What does your library need to harness the power of AI? This show is the second of a two-part series on AI with Christoper Jimenez, Web Services Librarian, and Melissa Del Castillo, Virtual Learning & Outreach Librarian, both with Information & Research Services at Florida International University Libraries. On this show, Melissa discusses Harnessing the Power of AI through collaboration, community, and communication.
Transcript
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Adriane Herrick Juarez:
This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast, where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
What does your library need to harness the power of AI? This show is the second of a two-part series on AI with Christopher Jimenez, Web Services Librarian, and Melissa Del Castillo, Virtual learning and Outreach librarian, both with Information & Research Services at Florida International University Libraries. On this show, Melissa discusses harnessing the power of AI through collaboration, community, and communication. Enjoy the show!
Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa Del Castillo:
Thank you for having me, I’m really excited to talk about AI initiatives in the library.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: I’m excited to talk about it too, thank you. This is the second episode in a two-part series on Harnessing the Power of AI. In the first episode, we talked with your colleague Christopher Jimenez about doing this through literacy and frameworks. On this show we get to hear from you, Melissa, about Harnessing the Power of AI through collaboration, community, and communication. Will you please share how we can initiate collaborative AI projects in our libraries? 01:35
Melissa Del Castillo:
I’m going to go through a couple of steps that you can follow. The good thing about what’s happening right now is that AI in libraries is so new that you shouldn’t ever feel like you’re behind, because we’re all learning this together. The first step, I would say, is to get some hands-on experience with AI tools, whether that’s going to Google Gemini and asking it a question—if you have an article you want to read, there are AI assistants like QuillBot that will summarize an article so that you don’t have to read the whole article. Craft a prompt to create some type of image for a presentation in either a Canva Magic Media or Google Gemini. Getting that hands-on experience will allow you to get the vocabulary needed to join larger conversations. It’ll help you to ask better questions when you have your own experience, so be experimental to become knowledgeable.
The second step that I would recommend is collecting information. Go onto any of the journals that are coming out like Journal of Academic Librarianship or College & Research Libraries—you’re going to find AI articles in those library journals. Also maybe go to the New York Times, seeing what they’re saying about AI. I work in an academic library, so going on to Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle for Higher Education are also good places to see what other academic institutions are saying about libraries.
Also join some groups. Right now a lot of groups are being formed. I know ACRL is forming an AI discussion group. I had the privilege of creating the ARIS Group AI in Information & Research Services, where we have conversation about articles, but it’s very low stakes. Then sign up for newsletters just to try to stay on top of the deluge of information that’s coming out about AI, because it can be quite overwhelming.
Then step three would be to attend different webinars, maybe a national, a local, a state conference and sit in on a webinar or a session where librarians are talking about how they’re using AI. There’s a lot of really great webinars that are actually being put out by vendors about ethical concerns of AI, and I would encourage, if they’re free, you might as well sign up for them. You will also get to hear what kind of conversations are being had in those types of arenas. That will make you feel more comfortable in initiating these collaborative AI projects.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: Well first of all, whew, thank you for saying that. We never have to feel behind. You mentioned this deluge. It’s kind of an understatement. It feels like there’s so much coming at us. What you are saying is so helpful—where to find those resources, where to find colleagues, how to tune in to those conversations. Thank you for that. What does it mean to create a community of practice around AI? 05:26
Melissa Del Castillo:
This is the fourth step to your last question, which is seeking partners, whether that’s institutional, whether your department, your library, your university, your larger institution, professional associations like local, state, national, global level. Also, I always encourage to think IPCD collaboration, which is interprofessional. Join a group that’s, maybe, operating at a higher level, or become a mentor to a staff or student group, cross-disciplinary, different departments or organizations within your institutions.
Chris and I have partnered with the Center for Advancement of Teaching. Currently, we’re about to do some workshops for the Office of Research and Economic Development— their Responsible Conduct of Research. We’re going to be doing a web workshop for that group. So think outside your box—outside of the department in your library to these other partnerships that could be possible. Ask yourself, Who are the stakeholders that you could reach out to? Who is excited about the prospects of AI where you are? Is it your dean? Is it patrons? Is it students? Is it other departments that you could network with? Seek out those who are making a difference and doing things in your organization, or at a larger professional association level who are writing these articles and creating these initiatives and trying to get into that circle of influence.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: How can we all contribute to the AI conversation? 07:49
Melissa Del Castillo:
We did our four steps. Now we’re doing some experimenting, we’re collecting, we’re attending and we’re partnering. This is how you can put yourself out there to contribute to the ongoing AI conversation. Again, think low stakes, Where can we learn together? Where can we find a place in this ever changing AI landscape that could be participating in a discussion forum? Maybe you want to create content. You’re at a library and you write a libGuide where you’re collecting resources, creating infographics. Maybe you want to organize that workshop on an AI topic, offer professional development opportunities like tutorials and trainings at your institution.
I would also suggest maybe putting yourself out there to find a research partner in one of these associations, these communities of practice. Propose a presentation, a paper or a poster. I think that we can feel like this is a new exploration, and there are very, very few experts, especially in libraries. We’re all at a beginning level where we’re starting to become more knowledgeable.
I would say, don’t feel like there’s going to be this scary prospect of people talking over your head and knowing a lot more than you because we are all just learning about AI and it’s also ever changing. So the conversation is different day-to-day. So, I would say feel confident if you’ve done your homework, that you can participate in these initiatives and hopefully succeed.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: We are all learning and it’s good to do that by participating to succeed. When doing all this how do we know what success looks like? 09:45
Melissa Del Castillo:
This is basic. This is what we do day-to-day. These are data points that we collect in our libraries. Whether that’s quantitative assessment—how many views did this libGuide that we created get? How many requests for reuse of our libGuide ? If you wrote an article and it’s in your institutional repository, or you put a presentation in there—how many views did that material receive, participant counts of workshops, consultation requests as a liaison for instruction. Then we move on to qualitative feedback—surveys that we do at these workshops, the feedback that we receive from the presentation discussions. Maybe we have someone who’s reached out to us by email and has offered praise and is asking further questions, all ways to gauge whether these attempts at AI initiatives have succeeded.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: I personally feel that demand is high. I don’t know what you’re experiencing in your neck of the woods, but people are asking and starting to say, Hey, I need to get up to speed on this. What does your library have to offer? I predict we are going to have some pretty big numbers and good feedback the more we jump into this and get our organizations and communities up to speed. 11:03
Melissa Del Castillo:
When you start putting yourself out there and your name starts to get attached to these initiatives—Chris and I have seen the success of this. It does snowball. We do get these requests to present at conferences. We’re currently working on a chapter for the new AI and Information Literacy Cookbook. But if you become one of those voices and you continue to try and think of new ways to participate, you will see an almost instantaneous feedback whether you were successful by getting these requests to do more. It can be overwhelming, but I think it’s worth continuing those conversations because that’s where you’re going to be gaining that valuable knowledge—in these impromptu ways that you’ve put yourself out there. Now others are asking you to do a workshop or a presentation, write a chapter, write an article, those types of things.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: And we hope to create impact, so how do we know what impact can look like in this realm? 12:38
Melissa Del Castillo:
This is something that’s building on those assessments. Those typical data points that we collect to assess success. Let’s take a leap beyond the quantitative and qualitative assessment and create a narrative of impact. Ask yourself these questions. Is there gatekeeping happening in your library on certain topics and information streams? If people feel like they can join a conversation in your library, that is demonstrating impact. If everyone feels like they’re empowered to have the conversations, to participate, to put themselves out there in these new initiatives, that is definitely a key point to look at for an impact value. Does your institute empower and navigate the evolving landscape by experimenting, collecting, attending, and partnering on AI initiatives? What’s the library doing in the larger sense of the institution? Is it someone in other departments—maybe at your university saying, Hey, well, the library can help with that. That, I think, is a great way to measure impact because the library is part of the conversation that’s happening in a larger context.
Are there known repositories? Maybe that’s an AI guide where people are accessing the information. Is the library becoming a reputable AI learning center? Do other libraries look to those guides and the repository materials as being something that should be held up as a standard for AI information and literacy? Do stakeholders feel comfortable asking experts? Are there known experts in the library that can be asked these questions, and are open to partnerships and new projects and ideas?
Is there an excitement over the possibility of incorporating AI into workflows throughout the whole library? I think that I’m going to mention him later because he’s one of my AI heroes—but Dr. Leo Lo, who also wrote The CLEAR Framework, wrote a fantastic article about AI reskilling in the library. It’s a top-down—it’s everyone from the assistant, to the student workers, cataloging, digital collections, instruction, reference. There’s also a really great article by Cox, and Cox about the implications of AI in academic libraries. They both go through each individual department, and what AI could mean for that department.
I think that if reskilling is happening in the library that can measure the impact of all of these initiatives. If your constituents, whether that’s students or patrons, are fluent in AI literacy that is a true measure of the impact that these initiatives that you’re pushing are successful.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: What should we expect with success and impact assessment surrounding all this? 16:06
Melissa Del Castillo:
What AI offers libraries is transformative potential. I know that’s open-ended, but we don’t know what AI success in libraries is going to look like as a finished project, because I don’t think that it is a finished project or product. Every day we are learning new things, new ways to use AI. I just recently read an article about using AI to do systematic reviews and I’m like, Wow, these new tools that are being created to simplify our process so we could be freed up for other tasks.
That’s one of the main things that we look at, as Chris has mentioned of AI, to help us with these tasks that take up our time when we could be freed up for better, higher thinking— higher order tasks. I think the goal for success and impact is definitely this transformative potential that it offers. But also, do we have these positive feelings towards AI? Because, there is a lot of doom and gloom if you’re looking at certain scholars and websites about how AI is on the verge of taking over and spreading misinformation and creating all of these problems.
If there is this positivity about AI, that is the goal—the success and impact that you receive from these AI initiatives. Is your community of practice and learning thriving? Are people joining? Are people hearing about it? Do people want to be part of your projects? Are you the ones that they’re thinking about asking if they have a project in mind? I think ultimately what that will lead to is a culture of growth and innovation. And, I think that is the most valuable aspect of AI in libraries. It has created this excitement where we see the potential. We want to be part of it. It’s this new mechanism that was once restricted to just computer science nerds. Now the library nerds are jumping on the bandwagon. This is something that we see as a great potential. Because it is just the beginning of this AI revolution, we can all feel like we could be a part of it because it’s there for the taking.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: Thank you. Is there anything else you’d like to share? 18:51
Melissa Del Castillo:
I just want to point out—I mean I mentioned it, and Chris has mentioned it, there are some benefits and challenges to AI. The only way to leverage the power of AI is to balance those benefits and challenges. Chris has mentioned some of the more unintended consequences that we’ve seen. I think the digital divide will definitely be a bigger conversation for us to have, as many of these products are going from a free model to a paid model, furthering the digital divide that I think is definitely going to be an issue.
I also think environmental concerns of these server farms and their power, the electricity, the water resources that they are requiring is definitely something that I had never thought about when I first was hearing about the power of AI—that it would have this direct impact on the environment. So keeping those issues in mind when you’re balancing them with the benefits—that AI is going to free us up for more and better tasks while it does our mundane tasks—these innovative solutions.
Upskilling of library professionals within your your institution, I think, is going to be the biggest benefit to these AI initiatives—making the whole library, in the spirit of innovation, able to enter in this conversation and feel like they have the power to participate, and that’s that’s a huge deal, right?
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: That is a huge deal and an integral part of what we always try to do in libraries. Thank you for bringing that into the conversation. Melissa, do you have any favorite leadership books or resources and why? 20:38
Melissa Del Castillo:
Well, I have to admit, the only books I usually read are mysteries and horror, [laughter] but I am on LinkedIn a lot, and that’s pretty much where I go to. I’m part of a bunch of groups. I wrote some of them down. One of them that I particularly enjoy is the Emotional Intelligence Network. They do a lot of really thoughtful posts about what’s happening in institutions—how we can do better. I also follow ACRL, ALA, and RUSA, Reference Users Association about what’s happening in other libraries. I also follow individuals. I am going to plug Dr. Leo Lo again. He’s always putting out great content on LinkedIn. That’s in general where I do most of my inspiration of library leadership, is there.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: Thank you. In closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 21:49
Melissa Del Castillo:
Well, let me just say, when I read that question, I really thought about asking Google Gemini to make a very witty response [laughter] because I feel like I’m stumbling around when I think about that. It’s definitely something that goes straight to my heart. I grew up going to libraries, but also I think that libraries—it’s an idea. It’s innovation. It’s the answer to an open-ended question. There’s so much potential for libraries.
I just read an article in Medium about libraries are probably going to have to take up the task of misinformation from AI. It made sense to me. That’s what we’ve been doing with fake news is—trying to voice our opinions and use information literacy skills to hopefully prepare the next generation for interacting with digital content. As Chris mentioned in his answers on AI literacy this is where libraries can take up the mantle—which is allowing for the ethical consumption of information. And so I think that as libraries, we can just be the answer to the question. That’s what I think of when I think of libraries.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #11: I like what you said about libraries being an answer to an open-ended question. This is kind of always something we’ve been. Now with AI, it adds a new layer. What you shared today about harnessing the power of AI through collaboration, community and communication will help us continue being that answer to the open-ended question—now utilizing AI technologies. And, thank you for being on the second part of a two-part series on AI with your colleague Christopher Jimenez, talking on the last show about harnessing the power of AI through literacy and frameworks. You both brought such great information on this topic. 23:29
Melissa Del Castillo:
Well, thank you for having me and having us. We could definitely do, I don’t know, four, or five more sessions and talk about AI until we can’t talk anymore [laughter]. It’s just such a growing topic. It’s really exciting. I think that there’s a great potential for libraries to be starting these conversations and doing these initiatives. It’s, you know, wonderful.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
It is exciting. There’s definitely more to come.
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right to your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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