At my university, at the beginning of Fall 2024, we received a message from our VPAA (Vice President of Academic Affairs) telling us that the theme of the academic year would be AI. His thoughts culminated with the quote, “AI won’t take your job. It is someone using AI who will take your job.” While many faculty are attempting to hinder students’ use of AI, or raise concerns about cheating and misuse, the librarians goal should be that of educating. Teaching our students how to use AI, and use it well, could be the reason they get or do not get a job. I met with the VPAA to discuss my plans for proactively putting the library in a position of authority when it comes to the use, understanding, and currency of AI. The library already offers in-class sessions on a variety of information literacy, citation, and other research topics, so it made sense to add sessions on the topic of AI. 

My librarian staff and I met to discuss the big topics regarding AI that we could turn into a series of workshops. We started with a student guide shared from upper administration created by Elon University. From this guide and other research, we produced four topics that we felt we could build into 50 minutes sessions, each that included some hands-on activities. The topics are AI Training and Bias, Prompt Engineering, Using AI to Generate Research Questions and Evaluating AI Output and Citing AI. These topics cover all the major areas of research and information literacy while also addressing how AI can be used to aid in your research process. 

The first session is meant to be a basic understanding of how generative AI tools are trained so that students, and faculty, have a grasp on where they get the content, what data they are trained on, and how they generate the output. It also discusses that based on the training it can have biases, good or bad, that we need to be aware of to be sure we are using the best information. The second is teaching the best ways to provide a prompt into an AI tool to get the best result. This session dives into how to ask the generative AI tool to take on a role, how you want the output formatted, and how to ask for specific context for your task. It also goes into refining your output for your needs. The third session is how to use AI to brainstorm, but in this example, we talk about brainstorming in order to generate a research question. At its heart, what students will take away is how to use AI to assist in the writing process, rather than try and use it to write for them. The last session, and arguably the most important one, is about evaluating AI output. In this session, students will learn how to check the output, ask for sources, and evaluate those sources. The various style guides, MLA, APA etc., are releasing their rules for citing AI, and these are covered as well. With these 4 sessions, we can cover 4 distinct aspects of using AI, while also helping students be more information literate. 

We announced these workshops in our weekly academic affairs update with a link to a form to sign up and created bookmarks with a QR code that were handed out at our Spring community development event. We take every opportunity at the beginning of new semesters to remind faculty of the library workshops and encourage them to use us to help in their classes. Unfortunately, we still have a lot of skepticism on our campus about AI, so our sessions have not been as widely scheduled as we had hoped. Because of this we try and offer these workshops in separate ways when we can, such as a standalone session at our community development days each semester. 

In addition to these workshops, we try to regularly send out updated content on the topic of AI to keep the library at the forefront as a trusted resource on AI. We have a libguide that we keep updated with important news and information as well as all of the content pieces we have created. We recently sent out a citing guide to faculty, and we are working with a colleague from the Center for Teaching and Learning to create a list of terms and definitions that we should all know to be up to date with AI. The library will continue updating and creating content for our students and colleagues.

In conclusion, I strongly feel that the library is the best resource on a college campus for AI literacy. Librarians have long taught information literacy and will continue to do so regardless of the format, in this case, generative AI. Librarians are used to learning and becoming experts on whatever new important tools and technologies encroach into their work, and this time is no different.