Austin Book wants to be a librarian. 

And yes, he’s aware of how perfect his last name is for the profession. While it’s not exactly nepotism, he jokes — since he has no relatives who are librarians — he hopes his name might get his foot in the door.

Book does like to read. But, more than that, he’s a “consumer of all things entertainment,” especially movies and television. 

After undergrad, where he double majored in creative writing and journalism, the Holland, Michigan, native planned a trip to L.A. to explore a career as a TV writer. “I liked the idea of creating captivating entertainment that could also challenge people's perceptions of the world,” he recalls. 

But L.A. wasn’t his vibe, he admits with a smile, and he grew wary when he realized how the entertainment industry operates. 

“You need to have connections. It's number one breaking into that industry. And I was like, I don't know that that's necessarily what I want for myself anymore.”

Rather than making connections to land a job, he wanted a job that would allow him to connect with people. 

He honed this skill, back in Michigan, as a customer service representative at Sierra Trading Post and Cayman Chemical. When he began considering graduate school, his priority was finding a fulfilling path. A friend recommended the library science and digital archives track at the University of Michigan School of Information, and the program resonated with him right away. He only applied to one school. 

Now a second-year in the Master of Science in Information program, Book is passionate about connecting community members with the library’s resources. As an outreach library assistant for the University of Michigan Library, he works to meet students where they are.

Book’s interest in cinematic experiences has come in handy. This past summer, he designed and built virtual escape rooms using the platform LibWizard — one to guide visitors through Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library and another to demystify the resources offered by Shapiro Undergraduate Library.

“The library provides so many resources that students don’t necessarily know about,” he says. These resources range from the digital — free access to five streaming services and thousands of audiobooks — to the charmingly tangible: a vending machine in Shapiro Library that dispenses pods and packets of seeds for students to plant. 

In a library, you're not selling people anything. At the end of the day, all I want to do is connect students, and really anyone who comes into the library, to the resources they need.

Year-round, Book creates engaging videos and hosts tabling sessions to nurture awareness of the library’s resources and teach people how to navigate them. His dream, after graduating, is to find an outreach role in an academic library that allows him to continue working with students. 

“In a library, you're not selling people anything,” he says. “At the end of the day, all I want to do is connect students, and really anyone who comes into the library, to the resources they need.”

Unsurprisingly, Book has taken on an active role in the UMSI community. Within the School of Information Master’s Association, or SIMA, he has been appointed to represent his peers’ curricular and academic support needs. He attends biweekly meetings to share feedback from the student body with faculty who serve on the MSI Committee.

“I think it's honestly awesome to have a library science student be a representative,” he says, “because this program started out as a program for library science students.”

Describing the community he has found at UMSI, Book pauses for a moment. “What’s a word that means ‘here for you’?’” he asks, pulling out his phone. Like a true librarian, he looks it up. 

“Dependable, empathetic,” he reads aloud. “Yes. Inclusive.” 

His favorite class at UMSI, Understanding Records and Archives with associate professor of information Patricia Garcia, stands out to him because of Garcia’s teaching style. 

“She was very good at creating an environment where students wanted to engage,” he says. For his course project, Book worked with four of his classmates to create a website called Queering the Calendar, archiving calendars of LGBTQ+ events in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti from the 1970s to 1990s. 

“You don't really think of that time as a great time for the queer community, but it was alive in Ann Arbor and in Ypsi, so it was really cool seeing those histories,” he says.

History informs the future, and this semester Book is excited about a course project with the international community Artificial Intelligence for Libraries, Archives and Museums.

AI4LAM aims to develop policy and share best practices to guide cultural institutions in the responsible adoption of AI. Book’s group is collaborating with their client from the Library of Congress, a UMSI alumna who co-chairs AI4LAM, to conduct focus groups and help shape the community's future.

Working with a client has given him the opportunity to use his people skills in a new context. This is Book at his best: facing novel challenges with tried-and-true tools, and greeting the uncertainty of the future with a sense of humor. 

If you had asked him five years ago where he would be today, he might have said in the writer’s room of a TV studio, pitching plot points that would end up on millions of people’s screens.

Who knew he would end up someplace even cooler?