New Webinar - "AI Slop in Collections: Practical Strategies for a Growing Problem"

AI Slop in Collections: Practical Strategies for a Growing Problem
A Library 2.0 AI Webinar with Crystal Trice

OVERVIEW: 

AI-generated books and other materials are flooding the market, and they're not always easy to spot. Some contain inaccurate information, repetitive text, fabricated references, or questionable illustrations. Others imitate legitimate titles or authors, while misleading metadata and inflated reviews make it difficult to separate reliable materials from low-quality content. Even familiar purchasing channels aren't immune.

For library staff responsible for collection development, this creates some challenging questions. How can you recognize questionable materials before purchasing them? Which warning signs deserve a closer look? How much can you trust vendor listings, reviews, and publisher information? And what should your library do about AI-generated materials that arrive through patron requests, local authors, donations, or digital collections?

This practical webinar explores ten strategies for recognizing and avoiding AI slop in library collections. Through real-world examples, we'll examine what to look for in author information, metadata, reviews, covers, and sample pages. We'll also explore ways to strengthen selection practices, work more effectively with vendors, and address AI-generated content through collection development policies and procedures.

Throughout, we'll consider the gray areas, including legitimate books that use AI-generated elements, the limitations of detection methods, and the importance of professional judgment when deciding what belongs in a library collection.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Participants will be able to:

• Recognize warning signs of low-quality, misleading, or potentially AI-generated materials during the selection process.
• Apply practical verification techniques using author information, metadata, reviews, sample content, and trusted sources.
• Identify opportunities to strengthen collection development workflows, vendor practices, and policies to reduce the risk of acquiring questionable materials.

This 60-minute webinar will provide practical examples and evaluation strategies to help library staff make more informed selection decisions. Participants will also receive a printable Before You Buy checklist to use when evaluating materials for their collections. All registrants will have access to the recording, presentation slides, and checklist.

DATE: Tuesday, November 24th, 2026, 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm US Eastern Time

COST:

• $99/person - includes live attendance, anytime access to the recording and presentation slides, and a participation certificate. To arrange group discounts (see below), to submit a purchase order, or for any registration difficulties or questions, email admin@library20.com.

TO REGISTER: 

Click HERE to register and pay. You can pay by credit card. You will receive an email within a day with information on how to attend the webinar live and how you can access the permanent webinar recording. If you are paying for someone else to attend, you'll be prompted to send an email to admin@library20.com with the name and email address of the actual attendee.

If you need to be invoiced or pay by check, if you have any trouble registering for a webinar, or if you have any questions, please email admin@library20.com.

NOTE: Please check your spam folder if you don't receive your confirmation email within a day.

SPECIAL GROUP RATES (email admin@library20.com to arrange):

• Multiple individual log-ins and access from the same organization paid together: $75 each for 3+ registrations, $65 each for 5+ registrations. Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.
• The ability to show the webinar (live or recorded) to a group located in the same physical location or in the same virtual meeting from one log-in: $299.
• Large-scale institutional access for viewing with individual login capability: $499 (hosted either at Learning Revolution or in Niche Academy). Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.

CRYSTAL TRICE

With over two decades of experience in libraries and education, Crystal Trice is passionate about helping people work together more effectively in transformative, but practical ways. As founder of Scissors & Glue, LLC, Crystal partners with libraries and schools to bring positive changes through interactive training and hands-on workshops. She is a Certified Scrum Master and has completed a Masters Degree in Library & Information Science, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Elementary Education and Psychology. She is a frequent national presenter on topics ranging from project management to conflict resolution to artificial intelligence. She currently resides near Portland, Oregon, with her extraordinary husband, fuzzy cows, goofy geese, and noisy chickens. Crystal enjoys fine-tip Sharpies, multi-colored Flair pens, blue painters tape, and as many sticky notes as she can get her hands on.

 

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Your Child's Education: Parenting in the Age of AI

Nobody agrees about AI in school

If you have a child in school right now, you have probably noticed that nobody agrees about AI. One teacher forbids it, and the next one assigns it. Schools buy software to catch students using it and software to teach them with it. The detection tools accuse honest students and miss plenty of others. Meanwhile, the children are already using it, with or without permission.

The confusion is honest. Teachers were handed this with no warning and little help, and they are working it out as they go. The policies will keep changing for years.

Your child doesn't have years. The habits they form now, about whether to wrestle with a hard idea or hand it off, are forming this semester.

It helps to see that the school is answering a different question than you are. The school has to ask whether the work is the student's own, because it must stand behind the grade. That is a fair question. Yours is whether your child is learning to think.

No policy can answer that one. It takes someone who knows the child, sees them every day, and will still be there in ten years.

That is why I think the best answer to AI in school is the oldest one we have: a parent who is paying attention. You don't need to understand the technology. You need to know what your child is thinking about, and to talk with them about it.

Start with your own experience

Think back to a time you learned something that changed you. I don't mean a class you passed. I mean a time you came out able to do or see something you couldn't before. Now ask what made it possible.

I have put this question to rooms full of educators for years, and the lists they make are nearly identical. Someone took a real interest in me. Someone trusted me. Someone challenged me to do something I didn't know I was capable of. Nobody names a curriculum, a test, or a grading system.

Almost every answer comes down to a person. For your child, the person most likely to be that someone, or to find that someone, is you.

What school is built to do

Most teachers went into the work hoping to be that someone for children, and many manage it. They manage it against the arithmetic. A teacher has your child for one year, alongside thirty others. You have your child for life. Nobody in the building is responsible for your child across time. You are.

But school itself does only three things reliably. It keeps children safe and occupied during the adult workday. It teaches them to work inside a structure. It issues the credentials that open later doors. These are real goods, and I am not criticizing the people who provide them.

It is worth separating four things we usually call by one name. Schooling is grades, credits, and following the rules. Training is real skill for real tasks. Education, in the old sense of drawing out, is what happens when someone helps you think at a level you couldn't reach alone. Self-directed learning is the destination: a person who has learned how to learn and steers their own growth. 

School supplies the first and sometimes the second. The other two happen in relationships.

For several generations, the message to parents has been to put the children on the bus and let the professionals handle it. The message was sincere. It was also wrong about how much of an education can be handed off.

You are more qualified than you think

Many parents hold back because they can't teach algebra or diagram a sentence. The research on parent involvement says that isn't what matters.

Across decades of studies, two things show the strongest connection to how children do. The first is high expectations: a parent who plainly expects the child to learn, to try hard things, and to own the work. The second is conversation: regular, substantive talk between parent and child about what the child is learning and thinking. Checking homework and supervising closely rank among the weakest.

The things that matter most require no subject expertise. They require attention and time.

You also know things no professional can. You know your child's temperament, what lights them up, what shuts them down, and what they are like on a bad day. A teacher meeting your child in September starts from nothing. You do not.

What taking charge looks like

Taking charge is not homeschooling, unless you want it to be. It is not fighting the school. It is deciding that you are the one holding the plan.

Decide what you are aiming for. Grades measure schooling. Ask what you want your child to be able to do, and what kind of person you hope they become. Then judge everything else by that.

Treat school as one supplier among several. It is good at some things. A grandparent, a neighbor with a workshop, a librarian, a coach, a job, a long project the child chose: these supply what school can't.

Read struggle as information. When your child resists, stalls, or falls behind, the first question is about fit, and only later about fault. A grade reports how your child performed under one set of conditions. It is not a measurement of your child.

Stay close to the teachers. They see your child in a setting you don't. Ask what they notice before you ask about the grade.

And don't do the work for your child. The goal is a person who directs their own learning, which means your job is to become less necessary every year.

AI at home

The same tool can finish a child's thought or sharpen it. Used one way, it writes the essay and removes the struggle that builds judgment. Used another way, it asks questions, pushes back, and makes a child explain what they mean. The difference is in how it is used, and that gets decided at home.

We have been here before. When phones and social media arrived, most of us treated them as a given. The parents who tried to hold a line alone found it nearly impossible, because every other child already had one.

So talk to other parents. A norm shared by five families holds where one family's rule does not.

The habit the research already favors turns out to be the best protection I know of. A child who is regularly asked to say, in their own words, what they think and why, has to do the thinking.

A first step

Tonight, ask your child a question you don't know the answer to. What did you think about today that interested you? What did you hear that you didn't agree with? Then listen longer than is comfortable.

This week, do that learning exercise yourself. Write down the conditions of your own deepest learning. Next to each one, write whether your child has it now, and who provides it.

Wherever the answer is "no one," you have found your job.