Getting academic library staff up-to-speed on artificial intelligence

Övrigt konferensbidrag, 2024

With the public release of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, most notably ChatGPT in 2022, interest in the technologies has swept across various organizations like wildfire. Higher education institutions and their libraries are no exception. Many academic library staff have found ways to develop their competence around AI and investigate what AI development will mean for academic libraries. Yet, if developing a better understanding for (generative) AI at academic libraries broadly is a goal for the organization, then the question arises of how a large proportion of a library’s staff can be reached, rather than a few engaged individuals, and what aspects of AI will then be relevant to address.

These are questions that we have faced in a collaboration between three libraries at universities in western Sweden. In the presentation we will share experiences from this collaborative effort to further professional development among staff members concerning AI in libraries. The program runs during the academic year 2023/2024 and contains several online lectures and two active learning classroom (ALC) sessions. The lectures were streamed live to all staff and were also recorded and made available for the three institutions. The ALC sessions, which allow for active engagement with the technologies as well as other participants on campus, required registration and were attended by a subset of the staff.

Although not all staff attended all or even parts of the program, it aimed to reach library staff beyond those who are particularly motivated to learn about AI. Apart from facilitating participation by making it less reliant on participation and time, the lectures and ALC sessions connected closely to issues of relevance in academic libraries, rather than at the university at large, and in different areas of responsibility to boot. They also linked to the local situation at the three universities, thus making them more immediately useful for the everyday work tasks. The fact that the sessions were planned and, for the most part, implemented internally has facilitated maintaining a local focus. Aspects of AI have been addressed from the perspective of their relevance to various library stakeholders (students, researchers, library staff), ongoing development projects have been presented, and issues around bias, privacy, security, and AI literacy have been discussed.

In the presentation, we will discuss the challenges of designing content for professional development around AI at a time when so much is happening and happening fast, at the same time as much actual implementation in the library field is in its infancy. We will also share our approach to these challenges, with a particular focus on how to make the content relevant to academic library staff with varying professional backgrounds and working within different specialized areas of responsibility. The presentation aims to raise awareness of, but also problems involved with, how professional development can be conducted within an area such as AI which is at the same time ubiquitous and can be viewed as a very specialized area of expertise.