AI tools can help librarians and individuals enhance their professional lives in many ways. Here are some examples of how you can use AI tools for different purposes and tasks:
- Information retrieval and discovery: AI tools can help librarians and individuals find relevant and reliable information from various sources, such as books, journals, databases, websites, etc. BingChat, ChatGPT, and Bard are popular, and other AI tools run on these main Language machine programs.
- Information analysis and synthesis: AI tools can help librarians and individuals analyze and synthesize information from different sources, such as text, data, images, audio, video, etc. AI tools can extract essential information, identify patterns and trends, generate summaries and abstracts, and create visualizations and graphs. For example, you can use the circulation statistics and have ChatGPT 4 analyze and give results to show what genres are popular and what can be weeded out of the collection. (Yes, you can usually tell from your circulation, but you may be surprised by other insights that come up with the AI tools.)
- Information creation and generation: AI tools can help librarians and individuals create and generate information from scratch or based on existing information, such as text, data, images, audio, video, etc. AI tools can create texts on various topics, such as poems, stories, code, essays, songs, etc. For example, Bing Image Creator can create images in less than a minute. Canva tool can create presentations, images from text, and even music.
- Labels, tags, keywords, and categories:: AI tools can help librarians assign labels, tags, categories, keywords, etc., for information sources based on their content and context. For example, Zotero is an AI tool that can help librarians and individuals collect, organize, cite, and share research sources. You can also ask ChatGPT to give you tags, keywords for a specific topic or book and even tell you what genre the book might be.
- Writing and communication: AI tools can help librarians improve their writing by detecting and correcting errors. For example: when you write a report, email, request, or other forms of communication, ChatGPT can write it for you correctly, Create presentations, and help with publication. For example, Canva is an AI tool that can help librarians and individuals to create stunning designs for various purposes.
- Information education and learning: AI tools can help librarians to educate and learn about information in a fun and engaging way, such as teaching, training, tutoring, and mentoring. For example, you ask ChatGpt to act like a tutor and you as a student of grade XY and ask it to work with you to understand concepts A #C
- Feedback, guidance, and reference: AI tools can help librarians use prompts to receive input or advice on how to approach users and feedback on how to improve and solutions to improve services. For example: Ask ChatGPT to act as a cognitive coach for professional development on any topic, and you can engage in a conversation with the tool.
- Creative ideas and suggestions: AI tools can be used to bounce back ideas and suggestions to add value, solve problems, and gain new insights based on what you want. For example, you can ask BingChat to give you novel ideas and themes for your library and suggestions for titles, catchy ideas, and novel directions for literary festivals.
- Writing reports & create curriculum: Librarians can write their reports using ChatGPT 3.5 or other AI tools to create reports. For example: Tell ChatGPT to act as an IB curriculum head for a library to create a curriculum outline to support literacy, library skills, information, and media literacy, along with guidelines for AI tools. Then, you can further refine your outline by asking it to define each item separately; Voila, you have a curriculum.
*Give as many details as possible to the AI assistant to give you what you need, and finally, you can read, edit, and revise your needs.
Information ethics, responsibility, and biases: AI tools can help librarians and the school community. However, it is necessary to adhere to the ethical and responsible principles and practices of information, such as privacy, security, transparency, accountability, and fairness, that each school adopts. Librarians can also show and teach how biases are visible when creating AI content. For example: If I ask Bingimage creator to create an image of a librarian, it will likely give me a female picture rather than a man. It will provide me with a fair-skin librarian rather than an oriental or Indian profile. Since AI is based on Internet content, most content does not give a varied viewpoint. Here is another post on how you can embrace AI
- Heeru Bhojwani, iCommons Specialist/Library Media Specialist at the American School of Bombay https://heerubhojwani.com
Please add how you have used an AI tool in the comment section below.
