and alienation, deaths of despair, and pandemics. In the face of this polycrisis, Lankes suggests that librarians must choose joy, and reinvest in their local communities, perhaps abandoning the rigidity of the universalizing and standardizing tendencies inherited from what he terms “the industrial library.”⁶ Due to generative artificial intelligence’s (GenAI’s) emergence and the public’s increased skepticism of all media, Lankes indicates that a new information literacy is also now required, and that librarians need to work to rebuild trust in their communities through movement building and storytelling. In ways that are not exactly specified, however, librarians also “need to experiment with and influence AI tools to ensure fairness and ethical standards”⁷ and “try AI in open sessions with the community.”⁸

Finally, Lankes’ last lecture, “Librarians and Their Feral Kin,” jumps off from his own experiences touring Dutch libraries, which—according to Lankes—are innovative and responsive to their communities’ needs despite the fact that the Netherlands ceased granting formal library degrees in the mid-1990s. This leads Lankes to consider whether library science degree programs in North America may be “instruments of inertia”⁹ and to argue for an expanded definition of “librarian” beyond formal degree-holding individuals. He urges the profession to embrace so-called “feral librarians”: “cadres of librarians who took alternative paths into the profession … [that] have been instrumental in forming a new librarianship, one of constant reinvention.”¹⁰ In one of the book’s most provocative stretches, Lankes entertains the possibility of the end of centralized, ALA-approved credentialing for library professionals in the United States, and analyzes what might in the future be a patchwork, state-based system. The assumption is that, with states like Texas working to remove the ALA-degree requirement from its definition of librarian, and other states like Georgia actively militating against the ALA, library programs should take this as an opportunity to reenvision library education and to extend an olive branch to those innovating in the profession that may not, strictly speaking, hold ALA-accredited master’s degrees.

While better written and certainly more focused than Lankes’ lectures, Orr’s supplemental essay feels tacked on to the volume, and her argument actually reads as if it contradicts some of Lankes’ earlier points from his first lecture about the urgent life-saving project of librarianship. Orr problematizes popular framings of the “loneliness epidemic,” suggesting that such views are illustrative of a moral panic that “obscures the deeper aspects of economic and social responsibility required to adequately address the issue [of loneliness].”¹¹ Curiously, it is in Orr’s piece that capitalism receives its sole mention in the book, despite Lankes’ obsession with what one might term many of its morbid symptoms in the bulk of the text. Orr’s conclusion regarding libraries’ role in counteracting loneliness is much less ambitious than Lankes’ and definitely lacks his missionary zeal: “Whether we like it or not, libraries are already serving as social infrastructure to help people cope with loneliness. Instead, I believe that to the extent that libraries exist, they already do as much as can be done.”¹² Orr is given the last word on the matter in Triptych via the placement of the essay, which is strange because it effectively qualifies—if not undermines—Lankes’ impassioned first lecture.

As other reviews of Triptych have identified,¹³ the book’s strength lies in Lankes’ bold approach to making his points, which could perhaps make it a worthwhile read to inform a larger group discussion in a book club or staff development day setting. For example, though Lankes is aware of Fobazi Ettarh’s concept of “vocational awe”¹⁴ and emphasizes that he “[is] also calling for supporting the library workforce”¹⁵ while proselytizing his salvific vision for libraries, spirited debate would likely ensue in any library workplace about how realizable a non-vocational awe-inspiring life-saving library raison d'être could even be. Similarly, Lankes’ call to embrace “feral librarians” is sure to ignite a powder keg of feelings around deprofessionalization, as was noted by Kuehn in his review.¹⁶ Where the book falls short repeatedly, however, is in Lankes’ aversion to offering many specifics, and this paucity of detail in his arguments will probably also limit useful discussion of his ideas due to his persistent lack of focus or clarity.

In addition to Lankes’ overtly stated views on AI explored in both his glossary and his second lecture, the reader of Triptych also has to navigate the GenAI content that he chooses to thread throughout the text. At the book’s outset, Lankes includes an AI disclaimer where he shares that the “conversation starters” at each section’s end have been created with Google’s NotebookLM, and that the book’s many images are products of Midjourney and ChatGPT. He is quick to emphasize his own oversight of the GenAI tools, his responsibility for their output, and even that his use of such tools “will be a deal breaker for a lot of people.”¹⁷ Lankes’ justification for using GenAI in Triptych is fairly standard: he views it as a tool that he needs to actively try out in order to comprehend it better, and that, ultimately, he “look[s] to engage in a conversation about AI, the mission of librarians, and its impact in society”¹⁸ that will, presumably, be brought about through his own GenAI use in the text. As evinced by Lankes’ release in February 2026 of an “AI free” version of Triptych, in his own words “a conversation was indeed had,”¹⁹ though I have not been able to corroborate where exactly this conversation may have taken place.

Overall, one wonders why Lankes’ GenAI experimentation necessarily had to make its way into the published work. It is puzzling that he manages to be simultaneously sensitive to the host of epistemological issues raised by the flood of GenAI content online and the consequent erosion of public trust (see lecture two), yet he then integrates GenAI images—even if disclaimed as such—so cavalierly into his own book. He is right to note—as he does in the blog post announcing the “AI free” edition—that Triptych’s GenAI elements, most markedly its images, “[introduce] a sort of fatigue when engaging the text.”²⁰ In addition to fatigue, Lankes is also correct in identifying (in the same blog post) that the inclusion of the AI-generated images—along with a not insignificant number of typos and awkward phrasing errors—works to sow seeds of doubt in the reader regarding the book’s other elements that are ostensibly GenAI free.

For several years now, I have been fascinated to observe that the readerly experience is consistently, even programmatically, elided in contemporary AI discourse. Just as the brashest AI boosters only ever tend to imagine themselves as the dynamic human-in-the-loop leveraging agentic AI to automate tasks and never the workers whose quality of work has been severely degraded (if not whose jobs have been entirely eliminated by AI automation), the same figures rarely, if ever, acknowledge what it might feel like to interface with reams of AI-generated content. In our present world of automated summary and synthesis, perhaps the implicit expectation is that—in line with so-called “dead internet theory”²¹—no one will ever “read” generated text in a traditional sense, aside from other peoples’ agents who will then retrieve the “content,” serving it back to the user as part of a synthesis matrix or enhanced with now “helpful” executive summary-styled headers and bullet points. Though Lankes claims to not have used GenAI to write Triptych’s main text, his approach to using the technology to craft his “conversation starters” and to output a cache of—completely superfluous and deeply irritating—GenAI images exhibits a similar hostility to the act of reading that he seems to have only become aware of retrospectively and partially. As I have noted in a past review of a more generalist AI text, Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence,²² works like Co-Intelligence (and now Triptych) can ultimately be read against the grain as symptoms of publishing in the AI age. My conclusion here is nearly identical to the one I reached after making my way through Mollick’s book: this is an age where having bold ideas without meaningful specifics to support them can seemingly get one farther and farther by the day, where book-like objects are rapidly replacing books, and where a fundamentally degraded experience of reading is itself becoming increasingly ordinary.

Notes

• 1. Though Triptych is attributed to Lankes with Jain Orr and Qianzi Cao, the main body of the book reads as if it has been solely authored by Lankes. Only one section of the text—its closing “supplement”—is attributed to Orr, and it is not clear what Cao’s contribution to the volume is. As a result, I will be referring to Lankes as the sole author of the text in the rest of this review for simplicity’s sake, and I will refer to Orr when discussing her contribution of the supplement section.
• 2. R. David Lankes, “An Urgent Conversation: AI and Librarianship,” Words & Money, July 11, 2025, https://www.wordsandmoney.com/an-urgent-conversation/.
• 3. Lankes, “An Urgent Conversation.”
• 4. R. David Lankes, Jain Orr, and Qianzi Cao, Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship (pub. by author, 2025), 14-15.
• 5. Lankes et al., Triptych, 39.
• 6. Lankes et al., Triptych, 42.
• 7. Lankes et al., Triptych, 51.
• 8. Lankes et al., Triptych, 54.
• 9. Lankes et al., Triptych, 63.
• 10. Lankes et al., Triptych, 61.
• 11. Lankes et al., Triptych, 83.
• 12. Lankes et al., Triptych, 84.
• 13. Evan F. Kuehn, “Review of Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship,” Theological Librarianship 18, no. 2 (2025): 48–50, https://serials.atla.com/theolib/article/view/4440; Emily W. Blevins, “Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship,” Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries 22, no. 3 (2025): 131–32, https://doi.org/10.1080/15424065.2025.2546041.
• 14. Fobazi Ettarh, “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves,” In the Library With the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018, https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/.
• 15. Lankes et al., Triptych, 38.
• 16. Kuehn, “Review of Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship,” 49.
• 17. Lankes et al., Triptych, v.
• 18. Lankes et al., Triptych, v.
• 19. R. David Lankes. “AI Free* Version of Triptych Now Available.” R. David Lankes (blog), February 2, 2026. https://davidlankes.org/ai-free-version-of-triptych-now-available/.
• 20. Lankes, “AI Free* Version of Triptych Now Available.”
• 21. Robert Mariani, “The Dead Internet to Come,” The New Atlantis 73 (2023): 34–42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27244117.
• 22. Joel Blechinger, “Review of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI,” Journal of Radical Librarianship 10 (2024): 63–65, https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/113.

Bibliography

• Blechinger, Joel. “Review of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI.” Journal of Radical Librarianship 10 (2024): 63–65. https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/113.
• Blevins, Emily W. “Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship.” Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries 22, no. 3 (2025): 131–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/15424065.2025.2546041.
• Ettarh, Fobazi. “Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves.” In the Library With the Lead Pipe, January 10, 2018. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
• Kuehn, Evan F. “Review of Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship.” Theological Librarianship 18, no. 2 (2025): 48–50. https://serials.atla.com/theolib/article/view/4440.
• Lankes, R. David. “AI Free* Version of Triptych Now Available.” R. David Lankes (blog), February 2, 2026. https://davidlankes.org/ai-free-version-of-triptych-now-available/.
• Lankes, R. David. “An Urgent Conversation: AI and Librarianship.” Words & Money, July 11, 2025. https://www.wordsandmoney.com/an-urgent-conversation/.
• Lankes, R. David, Jain Orr, and Qianzi Cao. Triptych: Death, AI, and Librarianship. Published by the author, 2025.
• Mariani, Robert. “The Dead Internet to Come.” The New Atlantis, no. 73 (2023): 34–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27244117.