Increasingly, academic libraries are being called on to provide information about artificial intelligence. This report looks at faculty attendance at academic library seminars and webinars about AI, and at use of other library provided guidance through listservs, websites, blogs and other venues. It also looks at faculty expectations of the role that they expect the library to play in plagiarism detection, the archiving and sharing of effective AI prompts, and the provision of specialized AI laboratories and platforms. The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: what role do faculty expect the library to play in the roll out of AI in higher education? How satisfied are they with the role that the library is currently playing? How do they view the library role vs. that at other academic and administrative departments such as Teaching and Learning? What percentage of faculty have attended a library seminar or webinar about AI? Or researched the issue through a library provided blog or webpage?
Data in the report is based on a representative survey of 771 faculty from more than 450 colleges and universities. Data is presented in the aggregate and broken out by a broad range of personal and institutional variables including but not limited to work title, gender, ethnicity/race, academic field, income level, college type, college size and public/private status.
Just a few of this 123 page report’s many findings are that:
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37.14% of the deans and department heads in the sample had attended an academic library sponsored or hosted seminar or webinar on artificial intelligence.
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Scholars in architecture, visual and fine arts were the most likely to have sought AI-related information from the academic library website.
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Faculty under age 30 were much likelier than older faculty to have consulted a library Libguide about artificial intelligence.
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Faculty at community colleges were the least satisfied with their academic library efforts to inform faculty about artificial intelligence.
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Faculty of Asian or Hispanic origin were more likely than those of other backgrounds to feel that their academic library had a dedicated AI librarian or librarian with special expertise in this area.