American Library Association

The American Library Association (ALA) is the United States' oldest and largest library association in the world, representing approximately 47,000 librarians, library workers, and library institutions from its Chicago headquarters — with an additional Washington D.C. policy office — through a membership structure of eight divisions, nineteen round tables, and a suite of standing offices covering intellectual freedom, diversity, literacy, and public policy. Its pivot into the make-AI-good movement operates on two interlocked axes: a training-data and copyright axis, where ALA — through the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) — takes a pro-fair-use position that AI training on copyrighted works is legally permissible and advances information access; and a deployment axis, where ALA pushes for patron-privacy protections, equitable access to AI tools, and preservation of human-centred library service against automated substitution. Both axes position ALA as the organized voice of the library profession on exactly the territory where AI deployment most directly intersects with libraries' foundational commitments — intellectual freedom, privacy, equity, and universal access.

Founding and structure

The ALA was established on October 6, 1876, during the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, making it the oldest professional library association in the world. Its founding mission centred on the advancement of library service and librarianship as a public good. By 2024 its membership stood at approximately 47,000 — a professional association spanning academic, public, school, and special libraries across the United States and including a small international membership.

The ALA's governance is federated. Eight membership divisions address specialised library sectors: the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) for academic libraries; the Public Library Association (PLA) for public libraries; the American Association of School Librarians (AASL); and five additional divisions covering state libraries, reference services, youth services, library leadership, and special libraries. Nineteen round tables serve specific member interests including AI and machine learning. Core policy offices — the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), the Office of Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services, and the Washington Office for public policy and advocacy — anchor the ALA's standing positions on intellectual freedom, privacy, and federal legislation.

The ALA president, elected annually, sets thematic priorities; the Council, as the governing body, adopts official policy positions. The Washington D.C. office channels those positions into Congressional testimony, agency comment, and coalition advocacy. Cindy Hohl served as ALA president for 2024–2025; Sam Helmick succeeded her for 2025–2026.

Training data, copyright, and the Library Copyright Alliance

The ALA is a founding member — alongside the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) — of the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), a coalition representing more than 300,000 information professionals across North America. The LCA's stated mission is to foster global access to and fair use of information for creativity, research, and education; it pursues that mission by developing a unified library-community voice on national and international copyright law and policy.

On AI specifically, the LCA issued a statement in October 2025 asserting that existing copyright law is adequate to address the intersection of copyright and generative AI — the library community's position that no new legislation is needed and that training large language models on copyrighted works is, under the fair-use doctrine, generally permissible. This stance is consonant with the library community's long-standing position that broad fair-use rights — for research, education, text and data mining, and computational work — are essential to the information-access mission.

The ALA acted on this position in litigation. In August 2025, ALA joined ARL, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Authors Alliance in filing an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit in Bartz v. Anthropic, a copyright class action brought by authors against Anthropic over training data. The brief did not argue against authors' rights wholesale; it challenged the class-certification approach that grouped nearly seven million rights holders into a single lawsuit, on the grounds that the class failed to represent the diversity of authors — from independent writers to tenured academics to open-access advocates — whose interests in AI training and fair use diverge materially. The coalition sought a nuanced framework that preserved fair-use consideration in computational research rather than a blanket restriction. The district court had earlier found Anthropic's training to be "exceedingly transformative" and thus fair use; a $1.5 billion settlement was subsequently reached.

ACRL AI Competencies for Academic Library Workers

Within the ALA's academic-library division, the Association of College and Research Libraries established an AI Competencies Task Force in March 2024, co-chaired by Keven Jeffery and Jason Coleman, to develop a comprehensive framework for how academic library workers should engage with artificial intelligence. The task force's membership drew from across the academic-library field — Jeffery and Coleman were joined by Emily Rimland, Brian Quinn, Michael Paulus, Sue Parks, Leo Lo (ACRL Board liaison), Beth LaPensee, LeRoy LaFleur, Olga Koz, Priya Kizhakkethil, Nicole Hennig, Brooke Gross, David Free (staff liaison), and Frances Alvarado-Albertorio.

The resulting framework, adopted by the ACRL Board of Directors in October 2025, organises AI competency for library workers across five guiding mindsets and four competency areas. The five mindsets — Curiosity, Skepticism, Judgment, Responsibility, and Collaboration — are foundational orientations rather than discrete skills: the framework explicitly positions informed engagement, not uncritical adoption, as the professional standard. The document states that "adoption of AI technologies is neither necessary nor beneficial in all cases" and that informed selectivity is what keeps academic libraries "both relevant to their communities and true to their professional principles."

The four competency areas structure the practical work. Ethical Considerations includes five competencies addressing equitable access (understanding barriers like licensing costs and open-source alternatives), fairness in data and design (recognising training data limitations and representational gaps), protection of autonomy, privacy, and intellectual property, accountability and transparency, and broader community impacts including unseen labour in AI development and environmental costs. Knowledge and Understanding covers basic AI terminology and architecture, attribution and detection, currency with reliable sources, critical evaluation of AI information claims, and relevant policies including FERPA, HIPAA, fair use, and copyright. Analysis and Evaluation addresses explanation of AI tools and their impacts, benefits-and-risks assessment, multifaceted analysis including algorithmic biases and data quality, and context-specific evaluation for library use cases. Use and Application covers task efficiency, workplace collaboration, effective prompting, service innovation, and accessible tool selection. The ACRL framework explicitly grounds itself in ALA's Core Values and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, positioning responsible AI engagement as a continuation of librarianship's established critical-information commitments.

AI Policy Working Group and divisional task forces

In June 2025, the ALA Council established the AI Policy Working Group with a charge to develop a unified, critically informed ALA-wide position on AI in libraries through the lens of ALA's Core Values. The group issued a draft document — "Guidance of the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Libraries" — for member comment in April 2026, with a feedback deadline of May 8, 2026; a final version is to be presented to Council for approval at the 2026 ALA Annual Conference.

The draft guidance addresses three interconnected concerns. On patron privacy, it establishes that library staff should not connect patron management systems or patron records to AI tools; staff should avoid AI tools that require access to patron personal data; and where AI tools process such data, strong protections must be in place — the guidance names patron-data privacy as non-negotiable regardless of AI capability. On equity and justice, it defines justice as distributive — the concerted, equitable application of AI benefits to all members of society, especially those facing additional barriers — and charges libraries with ensuring that AI tools and AI literacy training are available to marginalised community members, not only to the already-connected. On human-centred service, it establishes that all library workers and all community members retain the right to human assistance for any library service; libraries must maintain sufficient human expertise to provide that option; core library jobs must be preserved even where AI can automate parts of those tasks; and algorithmic recommendations that appear arbitrary or unreasonable must be questioned or overridden by professional judgment.

The PLA — the public-library division — established its own Transformative Technology Task Force after the PLA Board voted in June 2025 to replace its previous Technology Advisory Group with a body whose initial two-year focus is artificial intelligence in public libraries specifically. Under PLA President Dr. Brandy McNeil, the nine-member task force — including practitioners from South Huntington, Kent District, Arlington Heights, and Arapahoe Libraries, plus the LEO Group and Flywheel Strategies — began work in November 2025. Its charge is to curate and develop resources for public library staff focused on practical solutions, best practices, skills building, and community engagement strategies around AI. A town hall was held January 27, 2026; task force work feeds into the PLA 2026 Conference in Minneapolis (April 1–3, 2026).

Position in the corpus

The ALA's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the organised voice of the US library profession on both axes of AI's intersection with libraries. Its training-data position — fair use is adequate; existing law should not be rewritten to restrict computational use of publicly accessible works — makes it one of the few professional associations advocating for the permissibility of AI training, grounded not in industry interest but in the library community's century-long commitment to information access and text-and-data-mining rights. Its deployment position — patron privacy is absolute, equity is distributive, human service cannot be substituted — makes it simultaneously a structural check on AI's deployment in library services, aligned with the broader make-AI-good pattern of professional communities insisting on governance, accountability, and equity in AI rollout.

Structurally, the ALA follows the same sectoral-pivot pattern that the Authors Guild, the National Education Association, and the WGA represent elsewhere in the corpus — a long-standing professional association whose institutional infrastructure pivots into AI advocacy when AI deployment and AI policy directly reshape its members' working conditions and professional domain. The ALA's distinctive axis is the training-data one: where most sectoral organisations defend members against AI, the ALA defends information access and research use even when that means a fair-use reading of AI training. Libraries have always been on the access side of copyright arguments; that positioning does not shift when the downstream consumer is a large language model rather than a graduate student.