How the library has leveraged disruptive innovation to embrace GenAI

This year, staff and students began engaging with the Library for support sourcing, using, and evaluating various AI tools. With a plethora of AI tools bursting onto the scene, information and digital literacy are more important than ever. The Library has leant into the disruption by implementing various strategies to keep abreast of the latest developments in generative AI and created resources to help students develop their critical thinking skills to evaluate these models. Our librarians are using Teams to engage each other in the generative AI conversation. The Library uses a Teams channel to share and discuss current AI literature, useful tools and prompt engineering strategies, with certain topics having led to robust conversations in our monthly Library Discussion Groups.

Two working groups have convened to investigate how the Library can use generative AI tools to further increase our productivity and how to educate students on the responsible use of AI. A library guide was recently published on the use of generative AI tools in assessments, and links to useful AI research tools have been added to relevant research support library guides and class demonstrations to explain how they can be used as research assistants and for scoping the literature. Future conversations around AI and library guides currently under development will focus on algorithmic literacy (Ridley & Pawlick-Potts, 2021), understanding bias, developing competency in critical ignoring (Kozyreva et al., 2023), detecting hallucinations and communicating with AI through effective prompt engineering (Lo, 2023).

The Library is constantly adapting to change and has leveraged the AI disruption to innovate and enhance our services, resources and strategies in order to prepare our students for a future occupied by large language models.