Open by default: UCC's new Open Access and Research Outputs Policy

 In this blog post, Libfocus Team Member Hardy Schwamm, who works at University College Cork's Library as Head of Research Services, explains how UCC’s new Open Access and Research Outputs Policy came about, what it asks of researchers, and what the Library found when it set out to measure what the University really pays to publish.

On 5 June 2026, Academic Council approved UCC's new Open Access and Research Outputs Policy. It applies to research outputs submitted for publication from 1 September 2026.

Its aim is simple: research produced at UCC should be free to read, for everyone, from the day it is published. Getting there raised bigger questions about cost, ownership and who shapes scholarly publishing.

The hidden cost of publishing

For the past five years, UCC Library has been piecing together something most universities cannot easily see: what we pay in Article Processing Charges (APCs) outside Ireland's national IReL read and publish agreements. Sometimes this cost is called “APCs in the Wild.” The picture is striking:

•       At UCC, about €2 million was spent on APCs for around 850 articles between 2021 and 2025, outside our IReL read and publish agreements.

•       Nearly 60% of that spend in 2025 went to four publishers with which Ireland already has IReL read and publish agreements (see Figure 1 below).

•       The spend is concentrated in medicine and health and in science, engineering and food science, and much of it comes from public research grants.

This money is spread across many individual transactions, so it rarely shows up as a single line anyone can question. It is public money paying commercial publishers to make publicly funded research public. It is often paid for articles that could have been made openly available through our own institutional repository CORA at no cost. 

Figure 1: Distribution of UCC article processing charges paid outside the IReL agreements, 2025. Source: UCC Library analysis of institutional financial data.

More than cost: who owns our knowledge?

Cost is only part of the story. Across the sector, Open Access is increasingly shaped by questions of digital autonomy and knowledge equity. Who owns the infrastructure that research depends on? Who holds the rights to published work? And does the research community set the terms of scholarly publishing, or do a small number of large commercial publishers?

Closer to home, our thinking was shaped by SCOIR, the NORF-funded Irish project whose Model Institutional Open Access Policy informed our own, alongside policies at the University of Galway and the University of Leeds. SCOIR has also developed a draft Copyright and Related Rights (Research Outputsand Open Access) Bill. It proposes that publicly funded research is deposited in open repositories, and that the right to share it is protected in law, even where a publishing contract says otherwise. SCOIR's roadshow across Irish institutions last year put the central question plainly: who owns our knowledge?

Our policy aims to answer to that question. Several parts of it are designed to keep knowledge in the hands of the research community:

•       Authors keep their rights. Through rights retention, UCC authors no longer have to sign away the right to share their own accepted manuscripts. The Library has written to publishers to give them formal notice of UCC's position. No publisher has challenged our position yet.

•       Our own infrastructure. The policy puts CORA, UCC's institutional repository, at the centre of compliance. Open Access therefore does not depend on any single publisher's platform or business model.

•       No fees for readers or authors. We support Diamond Open Access, where neither readers nor authors pay, including through the UCC Journals platform. Community-led models, from Diamond journals to Publish-Review-Curate platforms, are among the publishing options the policy is designed to make room for.

•       Fairness for researchers. UCC is committed to ensuring that no researcher is financially disadvantaged by the policy. CORA as a free repository (Green Open Access) route is always available.

•       Quality over venue. The policy aligns with the CoARA principles for responsible research assessment. Where research is published matters less than the quality of the research itself.

What the policy asks of our UCC authors

•       Make your research outputs openly available at publication, through Green, Diamond or Gold Open Access.

•       Deposit your Author Accepted Manuscript or Version of Record in Pure at publication. The Library does the rest and makes it available via CORA.

•       Add the Rights Retention Statement to your submission where you can (text available at Step 4 in our guide). The Library's notice to publishers does the legal work, so the statement is mainly a courtesy to the editor.

•       Use an open licence. Creative Commons CC BY is preferred and meets most funder requirements. Other Creative Commons licences are available where appropriate.

•       Ask for an Exception if you need one. Monographs, creative works, other non-traditional research outputs, and work with small, not-for-profit or minority-language publishers can all be considered. Exceptions are a normal, supported and compliant route, and the Open Research Coordination Group (ORCG) aims to decide within 10 working days.

Policy shaped by broad consultation

The Policy changed significantly as a result of our consultation process. Between February and May 2026, we received about 75 responses through an open survey, targeted sessions with Colleges and the PI Forum. The open survey alone drew responses from more than 20 Schools and Departments. Colleagues in the Arts, Humanities and Irish studies were especially engaged, making up around 60% of survey responses.

We listened and amended the policy which:

•       Covers non-traditional research outputs such as creative works, performances and exhibitions.

•       Has a broader list of Exceptions, including long-form works and minority-language publishing.

•       Has a publicly listed Open Research Coordination Group with disciplinary experts from every college.

•       Includes a firm commitment that no researcher will be financially disadvantaged.

University College Cork campus

 What's next

We will launch the policy formally during our launch event on 17 November 2026. The programme includes a celebration of our UCC Journals, all of which publish Diamond Open Access.

In the meantime, guidance, FAQs and the exception request form are on the Open Access Policy Supports guide. If you want to find out more about the Policy and its implementation, you can contact the Library at openaccess@ucc.ie with any questions.

Finally, a big thank you to our colleagues in the UCC Research Office (OVPRI). Developing the Policy together with the Library has been an effective and enjoyable collaboration, and it was greatly helped by the members of the UCC Open Research Coordination Group.

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Death of a Library

Well done to Alana Mahon O'Neill from DCU Library, whose blog post received a special mention in the A&SL Blog Post Competition 2026.

The competition invited library staff and LIS students based in Ireland to submit a blog post exploring how library staff, libraries and information work are portrayed across film, television, literature, art, social media, gaming, news media or other cultural formats.

For millennia, libraries have existed as temples and intellectual retreats, preserving memories and wisdom for generations of learners. Yet, consistently, as this list of destroyed libraries shows, they have been destroyed.

This can stem from natural disasters such as fire and flood, or it can be the side effect of human activities, from wartime collateral damage to religious zealotry, or simply from neglect.

                        Figure 1: The fire of Alexandria, woodcuts by Hermann Göll, 1876. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

The Library of Alexandria is the most recognisable example; once the centre of knowledge in the ancient world, it was effectively written out of history by the 4th century as described in 'The Burning of the Library of Alexandria'. From time immemorial to our present day, cultures and intellectual freedom have been under attack, but destruction doesn’t always happen overnight. This history of book burning shows that they have been occurring since antiquity. Book burnings are strongly associated with early 20th-century Nazi Germany, which in turn sparked consistent copycat demonstrations. Books don’t even need to be burned; in 2024, a Florida College Library collection was tossed in the dump under the pretence of ‘weeding'.

A death starts small. Culturicide is the destruction of heritage, but the deliberate destruction of entire libraries is libricide. The death of a library is not just material loss, but a cultural and intellectual erasure. There is a proven history, and it is senseless to ignore the pattern.

Now that we have acknowledged this very real threat, I also wanted to ask: how have we depicted this phenomenon in fiction?

Fire is the main adversary of books; it destroyed The Great Library of Unseen University in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, The Baudelaire Library in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and The Great Jedi Library in Star Wars media. Meanwhile, the deliberate act of book burning is explored in speculative fiction such as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, George Orwell’s 1984, and various historical WWII literature such as Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.

However, while researching this trope of destroyed libraries, I have noted that the vast majority of fictional libraries actually seem to survive the story’s narrative. I imagine that this is because we as humans seek ultimate knowledge and are enchanted by the concept of a library that fulfils such desire. It is simply too terrible to imagine a world without libraries; in fact, a study by Duxfield et al. found that libraries in science fiction are optimistically depicted embedded into the fabric of society.

This may be why I found practically no resource or research into the trope of the destroyed library. It certainly exists in fiction, so why don’t we talk about it? The Duxfield et al. study references Griffen’s “The reinvented library” trope, library collections gathered post-catastrophe, as the most common type of library in science fiction. This identification feels like a post-death library, a reconstruction and preservation of knowledge when knowledge is scarce, but it does not identify the violence of the death itself.

Furthermore, I find that the destruction of a library in fiction feels like a quintessential exploration of the man versus God trope. In Missing Eco, Garret explores how literature like In the Name of the Rose approaches the library’s wisdom as a sort of holy temple, and therefore an affront on God. Meanwhile, Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel explores an infinite library of knowledge, driving its users to madness. Their labyrinthine allusions refer to the winding paths users take in the pursuit of knowledge, ultimately achieving catastrophe. So in many ways, the concept of the library is also like a modern tower of Babel, articulated by Garrett as "doomed to come crashing down".

I find that the death of a library provokes a profound sense of loss. It signals difficult times ahead, and in our writing, it can even foreshadow the death of everything.

I feel like I could finish my point here. However, after everything I have declared, it now feels too provocative to suggest that a library being destroyed in fiction can be a good thing.

How can violence be used to symbolise a retributive act of justice?

I would like to talk about the 2016 film The Handmaiden. Loosely based on the 2002 novel Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, director Park Chan-wook, in his film adaptation, shifts the setting from Victorian-era Britain to Japanese-occupied Korea.

The story follows pickpocket Sook-hee, who assumes a role as a handmaid to the heiress Hideko in a plot to steal her inheritance. Meek and unassuming Hideko lives a secluded life on a countryside estate in the custody of her eccentric uncle, Kouzuki.

Kouzuki possesses a rare collection of books in his personal library. He funded this obsession by assisting the Japanese takeover and was awarded a gold mine. Books for him are worth more than gold. As described in 'The Madhouse of the Handmaiden', this obsession means that his library becomes his holy temple, its contents his religion, and a snake guards the door, protecting its divine wisdom.

I will not spoil the entire film, but in order to express the significance of the following scene, I need to provide some context.

Despite Sook-hee’s plot to steal Hideko’s wealth, they unexpectedly fall in love. Sook-hee also learns that Hideko has been abused by her uncle, Kouzuki. The rare book collection in his library? All violent pornography. He abused his deceased wife by forcing her to read the material to men at book auctions, and now Hideko suffers the same fate.

Enraged, Sook-hee takes matters into her own hands.

The two women ravage the collection. Scrolls are ripped. Tapestries are torn. Cabinets upended. The music is tremendous. You feel uplifted in the carnage of red ink splattering water-laden pages.

Figure 2: The destroyed books are tossed in the water. Screenshot from The Handmaiden (2:12:23), directed by Park Chan-wook, 2016. Copyright Allstar/Amazon Studios 2016. 

The destruction of this library is two women regaining their agency from domineering, abusive men. Sook-hee destroys what was used to hurt and control Hideko in what is simultaneously a fit of rage but also an act of love. She becomes her saviour. The temple is desecrated, its holy scriptures annihilated, and the orchestra resounds in triumph. We cheer.

Finally, Sook-hee takes a metal switch, once a tool to abuse Hideko, to the crown of the library’s protector.

Figure 3: Sook-hee smashes the snake at the library entrance. Screenshot from The Handmaiden (2:12:46) directed by Park Chan-wook, 2016. Copyright Allstar/Amazon Studios 2016. 

“The snake marks the bounds of knowledge.”

This is the death of a library, but you will delight in the violence.

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The Last Patron Before Closing

Congratulations to Dr Bláithín Hurley from Central Library Waterford, whose blog post received a special mention in the A&SL Blog Post Competition 2026. 

The competition invited library staff and LIS students based in Ireland to submit a blog post exploring how library staff, libraries and information work are portrayed across film, television, literature, art, social media, gaming, news media or other cultural formats.

Image 1: Russian Folk Tales

It is almost closing time, a librarian is helping a reader find a book and everything is entirely ordinary. Yet, within moments, a man will be beaten to death with that same book. There will be blood on polished floors, shattered silence between the stacks and one of cinema's most improbable weapons: a volume of Russian folklore. But that is not the story that interests me.

What fascinates me is everything else.

The librarian remains at her enquiry desk. Her directions are precise. The reader follows them exactly. The correct shelf yields the correct book. When he has finished with it, the man carefully returns it to its rightful place before leaving.

Even as chaos erupts, the library itself refuses to surrender its order.

For perhaps three minutes of screen time, cinema's deadliest assassin ceases to be an assassin at all.

He becomes simply another library user.

Order Before Chaos

John Wick has a price on his head, professional killers closing in from every direction and only minutes before an enormous bounty becomes active. He needs to retrieve something that will ultimately save his life. Where does he go? To the library, of course.

He races through rain-soaked streets beneath flashing headlights, weaving between anonymous figures sheltering beneath umbrellas before stepping into the New York Public Library.

The pace slows. The lighting softens. The noise disappears. Suddenly we are back in a reassuringly familiar world of endless shelves, an enquiry desk, a knowledgeable librarian and the quiet expectation that everyone will behave appropriately. In a world full of uncertainty, the library remains one of the few places where order still matters.

The Librarian
Popular culture has not always been kind to librarians. Too often they appear as stern guardians of silence, comic caricatures or dusty custodians of forgotten books. Parabellum does something rather different. In less than a minute it presents a librarian who is calm, knowledgeable and quietly authoritative. She doesn't hesitate. She doesn't disappear into the stacks. She knows her collection, understands the enquiry immediately and directs her reader exactly where he needs to go. Those of us who have worked behind an enquiry desk recognise it instantly.

John joins the queue without complaint. He waits his turn. When called forward, he politely asks for the volume he needs. The librarian gives clear directions and sends him on his way. It is an entirely ordinary library transaction. Yet, that is precisely what makes it extraordinary.

This may be cinema's most dangerous hitman, a man capable of dispatching opponents with almost anything placed in his hands, yet inside the library another authority takes precedence. Not the authority of the High Table, but that of the librarian. John waits. John asks. John listens. John follows instructions. And, when he has finished with the book, he quietly puts it back where it belongs.

That final act tells us something important about John Wick. Hidden inside the book are the objects he values most: a photograph of his late wife Helen, a crucifix that will purchase sanctuary with the Ruska Roma and the gold coins that serve as currency in his shadowy world. Memory, faith and survival are hidden inside a library book. Having retrieved them, he carefully returns the volume to its rightful place, almost as though acknowledging that the library deserves the same respect as any sacred space. Unfortunately, his world follows him into the stacks.

Library Sacrilege
Ernest, another assassin, approaches while pretending to be just another reader, casually reciting Dante from the book in his hands. Yet he betrays himself before throwing a single punch by placing the book face-up on the wrong shelf!

For most cinema audiences this probably passes unnoticed. For librarians, however, it is the moment the real offence occurs. Ernest's first crime is not attempted murder. It is bad shelving.

With that tiny gesture he reveals himself as an outsider who neither understands nor respects the quiet systems that keep a library functioning. It is a surprisingly clever piece of visual storytelling. One man instinctively respects the rules of the library. The other does not.

The fight that follows is everything audiences expect from a John Wick film: breathtaking choreography, astonishing physicality and a wonderfully inventive use of books as weapons. Yet I found myself distracted by entirely different concerns.

I wasn't worrying about John. I wasn't particularly worried about Ernest. I was worrying about the books. Would they be damaged? Would whole shelves be knocked out of sequence? How long would it take staff to restore everything afterwards?

When John finally kills Ernest using the hefty volume of Russian folklore, there is an almost delicious irony. The very object Ernest had failed to respect becomes the instrument of his downfall. Books, it seems, can exact their own revenge.

Why This Scene Matters
Perhaps my favourite aspect of the entire sequence, though, is what happens around the violence. Nothing.

The library does not become an action film set. Somewhere downstairs the librarian is almost certainly continuing her closing routine. Tomorrow's books still need reshelving. The work continues. That quiet professionalism is, for me, the most authentic part of the entire scene.

Popular culture shapes how many people imagine libraries before they ever walk through their doors. What I admire about Parabellum is that, almost accidentally, it offers an affectionate portrait of librarianship. The library is not dusty, irrelevant or intimidating. It is organised, dependable and professionally run. Information is valued. Expertise matters. The librarian is not the joke; she is the person who makes the whole sequence possible.

Tomorrow morning the doors will open once again. The shelves will still be in alphabetical order. Someone will be waiting at the enquiry desk. Another reader will ask where to find a book.

And, with any luck, they'll manage to put it back in the right place.

Dr Bláithín Hurley is a Senior Library Assistant in the Local Studies Department at Central Library, Waterford, and an Assistant Lecturer with The Open University (Ireland). 

Her professional interests include local history, genealogy, information literacy, and the ways in which libraries, archives and cultural heritage are represented in popular culture.

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dr-bláithín-hurley-52a93a18a

Bluesky: @blaithinhurley.bsky.social

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From Ancient Egypt to Magical Archives: Representations of Libraries Across Genres and Time in Video Games

Congratulations to Lisa O'Leary from UCCLibrary, whose blog post received a special mention in the A&SL Blog Post Competition 2026. 

The competition invited library staff and LIS students based in Ireland to submit a blog post exploring how library staff, libraries and information work are portrayed across film, television, literature, art, social media, gaming, news media or other cultural formats.

Libraries have a long history of representation within popular culture, but within video games, as interactive spaces, they offer a unique perspective. When included in video games, libraries are locations of exploration, problem-solving, storytelling, or even danger. But more than that, they create a memorable space that demonstrates the enduring cultural significance of libraries and information access.

  
Libraries appear in numerous video games across many genres, establishing the versatility of libraries as meaningful game spaces. From action role playing games (Assassin’s Creed), where libraries contain quests, to interactive puzzle games (The Séance of Blake Manor). From survival-horror titles (Resident Evil) that transform libraries into tense and unsettling environments, to science-fiction games (Horizon Zero Dawn), and even cosy games (Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!). These various depictions across genres allow virtual library spaces to remain compelling settings defined by more than real-world bricks and mortar. As Pomerantz and Marchionini (2007, p.506) assert, “Place ...is more than physical space” and this ‘place’ is “equally important in both physical and digital libraries,” (2007, p.528).
 
Within video games, libraries can exist across different periods of time, emphasising the long-standing cultural value of libraries. In Assassin’s Creed: Origins (Ubisoft, 2017), players explore ancient Egypt and can step inside the Library of Alexandria, one of history’s most significant libraries. By bringing this space to life, the game reinforces a library’s core purpose of collecting, preserving, and sharing knowledge across time, even as, in recent years, libraries have evolved significantly. This contemporary adaptation to meet all users’ needs with traditional and newer ways of learning, is highlighted by Sayekti et al. (2021, p.9), Clark (2015, p.152), and Houston (2015, p.84). Yet, the depiction within this game shows that ‘library as place’ is still highly relevant. 
 

Image 1 credit: A screenshot of the Library of Alexandria in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins.

Libraries also serve as important narrative locations in video games. In The Séance of Blake Manor (Raw Fury, 2025), set in 1890s Ireland, the library plays a pivotal role. Players are required to actively engage with documents and information sources to progress and solve the game's central mystery. Thus, as a recently released game it cements libraries as places that support research and discovery regardless of time. Which aligns with Garnar and Tonyan’s (2021, p.6) observation that, despite changes in information access, libraries continue to draw users into the space.
 
A spin on library representation can be found in the remake of Resident Evil 2 (Capcom, 2019), set in 1990s USA. From the outside, the game's library appears to embody the traditional characteristics of a library: shelves of books, elegant surroundings, and a structured study environment. However, these expectations are quickly subverted. The library becomes a dangerous space where bookshelves conceal enemies, and compact shelving units form part of a tense puzzle. The library no longer functions as a safe place of learning but instead becomes an environment of anxiety and survival. This portrayal is altered in the sequel game Resident Evil Requiem (Capcom, 2026), which revisits the same location nearly thirty years later. The library has fallen into ruin like the city around it, with damaged shelving, scattered and decaying books, and a collapsed roof. Despite this, the emotional resonance of the location remains as it still carries traces of its past. This reflects observations that library spaces and environments have a profound emotional impact on users (Watson, 2013, slide 26).
  

Image 2 credit: Side-by-side screenshots of the RPD library in Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 (2019), and Resident Evil Requiem.

Another aspect of libraries in video games is the non-traditional library, i.e. databases or archives. In Horizon Zero Dawn (Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2017), set a thousand years in the future, the absence of a library-like institution and the loss of the knowledge bank becomes a prominent theme. The destruction of APOLLO, humanity’s vast knowledge archive, has devastating consequences for future generations who have lost the history, science, and cultural memory of the past. This narrative highlights the importance of access to information, and the consequences of controlling or restricting that access. Something that is relevant in the present day.  

Image 3 credit: A screenshot of Apollo’s logo in Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn.

Polar opposite in genre is Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library! (ArtRising, 2016), a cosy game focused entirely on organising a magical library. The relaxing gameplay centres on letting players engage directly with a core element of library work – sorting, tidying, and maintaining collections. As noted earlier, libraries can influence users on an emotional level, and this calming gameplay helps create positive associations. Thus, enabling the library to be perceived as a space shaped by personal experiences, emotions, and connections, rather than simply housing books. This aligns with Kim (2016, p.509) and Waxman et al. (2007, p.430) who both found that libraries are also places for socialising, relaxation and reflection.

Although only a small selection of games and genres featuring libraries is discussed here, these examples illustrate the unique ability of libraries in video games to support both interactive gameplay and storytelling. These libraries often hold key objects and hidden collectibles, reward exploration, and support progression through puzzles. Simultaneously, they encourage players to engage with the game world, providing insights into lore, the game’s history and its characters. As Fern’s (n.d.) article notes, the successful combination of interaction, learning, and flexibility enables libraries as a location to persist within the video game medium regardless of genre.

Ultimately, the representation of libraries in video games reflects their enduring significance within popular culture. Whether located in ancient Egypt, nineteenth-century Ireland, a zombie-infested police station, a post-apocalyptic future, or a magical archive, libraries continue to serve as important spaces for information access, exploration, and experience. Their adaptability across genres highlights the cultural importance of knowledge and the ongoing relevance of librarianship and information work. Yet at their core, both real and virtual libraries remain places where people seek knowledge, meaning, and connection.

  

Acknowledgements:

I acknowledge the use of Microsoft 365 Copilot to refine my original text and to correct spelling and grammar.

References:
Assassin's Creed Origins. 2017. PS5 [Game]. Ubisoft: Montreal. URL: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-gb/game/assassins-creed/origins
Clark, J. C. (2015). Library as Place: What Students Value in a Performing Arts Library. Music Reference Services Quarterly, 18(3–4), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2015.1093882
Fern, S. (n.d.). The library level: Archives in videogames. National Library of Scotland. Retrieved 16 June 2026, from https://www.nls.uk/collections/stories/life-in-the-library/archives-in-videogames/
Garnar, M., & Tonyan, J. (2021). Library as place: Understanding contradicting user expectations. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 47(5), 102391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2021.102391
Horizon Zero Dawn. 2017. PS4 [Game]. Sony Interactive Entertainment: Amsterdam. URL: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/horizon-zero-dawn/
Houston, A. M. (2015). Revisiting Library as Place: Balancing Space Planning Priorities by Focusing on Core Purpose. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 55(2), 84–86.
Kim, J.-A. (2016). Dimensions of User Perception of Academic Library as Place. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 42(5), 509–514. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2016.06.013
Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!. 2026. PC [Game]. ArtRising: Japan. URL: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4197610/Librarian_Tidy_Up_the_Arcane_Library/
Pomerantz, J., & Marchionini, G. (2007). The digital library as place. Journal of Documentation, 63(4), 505–533. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410710758995
Resident Evil 2. 2019. PS5 [Game]. Capcom: Japan. URL: https://www.residentevil.com/2/uk/
Resident Evil Requiem. 2026. PS5 [Game]. Capcom: Japan. URL: https://www.residentevil.com/requiem/en-us/
Sayekti, R., Karim, A., Achiriah, Aditya, M., Purwaningtyas, F., Syam, A. M., & Nur’aini. (2021). When the ‘Library as place’ Matters: A Case Study of an Academic Library. Library Philosophy and Practice, 1–18.
The Séance of Blake Manor. 2025. PC [Game]. Raw Fury: Stockholm. URL: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1395520/The_Sance_of_Blake_Manor/

 

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The Librarian and the Machine

Congratulations to Grace O'Connor from Dublin City University Library, whose blog post received a special mention in the A&SL Blog Post Competition 2026. 

The competition invited library staff and LIS students based in Ireland to submit a blog post exploring how library staff, libraries and information work are portrayed across film, television, literature, art, social media, gaming, news media or other cultural formats.

Still from Desk Set (1957), directed by Walter Lang. Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox via the Everett Collection. 

The year is 2026. You are a librarian and AI is coming for your job.

The year is 2004. You are a librarian and Google is coming for your job.
The year is 1957. You are a librarian and a computer is coming for your job.
Time is a flat circle.

In the romantic comedy Desk Set (1957), directed by Walter Lang, Katharine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, a reference librarian in the Federal Broadcasting Network. Spencer Tracy plays the inventor of EMERAC (Electromagnetic MEmory and Research Arithmetical Calculator), a computer that could leave Bunny and her colleagues out of a job.

It is a theme familiar to anyone working in libraries. Every few years, a new technology arrives promising to make what we do obsolete. What makes Desk Set interesting is that it manages to be both a warning about technology and, ultimately, an optimistic film about it. More importantly, it is a surprisingly affectionate portrait of librarianship and information work.

“If I didn't work here I'd pay to get in”

The Reference Department in Desk Set is a wonderful place.

It is busy, chaotic and unmistakably feminine. The women shop on their lunch breaks, borrow each other's lipsticks, gossip and tease each other. There is something particularly striking about the contrast between the Reference Department and the organisation around it. Like many real-world libraries, the department is staffed predominantly by women, while the people with overall institutional power are men. At one point Bunny says, “If I didn't work here I'd pay to get in” (Desk Set, 1957).

Bunny initially looks like the classic caricature of the librarian. She is a middle-aged woman, swaddled in cardigans, pens in her hair, and she lives alone. Yet the character is not simply a joke about librarians. Bunny was loosely inspired by Agnes E. Law, a former CBS librarian who established the network's research library (AFI, 2026).

The researchers in the Reference Department aren't passive assistants waiting to be told what to do. They interpret questions, find sources and work out what people are actually asking. As Bunny puts it, “No machine can do our job. Too many cross references” (Desk Set, 1957). The wording may sound quaint now, but the underlying point remains relevant: a reference question is rarely just about retrieving a fact. It requires understanding the question, recognising what the person actually needs, knowing where to look and judging whether the answer makes sense.

Bunny's expertise is accumulated through experience. She knows the organisation, the collection, her colleagues and the people asking the questions. That type of on-the-job learning and real life experience is difficult to automate.

Still from Desk Set (1957, directed by Walter Lang. Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox via IMDB.

The next machine

The computer wasn't the last technology to threaten librarianship.

By 2004, the threat looked rather different. Google was rapidly transforming how people searched for information. A D-Lib Magazine editorial from Bonita Wilson that year noted that anyone could now “type a few words into a Google search bar” and receive thousands of information sources ranked by Google's algorithms. It acknowledged that professional searchers, including reference librarians, might be tempted to worry about this development (Wilson, 2004).

As we know, Google did not make librarians obsolete. The work changed, libraries adapted to the new technology and learned to use it effectively, so it enhanced the work rather than replacing it.

And this is where the comparison between Desk Set and real-world librarianship becomes interesting. The film's stereotype of the librarian as a woman who knows where to find information may now seem dated. But its portrayal of the librarian as an expert, adaptable information professional has aged surprisingly well.

People and machines

Now we have AI.

AI can spit out references, facts, and even whole essays faster than any librarian could. It can answer questions in seconds and produce convincing-looking responses without requiring the user to understand how the information was found.

That makes the question asked in Desk Set feel remarkably contemporary: what happens to the librarian when the machine can do the searching?

Still from Desk Set (1957), directed by Walter Lang. Courtesy of 20th Century-Fox via IMDB.

The answer may lie in what librarians have always done when technology changes.

The profession has survived the card catalogue, the photocopier, the personal computer, the internet and Google. Some technologies have eliminated tasks. Some have changed the skills librarians need. But none has eliminated the underlying need for people who can evaluate information, understand context, exercise professional judgement and respond to what their communities actually need.

Desk Set does not challenge every stereotype about librarians. But it does challenge one of the most persistent stories told about the profession: that when a machine can perform one of our tasks, the librarian becomes obsolete.

EMERAC doesn't destroy the Reference Department. The librarians remain, and (spoiler alert) the machine becomes part of their workplace rather than the end of it.

Perhaps the real lesson of Desk Set is not that librarians will always beat the machines. It is that librarians have always been very good at finding a way to use them.

Time is a flat circle, after all.

Reference List

American Film Institute (2026) AFI Catalog. Available at: https://catalog.afi.com/Film/52153-DESK-SET (Accessed: 28/08/2026).

Desk Set (1957) Directed by Walter Lang. [Feature film]. 20th Century Fox.

Wilson, B. (2004) 'Using the Internet for Searching', D-Lib Magazine, 10(3), Available at: https://www.dlib.org/dlib/march04/03editorial.html (Accessed: 30/08/2024).

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Libfocus Link-out for September 2026

Welcome to the September edition of the Libfocus link-out, an assemblage of library-related things we have found informative, educational, thought-provoking and insightful on the Web over the past while.

[image: Kadumago, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons]

The Next Chapter of Open Access Is Stewardship.
Kamran Naim argues in the Katina Magazine that the next chapter of the Open Access movement is about accepting collective responsibility for the infrastructures that make openness sustainable over the long term.

The Politics of Academic Libraries: Why Librarians Need a Seat at the Decision-Making Table.
Librarian Onyebuchi Ekpolomo recommends on LinkedIn that libraries do not shy away from “politics” and get a seat at the table where it matters.

Libraries and museums should have books, not artificial intelligence.
This opinion piece questions the growing use of AI in museums and libraries, arguing that technology should support, not overshadow, the books, collections and historical evidence at the heart of cultural institutions.

How one library built an Intranet that Staff actually use.
Too many emails, scattered information and disconnected teams are familiar challenges for many libraries. This article looks at how Lake Villa District Library built a staff hub that became a trusted source of information while strengthening workplace culture and collaboration.

Back to school in the age of AI.
Elissa Malespina discusses tools to help guide the conversation about the use of AI among students as the new academic term begins.

Ten simple rules for scholarly blogging.
Catharina Ochsner, Heinz Pampel and Martin Fenner offer practical guidance for those who wish to adopt blogging as a form of scholarly communication.

We’re Using Harvard’s Libraries Wrong.
In this opinion piece for The Harvard Crimson, Emily X. Yu advises students to draw on the expertise of librarians, rather than on AI, when doing their research.

Need a Gun Lock? Ask Your Local Librarian.
Chip Brownlee looks at an initiative in Baltimore that promotes safer firearm storage in this article for The Trace. Johns Hopkins has partnered with Baltimore’s public library system for the project, with the aim to prevent homicide, unintentional injuries, suicide and theft.

Oxford and Springer Nature Update AI Journal Guidelines.
On the back of a global survey of more than 2,600 researchers on AI disclosure practices and policies, OUP updated its guidelines on AI use for authors and editors. It includes what AI use should be disclosed when preparing manuscripts for OUP journals.

A Groupthink We Don’t Talk Much About.
Irving Janis, the Yale psychologist who developed the theory of groupthink from studying foreign policy disasters, found that the groups most vulnerable to it weren’t the incompetent ones. Neil Blair Christensen wonders if the scholarly publishing community are one of those groups.

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