Understanding AI at the Library: An Interview with Kurt Lemai-Nguyen

In this interview, 2025 Library of Congress Junior Fellow Kurt Lemai-Nguyen reflects on his experience working to support understanding AI at the Library in the Library’s Digital Strategy Directorate. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Leah: Hi Kurt! It’s great to have you on our team this summer. Could you tell us what your role is here at the Library, and what you are working on? 

Kurt: This summer I was a Junior Fellow in the Digital Strategy Directorate in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). My project was to research and develop materials to support understanding AI at the Library. I was super excited to join the vibrant dialog we’re having now at the Library around AI. Going into this project, my goal was to try and figure out a way to facilitate interesting conversations with staff, not necessarily with the direct goal of teaching or delivering some kind of message, but as a way of asking questions and (positively) stirring the pot. It was also a good opportunity for me to go around learning from the staff!  

The project we settled on was an oral history of librarians on the topic of technology. We went with this strategy because it kept conversations open while  recording staff experiences. One of the ideas I resonated with in the Library’s approach to AI is AI technologies are changing rapidly, and the Library’s approach to AI builds on decades of technological innovation.  

Because of this, I really wanted to take advantage of the huge wealth of knowledge accumulated by the brilliant people who work here, and I wanted to try and circulate their narratives to other people as well. It was awesome talking to so many amazing people! 

Leah: Tell us a bit about your background and journey. What professional or educational experiences led you to apply for this fellowship? 

Kurt: Ever since middle school, I’ve wanted to be a librarian, so the Library of Congress has always been this shining beacon in my mind that made me think, “Oh, I would love to try working there one day!” So many amazing projects come from the Library, from Newspaper Navigator to the metadata augmentation experiments, so I’ve been fiending to join conversations and learn from all the great scholarship that’s happening here.  

When it comes to my own experiences, it’s been an unexpected path of tasting the different flavors of librarianship throughout the years. I started in my middle school library shelving books and working the circulation desk before I moved to volunteer at my public library to do more public-facing work with the summer reading program. In high school, I shadowed librarians at my local community college and local museum librarians, and I got a sense of more specialized librarianship. I continued learning about this in university as I dabbled in cataloging, curation, interlibrary loans, reference, and digital humanities librarianship. It’s been a total mixed bag! I do think that these varied experiences made the Library all the more appealing to me because of how it also has these different functions to support the huge scale of its operations. 

Leah: What in your background, coursework, or job experience has been useful for your work on this project?  

Kurt: I think, for better or worse, I have an almost impertinent curiosity about libraries. Throughout the years during my traveling or learning, I would randomly stop by libraries and just start asking questions to staff like, “What classification system do you use here?” or “How did you become a librarian?” Fortunately, due to the generous and patient nature of these librarians, I’ve always been met with welcome arms and a treasure trove of knowledge, creating this positive feedback loop where I keep wanting to bother them with more and more questions. This hobby of spamming questions to librarians prepped me to quickly break the ice to conduct oral histories, but this summer I’ve learned to temper the pacing as well. We had a more measured approach and focused less on my questions and more on the stories that staff were interested in telling, which is very different from my usual interrogations. I learned so much about pausing and leaving space for people to fully tell their stories.    

Leah: Is there anything about working on this project that you have found surprising or unexpected? 

Kurt: Honestly, every conversation was a surprise! I think this one section could balloon into a book with all the amazing tidbits that I’ve learned over these past 10 weeks. In terms of broad conceptual stuff, the most surprising thing for me to readjust myself to is what it means to be the national library and the scale that encompasses. Managing a library with almost 200 petabytes of data and over 170 million collection items is truly a logistical goliath, and learning how this Library thoughtfully churns has been an enlightening experience. 

Leah: Tell us a bit about how this work connects with your career goals. Is this experience helping you to further develop or refine your goals and interests? 

Kurt: This position has helped affirm my desire to balance a strong technical skillset with an emphasis on cooperation and collaboration. I’m fascinated by new computational approaches that leverage computer vision and natural language processing to develop unconventional ways of interfacing with and studying collections materials, but I also want to continue cultivating the ability to say things in real, everyday language. With the speed of change in technology, it can be difficult to keep up with the countless acronyms being thrown around, but I’ve been so inspired by the fluency of staff to cleanly explain their work to me without reducing the complexity of the information conveyed. As staff at the Library have shown, expertise doesn’t have to be drowned out with jargon, and I hope I can continue practicing and learning from their example. 

Leah: Based on your experience in this fellowship, are there any things you are going to focus on getting out of your next educational experience? Has this experience shaped your ideas about your future work and educational program? 

Kurt: In the fall, I’m enrolling in UT Austin’s PhD in information sciences and working with Professor David Lankes on studying libraries in conversation with AI. This summer, I’ve learned so much about the history of different technologies at the Library, from the lengthy history of archival formats and tapes to the enormous labor behind the different websites that display digital content. This birds-eye view of technology will definitely be key to the way that I navigate these new questions about how AI can thoughtfully be applied to the work of libraries, including metadata augmentation and search interfaces, while keeping in mind ethical and other concerns around these technologies.