Allison Jennings-Roche was named a 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker for her work at the University of Maryland helping educate students, faculty, and librarians who work with information systems. LJ recently spoke with Jennings-Roche, who is now the associate director of digital initiatives and collections (and a PhD candidate) at the University of Baltimore’s RLB Library, about why it’s vital to understand information, where it comes from, and how it affects everyone.

LJ: What need did you see for students and others to think critically about information systems?

Allison Jennings-Roche: I’ve always been fascinated by the system by which we make decisions and live our lives. After I figured out that being in librarianship was my path, I realized that I couldn’t divorce that fascination from systems, processes, and politics. I got a bachelor’s degree in political science and my first master’s degree in legal and ethical studies. I was trying to understand how we care for each other within community, how decisions are made, how we can think about systems and processes, and how that makes change. I love to help people in the day-to-day, but I was also fascinated with how librarians can, and often do, serve as mediators between these complex systems and what people see on the front end. A lot of our information systems today have become so opaque. They’re served up to us in ways we can’t interact with. Very often you’re not able to make decisions about the information you consume and where it’s coming from, or other people are making those decisions for you. We can obviously see that with the rise of misinformation and disinformation, things like election interference, all of these ultimately feed back into this greater whole of “How are our information systems influencing our decision-making and how we collectively understand any number of topics?” I think that’s only becoming more urgent in 2025.

How do you approach these topics with students?

What I do with students, and other groups of people, is ask them to think critically about how they engage with information today. A lot of the beauty of working with an academic library system is that you’re able to make transparent systems that happen on the back end. If we talk about search terms and how that influences what you find, we can pull that out and take it to Google or another search platform and show the difference between doing a search where there’s no data collected about you. If we’re talking about a closed library system versus something that’s collected a ton of information about you as a person, where you live, your demographic data, your previous searches, then you’re getting a mediated and influenced ultimate output. What does that mean for my information world?

I try to offer that as neutrally as I can because we’re all engaging with it. I’m perfectly happy that I can quickly find the restaurants closest to my house and things like this. But if we think about what that means if you’re trying to understand a specific research topic or if you’re talking to friends or family members or peers about the way they’re coming to decisions around major political or social issues, it can really help you see the filter bubbles and the algorithmic interference.

How complex does it become?

People often say, “Aren’t you seeing this?” That’s a common thing in everyday conversation from the coffee shop to the classroom. Someone says, “I’m seeing everything about this.” And I say, “Well, that’s not my algorithm.” We have to understand how each of us have this highly customized, highly tailored information world that never existed before in human history. Before, your information world was influenced by the people you lived around, where you went to school, or further out, a state or local government. Today, what I’m seeing on my screen is distinct from someone sitting next to me. That’s hugely influencing the way we think about any number of issues.

I love taking the moment from “We’re going to find a topic for a paper, and let’s think about what that’s telling us about the rest of these information systems.” How do we think critically about what our universities or schools are paying for access to information? What does it mean that a lot of information we have access to is now a subscription model instead of genuine ownership? The students think really critically about those systems, both in a library and academic context, but also about how it influences the rest of their lives. I’m much more interested in teaching students to be better citizens and think critically about information engagement with democracy than just one paper.

How do students respond to this learning?

Younger people have become demoralized by the system, they don’t trust anything, and they don’t fully understand how to develop that trust or make their own decisions. I find that when I start talking about these things, we talk about them very deeply, and I’ve never seen more energized and engaged groups of students. They almost don’t have a framework for what’s good information anymore, and what they’re intrigued by learning about is where they can develop those skills in evaluation, how those systems are changing their mindset, and bringing in cognitive psychology, politics, all of the things needed to think about misinformation and disinformation, because there are distinctions. There’s a big difference between someone attempting to manipulate your thought patterns, buying patterns, or, God forbid, voting or political patterns, and someone in your life who’s just sharing something because they simply made a mistake. I think we tend to flatten those things and it inhibits conversation, makes people feel shame around sharing or saying something that’s inaccurate or creates a space of judgment.

Tell us about your new position. Are you continuing to teach students about information systems?

I’m the associate director of digital initiatives and collections for the RLB Library. It’s a new position, but it’s interesting because I got the opportunity to take a chance and shift from teaching students to thinking about information systems to being one of the people that make decisions around policy, thinking about these things and what we’re collecting. My role is in a lot of the decisions around collections and budgets of technology for the library. By collections, I mean both books and digital and subscriptions. What’s really exciting about this role is that I’m able to talk to my colleagues, to the other faculty on campus. I manage a team where we think critically about what we offer to our community, how we reflect the community. What’s intriguing is that technology is often included within librarianship, but technology and collections are separate. But if we think about the influence of various tools, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, then we think about how a library collects those things. We purchase them, support them, encourage people to use them. How do we think about those in the larger context of our values as libraries, whether it’s intellectual freedom or privacy or research integrity? I took this job excited to be in a role where I’m thinking critically about those things, making policy, and making decisions.