Panelists Shauntee Burns-Simpson, director of youth and family services at the District of Columbia Public Library, Eric Klinenberg, director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, Peter Musser, head of library services at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, and host, Mona Sloane, assistant professor of data science and media studies and faculty co-lead of the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at UVA discussed the evolving relationship between AI and libraries reshapes our understanding of access to knowledge, learning, and vital social infrastructure.

Shauntee Burns-Simpson, MLIS, is the director of youth and family services at the District of Columbia Public Library and the 2025–26 president of the Graphic Novels and Comics Round Table (GNCRT). She also serves on the boards of the Freedom to Read Foundation and the Public Library Association. Formerly the president of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (2020–22) and chair of ALA’s Committee on Diversity, she has consistently championed equity, diversity, and inclusion in librarianship. As an ambassador for libraries and youth librarianship, Burns-Simpson is dedicated to connecting communities to library resources, supporting at-risk teens, and fostering a lifelong love of reading and learning through innovative and inclusive programming.

Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard professor of social science and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed (Knopf, 2024), Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age, co-editor of Antidemocracy in America (Columbia University Press, 2019), and co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and This American Life.

Peter Musser is the head of library services at the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). He guides policy and collection development for OER Commons, a digital public library of open educational resources. He also works with ISKME’s research, platform, and training teams to better understand sociotechnical aspects of topics (like generative AI), and how they might impact libraries and the communities they serve. Since 2023, Peter has served as chair of the AI & ML in Libraries Interest Group for ALA Core, a division of the American Library Association. He lives in New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada.

The event was moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia.