New Voices RGU Student Series 2025 – Alix Hawley
Category: RGU Student Series 2025
In the 2025 New Voices Student Series, the CILIPS Students & New Professionals Community will be sharing the views of Robert Gordon University students from the MSc in Information and Library Studies.
With special thanks to Dr Konstantina Martzoukou, Teaching Excellence Fellow and Associate Professor, for organisingthese thought-provoking contributions.
Today’s blog post author is Alix Hawley who has a background in English Literature and Creative Writing. She currently works as an Assistant Community Librarian for a public system in British Columbia, Canada.
Opinion-Based Blog Post: Tricks and Treats: Guiding Youth GenAI Use in Public Libraries
Generative AI is fundamentally altering the way high-school students seek and use information. We know they are among the most enthusiastic users of ChatGPT (their AI of choice), and anecdotal evidence from my public library branch and local schools suggests many secondary-school students now use it over Google for searching. But much current advice on GenAI use for such users amounts to “don’t do it,” according to teens I know. Most research to date focuses on its use in higher education (and still reports a lot of warning off—see Chan and Hu 2023 on university students’ thoughts about GenAI). Concerns about plagiarism, ethics, and privacy are real, but the possibilities of GenAI for teen learners are broad. How can public librarians help?
On the educational front, we can, alongside our high-school library counterparts, easily demonstrate GenAI as a study tool in our everyday work. Teens tend to ignore formal library education sessions (Ornstein and Reid 2022), so librarians being available around the public computers after school, along with infographic posters, as in Figure 1 below, or QR code links to short-form videos on prompting, for example, would make it easy for young users working on their own, and normalize the responsible use of GenAI as a tool.
It is also simple to give students a few examples of sound prompt engineering and refinement. Educator Evan Harris (2024), influenced by Yi Zhou (2023), suggests useful prompting strategies for secondary students: “Few Shot” (train the AI with a few examples of what you want or don’t want it to do); “Chain of Thought” (prompt the AI to give a step-by-step answer) and “Tree of Thoughts” (having the AI revise its answers and seek its own errors with multiple branching prompts). Librarians can also demonstrate how to gauge reliability and check information, given AI’s propensity to hallucinate search results. As well, we can provide practical demonstrations of how GenAI can assist with citation format, contrasting that with its inability to cite its own sources—a good reminder to youth patrons that it is indeed a tool and not a reliable homework producer.
Just as importantly, we can demonstrate what GenAI does well, such as brainstorming, setting up outlines, synthesizing information, and coming up with review questions, rather than telling users to stay away from a tool that’s already serving many of them. The public library is an important force for digital inclusion, especially for young people of lower socioeconomic backgrounds and with various needs, and GenAI can assist young users with autism and dyslexia, for instance (Kessler and Pérez-Berenguer 2023). It can also be an equalizing force in its ability to assist most students in some way.
Moreover, libraries can adjust youth programming around GenAI, hosting relaxed DIY homework and study sessions after school or around exam times, with comfortable spaces to work, loaner laptops and snacks, and librarians and posters available with GenAI study tips. We can also use the technology for lighter programmes: a “finish the ChatGPT short story” contest, an online GenAI art show on a particular theme, or multiplayer gaming sessions with GenAI scripts.
Recently, a teen patron came into my branch seeking a YA novel that wasn’t fantasy or historical or romance or too dramatic, just “about real life.” We found a couple of possibilities, and she chose one to borrow. This interaction felt like a metaphor for everyday youth use of GenAI—it’s no longer a fantasy or a dramatic moral issue, it’s just their reality. Teaching GenAI skills is about “demystifying, demythologizing, demonstrating, and democratizing” (Del Castillo et al. 2024). Public librarians can help younger users understand how to make AI function well and ethically for them.
Figure 1: Sample infographic poster for younger teen users of Generative AI in the public library, created by Alix Hawley using Canva.com (2024).
References
Del Castillo, M.S., Jimenez, C.M. and Bakker, R.J. (2024) ‘Breaking Boundaries: Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT to Transform Library Services.’ [conference proceeding, ALAAC 2024] Available at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1169&context=glworks. [Accessed 1 November 2024].
Harris, E. (2024). “AI prompt engineering in secondary education.” Available at: https://medium.com/@evanjharris2/ai-prompt-engineering-in-secondary-education-883626d09c15. [Accessed 3 November 2024].
Kessler, M. and Pérez-Berenguer, D. (2023) ‘Creating, consuming, remixing, and sharing accessible Open Educational Resources (OERs) using an authoring tool’, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, pp. 1–12. Available at: doi: 10.1080/02680513.2023.2248175. [Accessed 31 October 2024].
Ornstein, E. and Reid, P.H. (2022). ‘“Talk to them like they’re people”: A cross-cultural comparison of teen-centred approaches in public library services’. Journal of Librarianship & Information Science, 54(3), pp. 451–468. Available at: https://web-p-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.rgu.ac.uk/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=0574f7c8-66cc-4f52-aa2c-073eefc2a039%40redis&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHNoaWImc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=158146553&db=lxh [Accessed 2 November 2024].
Zhou, Y. (2023) Prompt Design Patterns: Mastering the Art and Science of Prompt Engineering. [ebook] ArgoLong Publishing.