Sharing this beautiful essay by Dr. Coleman about Pauline Atherton from ALA Connect…it will help us reflect on the past and guide the future!
Dear Colleagues,
As ALA’s Sesquicentennial in 2026 approaches, I revisited two of Pauline Atherton’s seminal works, through an AI-driven lens. This milestone is a unique opportunity to reflect on the leaders who have shaped our profession.
Using the Eleven Labs AI Text Reader, I first listened to Pauline’s Sarada Ranganathan Endowment Lectures (SRELS) given in India (1970), published in Putting Knowledge to Work (1973), and digitized for dLIST Classics in 2007 (cover attached). Hearing her words through an American AI voice was both moving and illuminating—a modern way to engage with her vision using technology she would have embraced.
Pauline’s insights continue to resonate, especially as we explore responsible AI use in enhancing library services. I had the privilege of being Pauline’s first graduate teaching assistant at the University of Illinois. In her opening lecture at SRELS, she explained why she called herself an “apostle of Ranganathan,” humorously recounting her journey from initial skepticism about his Five Laws to becoming its dedicated advocate in the United States—a story she also shared with me. 🙂 By the time I met her in 1992, she’d already had a distinguished career, from ASIS President to pioneering mechanized information systems, OPACs, and traveling widely, bridging traditional librarianship with emerging technologies—a legacy of adapting knowledge to serve people. Listening to her lectures through the Eleven Reader app made historical scholarship both accessible and engaging, embodying the vision that both Ranganathan and Atherton championed: the dynamic evolution of library and information science.
Linda Smith’s metaphor of AI as a “human intermediary” aptly frames AI as a tool that augments our ability to make information accessible. With AI’s support for diverse languages, including Tamil, we now have new pathways for connecting with knowledge across linguistic and cultural boundaries, embodying Ranganathan’s fifth law: “The library is a growing organism.”
Pauline’s 1992 reflection in Libri—she gifted me a signed copy of her Information Technology in Libraries and Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science, which had just come out—invites us to welcome change and simplify knowledge systems: “We introduced complicated procedures… we came to realize it was our responsibility to make them easier to use.” Inspired by Pauline and her extension of SRR’s “book” laws to IT, I once proposed the corollary: “The growing library experiences pain!” —a humorous reflection on the challenges we face adapting to ever changing systems.
Pauline’s insights remain especially relevant today as we consider how to use AI responsibly to enhance library services while honoring our foundational principles.
How do you envision AI being applied to advance our mission of connecting people with knowledge? What innovative ways can we use these tools to better serve our communities and thoughtfully preserve diverse knowledge traditions?
For those interested, Pauline Atherton’s Putting Knowledge to Work is available full-text in the dLIST repository (University of Arizona, Tucson), and she has a Wikipedia page, thanks to Kathleen McCook.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
Warm regards,
Anita
Anita S. Coleman, PhD | Infophilia | Antiracism Digital Library & Thesaurus | iSchool@UIUC