🔑 The Classroom
Card Catalog is a free weekly newsletter about information literacy and AI fluency, written through the lens of a librarian. I write about how to evaluate whether what we’re reading can be trusted, what AI is doing to the way we think and how to use these tools well, how search engines and algorithms decide what information we see, and how librarians approach finding and organizing information.
The Card Catalog Classroom is where that work goes deeper. It’s a private learning space on Circle where the ideas and resources shared across Card Catalog articles and Notes are organized into a searchable library and built into structured lessons with hands-on exercises. It’s a place to work through skills and explore organized resources at our own pace, with everything available to come back to whenever we want.
The Classroom is a living library, and like any library, the collection grows over time. Each lesson is built from one of Card Catalog’s articles. Where the article explains an idea, the lesson is a way to put that idea into practice, organized across four learning domains: AI Literacy, Source Evaluation, Research Skills, and Digital Culture.
Alongside the lessons is the Reference Collection. If we’ve ever read a Note, bookmarked a resource, or thought “I know she shared something about this” and couldn’t track it down again, all of that now lives inside the Classroom too. Every archive, database, tool, framework, and recommendation ever shared in Card Catalog Notes has been organized into a searchable directory of 16 categories, with new entries added every week.
Lessons
The Classroom has a growing library of lessons organized across four areas: AI Literacy, Source Evaluation, Research Skills, and Digital Culture. Each lesson is built from one of Card Catalog’s published articles, but what makes them different from the articles themselves is what happens after the reading.
Every lesson teaches a specific, repeatable procedure by walking through a case that shows how it works in practice, and includes an exercise or interactive challenge so we can try the skill ourselves rather than just understand the idea behind the skill. The lessons are built this way because practice is what turns a skill we’ve read about into a skill we can use. An article can explain how to evaluate a source, but evaluating one in the moment, when it matters, takes practice. The lessons give us a way to do that at our own pace.
The Reference Collection
This is the part of the Classroom I’m most excited for people to spend time with.
Card Catalog’s Notes feed has shared hundreds of resources over the past year: free archives and databases, verification tools, research methods, AI prompting techniques, libraries from around the world, reading recommendations, explanations of how algorithms work, and more. The Reference Collection is where every one of them is organized into 16 searchable categories so we can find what we need when we need it.
AI Prompting Playbook organizes prompting techniques by what we’re trying to accomplish: analysis, fundamentals, learning, research, and verification. The collection is organized by purpose, with explanations of what each approach does and when to use each one.
Archives and Databases is one of the largest categories, and it brings together free, publicly accessible digital collections across arts and culture, business and finance, government and civic records, history and genealogy, music and audio, nature and wildlife, news and journalism, science and research, and food and drink. (The archives shared across Card Catalog Notes are grouped by subject, so every audio archive sits with the other audio archives, every science database sits with the other science databases, and finding what we need takes a click instead of a search through old Notes.)
Evaluation Frameworks collects every framework for assessing the credibility of a source, a claim, or a piece of content. Some of these are established academic models. Others are practical approaches I’ve developed specifically for the way information moves right now.
How AI Works is for anyone who wants to understand what’s happening when we use these tools, without needing an engineering background. The resources here cover how language models are trained and what their limits are, why AI hallucinates and how to spot it, key terms that come up in AI conversations, and the conceptual distinctions that matter when working with these tools day to day.
How Algorithms Work covers the systems that decide what we see, what gets recommended to us, and what gets buried, from social media feeds to search engines to content moderation. How these systems make decisions is part of the information environment we all live in.
How We Trust Information explores the psychology and systems behind why we believe what we believe. The resources here look at the cognitive shortcuts we take, the social signals we rely on, and the conditions under which trust forms or breaks down. This is where we examine our own thinking alongside the information we’re evaluating.
Information and Library History traces the long story of how humans have made, organized, shared, and contested information. The resources here cover the technologies that shaped how information travels, the systems and people behind how it gets organized, the politics of who has access, and the patterns that keep showing up across centuries.
Information Literacy Tip of the Day collects short, sharp observations about how information is presented and how it misleads us. The tips here look at the patterns we encounter constantly without naming, from misleading statistics to disguised advertising to the small distinctions that change what a piece of information actually means.
Information Overload brings together research and strategies for managing the volume of what comes at us every day. This is library science applied to modern life: how attention works, how to build sustainable information habits, and how to design our relationship with information so it serves us instead of exhausting us.
Librarian’s Dictionary defines the working vocabulary of library and information science, the terms librarians use to describe how information is found, evaluated, and shared. These are concepts shaped inside the field of library science, brought into conversation with the way we navigate information now.
Libraries of the World is a catalog of remarkable libraries from every corner of the planet, the ones that expand what the word “library” can mean. The collection moves across regions and time periods, showing how the work of collecting and protecting knowledge takes wildly different forms depending on where and when we look.
Library Science Tip of the Day shares the knowledge of the field: cataloging principles, classification systems, reference techniques, collection development practices, and the daily craft librarians use to organize and connect information. These are the methods that have been refined over decades inside libraries, made accessible for everyday use.
Live Nature Webcams brings together cameras trained on wild places around the world that we can watch live from anywhere. The collection ranges across savanna waterholes, coral reefs, geyser basins, and the skies where the aurora appears, each camera installed for research or park operations and then opened to the public.
Reading and Discovery is about how we engage with what we read, where we find what to read, and the broader practices of language and learning that shape both. The resources here cover everything from reading habits and book discovery to the way our environments and language choices shape how we think.
Research Skills brings together the working skills behind doing research well in today’s information environment. The resources here cover how the internet is structured, how to use the tools available to us, how to read and evaluate what we find, and how to keep what we collect organized in ways we’ll return to.
Verification Toolkit gathers the tools and techniques for checking what's in front of us, across every kind of claim and source we encounter in daily life. The resources here treat verification as something we can build into how we move through the world.
Virtual Museum Tours brings together museum experiences from around the world that we can walk through from anywhere. The collection spans museums dedicated to art, history, science, culture, and the natural world, opening up institutions that would otherwise require travel, tickets, or both to experience.
New resources are added to the Reference Collection continuously. Every time something appears in Notes, it goes into the Reference Collection where it stays organized and findable for as long as the Classroom exists. The whole collection is built on a principle I come back to over and over again: good information is findable information. If a resource has been shared on Card Catalog, we should be able to find it again whenever we need it, whether that’s tomorrow or two years from now.
The Archives
Paid subscribers have also received exclusive content over the past year that was published directly to the community, and all of it now lives in the Archives section of the Classroom, organized by type.
AI Briefings are in-depth analyses of major AI developments, written so we understand what happened and what changed without needing to follow every AI news cycle. These are the pieces subscribers tell me they forward to their colleagues most often, because they take something confusing and make it clear.
The Librarian Hotline is where subscribers have sent research questions and information challenges and received detailed, personalized responses. Past hotline entries cover everything from verifying a medical claim to evaluating whether a specific AI tool is trustworthy enough for sensitive work.
Research Packets are curated compilations of sources, studies, and perspectives on a single topic, assembled the way a reference librarian builds a reading list for someone exploring something new. Each packet includes annotations on every source and how the pieces connect to each other.
All of this content used to live scattered across the Substack feed, mixed in with everything else. In the Classroom, the Archives section organizes everything by type so we can browse and find what we need without scrolling and guessing.
Beyond the individual subscription
Most paid subscribers join as individuals, but a growing number of subscribers use Card Catalog inside larger contexts: organizations, departments, and teams where the work of evaluating information, using AI well, and doing careful research is part of the job. For anyone in that position, there are paths to the Classroom that don’t require paying out of pocket. The two options below cover how to request a subscription reimbursement by an employer and how to bring the Classroom to an entire team at once.
Company Reimbursement: A Request Template
The Classroom covers skills with direct professional value: evaluating sources, understanding how AI tools work and when to trust them, navigating research, and thinking carefully about how information moves. These are skills that apply to any work where the quality of information shapes the quality of what we produce. If the Classroom would strengthen skills we already use at work, our employer may cover the subscription as professional development.
I put together a template that you can customize and send to a manager or learning and development team. It explains what the Classroom covers and frames the cost in the context of comparable professional development.
Make a copy of the template here → Requesting a learning resource: Card Catalog
Group Licensing: For Teams and Organizations
Card Catalog offers group subscriptions for any team or organization that wants to bring the Classroom to multiple people at once. The skills covered apply broadly across professional contexts, and group subscriptions work for any workplace where information literacy, AI fluency, and research skills support the work.
Each member of a group subscription receives their own login, their own newsletter delivery, and their own access to the Classroom. Group subscriptions are $75 per seat per year, which is 25% off the individual rate. Teams can purchase any number of seats they need.
Subscribe your team here → Card Catalog group subscription
We Just Joined. Now What?
After subscribing, an invitation email arrives with a link to join the Classroom on Circle.
Start with the Start Here page, which has a welcome and a walkthrough of how everything is organized. From there, open up the Reference Collection and browse a few categories to see the range of what’s in there. Then pick any lesson in any of the four learning domains and work through it whenever we have time. There’s no sequence to follow and no schedule to keep up with. The Classroom is a growing library. It’s there to walk into anytime, and to return to whenever something new shows up or an old question resurfaces.
And for anyone who wants to read the AI Briefings, Librarian Hotline responses, and Research Packets directly on Substack, the full archive is available here.
