I have been watching the AI industry name things for three years now. After a while, a pattern becomes hard to ignore.
Nearly every capability being celebrated as a breakthrough of the current moment has a library science predecessor with decades of history behind it. Different name. Older idea. No attribution.
Here is the short version.
1. Prompt engineering We called it the reference interview. You ask careful questions until the real question emerges, then you search. Same skill. Higher salary when a tech company names it.
2. Retrieval Augmented Generation Grounding AI answers in a verified document collection before responding. We called it a controlled database search. MEDLARS was doing this in 1964.
3. Knowledge graphs Structured maps of how concepts relate to each other. We called it subject indexing and faceted classification. Ranganathan built the theoretical foundation before most AI researchers were born.
4. Named entity recognition Identifying names, places, organisations, and concepts in text. We called it authority control. The Library of Congress has been doing it since 1902.
5. Semantic search Understanding what a query means rather than matching keywords. We called it conceptual indexing and built the MeSH thesaurus specifically to capture meaning rather than terminology.
6. Content moderation Deciding what enters a collection, on what criteria, evaluated by whom. We called it collection development policy. Every library has had one for over a century.
7. Hallucination detection Checking whether an AI-generated answer is actually true. We called it reference verification. We have been doing it since the reference desk was a physical piece of furniture.
AI scaled these capabilities, automated them, and in several cases improved them substantially. That is real, and worth saying plainly.
What is also plain is that the intellectual foundations were laid by information professionals who are now being invited to attend AI literacy workshops so they can learn about concepts their profession invented.
I stopped waiting for the acknowledgement a while ago. There is more useful work to do than wait.
Show up. Build things. The room is already ours.