The San José Public Library (SJPL) has been a key point of access to information and ideas since its founding in 1880 as a one-room "free" library to its now 24 branches and a main library jointly operated in partnership with the San José State University. Delivering on its mission to “enrich lives by fostering lifelong learning and by ensuring that every member of the community has access to a vast array of ideas and information” will be no different in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially as AI technologies and tools raise big questions about what the future may look like.
SJPL is committed to providing access to information, technology, and a supportive environment to learn about a vast array of topics, including technology, to all customers. Through programming and on-site access to technology, residents will have the opportunity to learn about AI – what it is (or isn’t), what it can do (and what it is bad at doing), what levels of privacy are available and how to protect privacy, and so on.
Ultimately, SJPL’s mission is as it always has been: to provide information that people use as they make informed decisions for themselves.
About the Technologist-in-Residence Program
The Technologist-in-Residence is a fellowship style role generously funded through the San José Public Library Foundation. This program was created to support the library and the community as we navigate the current suite of tools being called “AI” together. The rapid development and advancement of these tools are influencing the future, changing how information is accessed, how we work and learn, and how we communicate. Through this residency, we aim to deliver programming that brings domain experts and the public together through the Library to empower the community to influence the future of emerging tech and AI.
About Sarah – SJPL’s Technologist-in-Residence
Dr. Sarah Papazoglakis will serve as SJPL’s first Technologist-in-Residence. Sarah is a humanist and a technologist. She completed her PhD in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she developed the “Alternative Futures, Imagined Pasts” course and published her dissertation research: Doing Good, Behaving Badly: Fictions of American Philanthropy. Since completing her doctorate, she has spent almost a decade designing ethical frameworks for building technology responsibly by emphasizing how storytelling and fiction serves as a common foundation of both literature and emerging technologies, like AI. She translated her research and teaching experience into a working group proposal for convening people most negatively and positively impacted by the adoption of machine learning into the food system to share their stories and recommendations by building the Refresh Food + Tech project from the ground up as a consultant for Google. Developing an engagement model that brought cross-sector stakeholders to the table to build a shared policy platform introduced her to privacy and trust as key community concerns about new technologies, leading her to complete the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Privacy Certification. Seeking to serve her community in a more direct way, Sarah joined the City of San José as the first full-time privacy lead and built the City’s Digital Privacy Policy based on its Digital Privacy Principles.
Today, working from principles and the premise that all new technologies first begin as fiction, Sarah helps product teams develop the narrative of the future technologies they are building, emphasizing how that story could be different based on the design and engineering choices made throughout the product development process. By helping teams imagine and gain evidence-based insights into how emerging technologies could be designed and built to meet diverse communities' and consumers’ needs, she collaborates with engineering and technical leaders to translate that story into hardware and software requirements that implement responsible innovation. Sarah is also the co-founder of Autonomous Futures, a counter-archive of speculative fiction novels, films, and other cultural texts that offers principles for exploring alternative futures for emerging technology by centering writers and perspectives often left out of the oft-cited canon of science fiction credited with inspiring novel technologies.
As the Library’s first resident, Sarah will draw from this multi-faceted experience to build innovative programming centered on community building and growing our collective capacity to not only respond to this current AI era but to shape where it goes.
Crafting Our Future
We are kicking this residency off under the theme of “Crafting Our Future.” The yearlong series will convene community conversations anchored on a book or film, giving us a shared reference point for engaging in thoughtful dialogue about the future of technology together. These community gatherings will emphasize perspectives and communities that are often left out of conversations on emerging technology. We will bring in experts to explain how these tools are actually built and why they work the way they do to help make us all better judges of the stakes, limits, and possibilities of generative AI.
Reflecting on our collective discussions on fictional possible worlds and expert-guided talks about AI technologies, we will tap into our human creativity to craft a community art project that stitches together individual contributions into a collective patchwork. It will be an opportunity to create a collective, concrete representation of the future we want to build together and what we want the technologies and tools to look like in service of our community in San José and beyond.
Join us
Our inaugural kickoff event: The Design of AI, which will take place for a lunch time event (with light snacks) on Wednesday, September 16 from 12 to 1:30 p.m. We will discuss the novella Automatic Noodle (2025) by Annalee Newitz and host an expert in designing AI and emerging technology interfaces and experiences who will guide us into understanding the design decisions shaping our interactions with chatbots and generative AI tools and how they impact how we understand and engage with these tools.
For more information about AI education and resources at the Library, please visit: sjpl.org/AI.
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