“To be perfectly honest, I did not choose libraries. Libraries chose me.”
That’s what librarian Anne Grant says when asked about the path that led her to a career in librarianship. Grant’s original career goal was to teach, specifically to become a history teacher. After earning her bachelor’s in history from Western Carolina University, Grant came to Clemson for graduate school and had the opportunity to attend the University of Aberdeen in Scotland to earn a post-graduate diploma in Scottish and Irish studies. It was at Aberdeen that she realized she might want to change her plans to focus more on teaching and less on research. She decided she wasn’t cut out to pursue a Ph.D. at that point in her life.
Grant had become familiar with Clemson Libraries during graduate school, as she worked as a graduate assistant in the Faculty Senate office, which was located in Cooper Library at the time. When she started looking for a job, people encouraged her to apply at the library. It took five tries, but she finally landed a job with the Libraries in 2001 working in both reference and acquisitions.
Some of her colleagues in the library encouraged her to get her library science degree so that she would have more opportunities for career growth in the Libraries, so she went back to school to earn her Master of Library and Information Science degree from the University of Alabama. After finishing that degree, she moved into the role of education librarian, and she has been on the faculty ever since.
Despite her misgivings about going into academia during graduate school, Grant did go on to earn her Ph.D. She graduated in December 2024 with a Ph.D. in learning sciences from Clemson’s College of Education.
Grant now serves as the research librarian for history, geography, philosophy and religion, and languages. She also serves as instruction coordinator and recently took on a new role as AI literacy coordinator. Her role is to help coordinate people across campus who are working with AI and to help students, faculty and staff understand the power of AI as well as its limitations.
“AI is everywhere now, it’s in everything we use, and I think sometimes people think AI is omniscient, and it isn’t,” she said. “It can’t know things that it doesn’t have access to, but people just trust it to be the be all, end all. Until they can understand the limitations of these tools, then people can’t understand how to critically think about the information they get out of AI.”
Grant said that because librarians are experts in how to access information, it makes perfect sense for them to be on the forefront of helping people learn about AI and how it can help them.
“There are so many prongs to AI work — there’s the information piece, the ethics piece, the IT piece, the data privacy piece. We’re just trying to contribute to the conversation by talking about the information piece and working with people across campus who are holding the other pieces and trying to give people a central place they can come to learn more about AI.”