I was privileged to attend the BETH = Bibliotheques Europeennes de Theologie conference in Stavanger, Norway, 20-23 September 2025, which had the theme of exploring AI’s role in Theological libraries. I really appreciated the practical nature of many of the papers in this conference, which highlighted projects and processes using AI that had been implemented in libraries. I also felt that there was also a second theme or undercurrent, that of highlighting the human value of libraries and the books they contain.
View down into Stavanger
Before we dived into AI, there was a walking tour of Stavanger, starting at Stavanger Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in Norway at 900 years old. Stavanger is located in what is known as the ‘Bible Belt’ of west and south Norway, and used to be called the mission city of Norway because it sent out so many missionaries. I was impressed by several richly detailed epitaphs with paintings of the deceased with their family. Our tour also took in St Peter’s Church, a more ‘regular’ Norwegian church, where a rehearsing worship band created an atmospheric visit. Our last ‘church stop’ was at a historic ‘prayer house’, an upstairs room used as a meeting room by non-conformist churches that sprang up after the Dissenter Act in 1845 allowed Christian gatherings other than the established Church of Norway. Today it is used as a youth church meeting place by the Church of Norway. Our tour took in Stavanger’s streets of painted wooden houses, harbour and hilltop views. We ended up at the conference location, VID Specialised University, where we were greeted by lovely Norwegian waffles and coffee.
Historic epitaph, Stavanger Cathedral
The first day of the conference closed with a film showing of Le Poids des livres : la bibliothèque de Port-Royal. In preparation for the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal’s move to new premises in 2022-23, two filmmakers, Camille de Chenay and Adrien Pierre, followed the life of the library for six years. The documentary film that resulted is a love song to the library and a powerful piece of advocacy about the value of the library and the human stories it holds and creates. It’s not currently available on YouTube as it’s being shown at film festivals but it should be in the future – I really recommend that you watch it!
Historic Mission school building, VID Specialized University
Hannah Pope from VID Specialised University kicked off the papers about AI by exploring the role of the librarian. She suggested that we may feel saturated by suggestions about AI, and be struggling between knowing that it is important but also hearing that it is problematic. AI is a tool – or rather, a whole bunch of them – but the difficulty is that we may not be able to pick up and put down that tool at will. It’s appearing all the time in our environment, in a “gold rush” of AI not necessarily in our control. Ignoring AI is no longer an option. We are still in the early stages of understanding AI, and it is similar to the advent of the World Wide Web, so it could be argued “That all turned out fine.” But AI – Gen AI – is an explosion, of bots, deep fakes, and disinformation. Often in the library we’re expected to be ambassadors for AI, but often conversations around AI lack nuance and understanding of the complexities – there is a role for the information professional here. Librarians are ideally positioned to have a foot in both camps, to challenge and adopt.
Juergen Warmbrunn from Herder Institute Research Library, Marburg shared a paper “AI in libraries: just think about it or do it?”. This immediately got my attention by talking about using Gen AI to handle lists of large donations to the library. Warmbrunn had had success using ChatGPT LLMs to identify unique items from donations lists, although there had been some challenges applying LLMs to the PICA Library system. Other successful projects had used AI tools in cataloguing a large donation in Latvian, and in developing a ‘Table of Contents’ awareness service for incoming research publications. Warmbrunn felt there had been a positive reduction of work processes and increased outputs. Importantly, there had been no negative consequences for staffing levels.
In contrast, Donatella Bellardini, from the General Library of the Historical Studies Center PP. Barnabiti, Rome spoke about “Reading literacy, gamification, library services, and Artificial Intelligence”. This focused on a pilot project aiming to combat educational poverty and counter the negative effects of AI through promoting reading and critical thinking. Reading groups were held in the library, with children engaging in activities to follow clues about the books they liked best. The underlying premise was that books remain essential in supporting critical thinking, and that we should honour our traditions whilst embracing technological achievements.
Henrik Holtvedt Andersen from MF Norwegian School of Religion and Society, Oslo presented on “Using AI to digitise and curate sensitive research data”, in a project where paper surveys were digitised to create image (jpg) files. He discussed the data issues of using ChatGPT as a tool, when the free version of ChatGPT has open data, though the Teams or Enterprise subscriptions enable data security. The University of Oslo has its own AI tool which is GDPR compliant. His project had also developed his skills in prompt engineering, with giving the query in natural language, providing context and background information, clear instructions and examples working well. Learning points for me included that CHatGPT has memory, so previous prompts are to some degree part of new ones. It’s an effective way of working to create a project in ChatGPT and save all your chats to it.
In the Mission archives
We had an opportunity to visit the library, archives and museum collections at VID Specialized University. VID has an agreement with the National Library of Norway to retain mission and church archives from denominations other than the Church of Norway. There are about 550 archive collections. This reflects its history as the archives of the Norwegian Mission Society (NMS) which was founded in Stavanger August 1842. In the library, the office of one of the most prominent missionaries has been reconstructed and used as a focal point for his historic book collections. VID Library overall has about 80, 000 volumes. It benefits from the digitisation programmes of the National Library of Norway, which have digitised a significant amount of the Norwegian material printed before 1980.
John Kutsko from Atla reported on the Global Survey, picking up on the survey themes of changes in theological education and the relationship of the Library in the organisation. The full report should be published shortly. Then, Riccardo Amerigo Vigliermo and Federico Ruozzi presented on AI and Non-Latin alphabet cataloguing: the Digital Maktaba Project. This has developed AI tools to catalogue Arabic-script theological collections. I can’t tell you much more except it looked Very Clever – please follow up with them!
Continuing the theme of AI & Cataloguing Workflows, Hannes Lowagie, Royal Library of Brussels, spoke about how they have embraced artificial intelligence to reimagine cataloguing workflows. AI was used as part of a large cataloguing retroconversion project, which scanned title pages of books to identify the books and create a basic record. This used the Microsoft Power platform, designed for ‘Citizen developers’, and worked well for early 20thC and late 19thC books which have a lot of information on the title page. Lowagie had also explored the potential use of AI for classification by building prompts to add classification terms. This has set up an automated classification workflow that covers the basic tasks, meaning he can now ask more in terms of complex subject indexing from staff. Key benefits included consistency in bibliographic records, a scalable infrastructure to support future book deposits, and AI integration that enables collaboration and the shared use of models, training data and cataloguing rules. Last but not least, AI enables the use of human cataloguers for really expert things. Issues include a reliance on Microsoft, when if they stop paying the licence, they lose the tool.
Martin Fassnacht from the University of Tubingen spoke about how AI is changing the IXTheo tool. They have piloted using DeepSeek with IXTheo data and come back with plausible results. Enabling natural language queries in IX Theo is one of the goals. Risks include the quality of the answer, and economics – licenses can change.
Jaime Lopez de Eguilaz spoke about the Bilbao Diocesan Library, which is marking the 75th anniversary of its diocese. This diocesan heritage library is showcasing its journey since 1956 through public exhibitions and community engagement. It is also looking ahead to the integration of AI by using a chatbot.
On Tuesday afternoon, we visited the Norwegian Museum of Printing. A fascinating exhibition on the history of the printed book in Norway displayed 16th and 17th C imprints with waste manuscript bindings.These manuscripts preserved as bindings represent some of the very few fragments of pre-Reformation medieval manuscripts in Norway. Norway came relatively late to book culture, as until the 19thC it was governed by Denmark and most printing took place in Copenhagen. The museum maintains a hands on print shop with historic examples of printing equipment and machines, with student placements, internships and community groups working to maintain and retain historic printing skills.
At the print shop, Norwegian Printing Museum
To close, I think the most memorable quote of the conference for me was from Juergen Warmbrunn Herder Institute Research Library, Marburg “With the use of AI, clever people will become more clever and stupid people will become more stupid.” What does this mean? Reflecting on my own experience, I think it means that if we can engage cleverly, critically and creatively with AI, we can leverage the benefits of AI to make the world better. If we ignore AI, we risk AI influencing and even controlling us through its omnipresence in the digital environment that surrounds us all.