This special bonus episode is from a keynote address delivered at the opening of the new ESSECI Public Library in Cuneo, Italy, at the end of September 2026. “From the Care of Bodies to the Care of Minds” explores what libraries can and must become in an age of generative AI, declining trust, and profound changes in how people create knowledge. Dave argues that libraries offer something machines cannot: accountable human relationships grounded in community. He calls on libraries to move beyond repositories of information and become platforms for conversation, cultural heritage, creativity, and collective action.

Libraries have always been more than the sum of their shelves. After hours, when the last patron has gone and the lights go down, something else takes over. Maybe it's a lock-in group shrieking through an escape room in the stacks. Maybe it's a paranormal tour winding past the periodicals. Maybe it's a prom, a wedding, a midnight book release with people in costume lined up around the block. Libraries have been hosting the unexpected for as long as they've existed and some of what lives in their collections and histories is stranger than anything you'd find in the fiction section. In this episode, we embrace the season and explore the wonderfully weird, the surprising, and yes, occasionally spooky, side of library life. Because it turns out that the world's greatest keeper of human knowledge has, over several thousand years, accumulated more than its fair share of things that go shhh in the night.

Every so often the way we make information changes enough that the field built around it must rebuild. It happened after WWII when a flood of scientific data and the digital computer turned librarianship into library and information science. It is happening again. This time the cause is a machine you can talk to. When learning happens inside a conversation, there is no document left to check, and AI literacy runs out of things to grip. Generative AI triggers a major "information shock"—a fundamental disruption on par with the printing press or digital computer that forces fundamental changes in how we create, store, retrieve, use, and evaluate information. Dave makes the case; Beth and Mike push back.