Over the last few months, I’ve been watching with curiosity how libraries are quietly—but decisively—reshaping their relationship with artificial intelligence. It’s no longer just about adopting a new tool; it’s about redefining our professional DNA.

It began, perhaps fittingly, with the books themselves. Leading libraries—Harvard, Boston Public, and even Oxford’s Bodleian—have started opening up massive digitized collections for AI training [1]. These aren’t copyrighted bestsellers but millions of public domain works spanning hundreds of languages. The idea is simple yet profound: let AI learn from humanity’s collective memory, curated and preserved by libraries. This act of sharing feels like librarianship at its noblest—quietly empowering innovation while protecting cultural integrity. And yet, there’s always a thin line between use and misuse; once data leaves the stacks, who ensures its ethical handling?

At the same time, a strange irony has surfaced. Librarians are now being asked to find AI-hallucinated books—titles that exist only in the imagination of chatbots [2]. It’s almost poetic: AI depends on libraries for truth, yet it also invents illusions that send people back to those very libraries for verification. Many of my colleagues describe it as part detective work, part myth-busting. No wonder librarianship today demands as much digital literacy as human empathy.

Meanwhile, in the name of efficiency and inclusivity, many libraries are turning to automated diversity audit tools to evaluate their collections [3]. But new research warns that these systems can flatten identities and miss local nuances. It’s a reminder that algorithms, no matter how elegant, cannot replace community understanding. By the way, I find this debate refreshing—it forces us to revisit what “representation” truly means beyond checkboxes and metadata.

Encouragingly, the profession isn’t shying away from these complexities. Across institutions, librarians are enrolling in AI literacy programs, attending workshops, and even taking up newly created roles such as Director of AI or AI Librarian [4]. I find this deeply symbolic: librarians stepping out of the reactive corner into leadership positions. From Stony Brook to San José, they’re proving that AI is not an external force to be feared but a field to be shaped—ethically, critically, and confidently.

All of this feeds into a growing scholarly and professional conversation about aligning AI with the library’s enduring mission—access, equity, and trust. New frameworks from IFLA, Frontiers, and several universities emphasize that libraries must be partners in AI development, not mere users [5]. The message is clear: technology must bend toward human values, not the other way around.

So yes, the AI wave has reached the library world—but it’s not a tidal surge of disruption. It’s more like a steady current of reinvention. From digitized archives feeding neural networks to librarians decoding machine-made myths, the profession is finding its rhythm again.

And as I see it, this is the dawn of a new librarianship—one that reads, writes, and reasons alongside the machines, but always, always in service of humanity.

Hello AI World!!!

#AIinLibraries #Librarianship #DigitalTransformation #ArtificialIntelligence #LibraryInnovation #EthicalAI

References:
[1] https://apnews.com/article/e096a81a4fceb2951f232a33ac767f53
[2] https://www.404media.co/librarians-are-being-asked-to-find-ai-hallucinated-books/
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14890
[4] https://about.proquest.com/en/blog/2025/bridging-the-ai-skills-gap-a-new-literacy-program-for-academic-libraries/
[5] https://www.ifla.org/news/just-published-new-horizons-in-artificial-intelligence-in-libraries/