Guest Speaker: Jay Singley – #CritLib & Writing for Publication as a Graduate Student
Join SCARLA in welcoming Jay Singley, author of the recent ACRLog guest blog post “We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question”. The post is a critical examination of using Ex Libris’ “Summon Research Assistant”, an AI-powered research assistance tool meant to aid users in summarizing and locating citations. Jay audited the Summon tool after seeing reports of error messages and results suppression for certain topics. These error messages were first reported while searching for keywords such as “Tulsa race riot” and “Tulsa race massacre.” There are clear and urgent ethical considerations regarding the adoption of AI-tools into our academic work as both librarians and students.
The first part of our event will be a short presentation by Jay Singley and a discussion related to the ethical concerns of using AI-powered research assistants, information suppression, and opaque systems. We will talk about their process and audit of the Summon tool and the larger implications for our field.
The second portion of our event will be a conversation about professional writing as a graduate student and a librarian. We will have a free-flowing conversation and Q&A.
Jay Singley is the Document Delivery and Circulation Desk Manager at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics and a current LIS graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The ACRLog is a blog by and for academic librarians, and is associated with the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association. The Ex Libris site has more information on the Summon Research Assistant.
Please read Jay’s guest blog post “We Couldn’t Generate an Answer for your Question” and come with your thoughts and questions.
What is CritLib?
Critical Librarianship explores and discusses librarianship and information work through a critical and activist practice.
Date: October 27, 2025
Time: 6 PM – 7 PM EST
Location: Zoom – To attend, please register for the event.
We can’t wait to see you there!
For any questions, please reach out to rutgers.scarla@gmail.com