UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH CENTRAL CAMPUS, LIBRARY.
Everybody’s talking about AI and Chat GPT – what will they mean? I attended an event on 20.4.2023 organised by the Information School Sheffield University which explored this question for libraries.
Dr Andrew Cox introduced the session, reminding us that chatbots & AI have featured heavily in the news recently, and of course have existed in scifi for some time.
What might AI look like in the library?
From what we’ve learnt about AI it will have a wide and deep impact on library service and backend operations and library information literacy. We’ll see new features like library chatbots, text and datamining support and automation of systematic reviews. Knowledge discovery of collections will change, with a new paradigm of search : instead of giving a list of results, ChatGPT will give an answer. Users expectations of what a search looks like will change dramatically. There may be an impact on library jobs (although the decline of the librarian has been forecast for many years since the arrival of the internet, and librarians have evolved and thrived). Changes to the workforce will probably be complex and driven by sector.
Fundamentally we should remember that AI is only as good as the data it relies upon. Our library expertise in finding and managing data in a complex information landscape, and in determining the provenance and quality of data remains key. Also, libraries’ work in supporting sharing, openness and interoperability of data is vital as this data becomes available for AI to use.
