Earlier this month, Leo S. Lo, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, traveled to Florence, Italy, to deliver a Lectio Magistralis (Distinguished Lecture) at the Università degli Studi di Firenze.
Hosted by the Dipartimento di Storia, Archeologia, Geografia, Arte e Spettacolo (the Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, and Arts), known as SAGAS, the lecture, delivered on March 4, was part of a distinguished series dedicated to bringing international voices in library and information science to one of Italy’s oldest and most distinguished universities.
Titled “AI Literacy as Accountable Judgment: What Libraries Must Teach in an Answer-First World,” the lecture centered on a shift that affects every student, researcher, and curious person who reaches for their phone to look something up. When we type a question into Google or any major search engine today, we no longer receive a list of sources to evaluate. We receive an answer. An AI-generated response appears at the top of the page, confident and polished, before we ever see the evidence behind it.
Lo calls this the AI Answer Economy, and he argues it changes the fundamental challenge libraries face. The old bottleneck was discovery: helping people find information. The new bottleneck is judgment and verification: helping people evaluate the answers they are already receiving. As Lo said to the audience in Florence: “How do I judge whether to trust this answer, and how do I verify?”
The lecture drew students and faculty from across the university, who brought many questions to the Q&A session which followed the presentation. Audiences pressed on questions ranging from how Italian archives should respond to AI companies seeking digitization partnerships, to how secondary school students can develop critical thinking skills when AI can write their essays for them. “There were no easy answers, which made for a genuinely productive conversation,” Lo said.
Lo’s lecture has been published as an ebook by Casalini Libri, with a full Italian translation, and is available online. It is the inaugural volume in the series “Letture magistrali in archivistica e biblioteconomia” (“Keynote Lectures in Archival Studies and Librarianship”).
The invitation came through the SAGAS Department’s Master’s Programme in Archival Science and Library Science, which selected Lo to deliver the program’s Lectio Magistralis — a signal of the growing transatlantic conversation around libraries, AI, and the future of information.