New Voices RGU Student Series 2025 – Charlotte Gabriel

Category: Blog, 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 organising these thought-provoking contributions.

Today’s blog contributor is Charlotte Gabriel. Charlotte is a current student at Robert Gordon University studying a masters in Information and Library Studies. She recently completed an undergraduate degree in Ancient History at Reading University.

The role of the Information Professional in the shaping of the new AI world

The quote, “the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new”, (Dan Millam 1980 p. 130), has never been more relevant to the role of the information professional than it is today.

In a world where the rapidly evolving development and influence of AI is changing information in front of our very eyes, the information professional has an important and evolving role in the shaping of this new AI world.

Credit: Pixabay, Volkovitskaia, O.

Marchionini said that the information professional is currently seen as the bridge builder between information and the user (Marchionini 2024). But over time I believe this bridge will have to be redeveloped to adapt to the changing relationship between user and the information created, accessed, searched for, with and using AI. As a recent graduate I saw firsthand how AI was already having an impact on how university students seek and use information.  AI tools such as ChatGPT are already changing how students search, summarise, and analyse information on nearly any topic known to humankind (Zhang 2024).  The shift from using a traditional search query to a prompt, constructed to do more than just find, is blurring the lines between AI found information and AI created information.  The taxonomy of search used in the library is very different from the natural language used in AI prompting (Zhang 2024).

And yet, a study conducted in 2023 to identify the number of librarians in Academic libraries investing in building AI literacy found that among those interviewed only about 7% had paid for the premium version of AI (Lo 2024). The study found that among those who had paid for the service the AI literacy skills increased. As information professionals, investing so little in building their own personal AI skills creates a significant gap in knowledge in professionals whose role may be seriously impacted by a technology that is already changing the way humans interact with information. At a time when such information change is happening surely the only way that librarians can keep on top of AI is if they experiment and use it themselves.

Credit: Pixabay, Jarmoluk, M. 

Changes to Practices of Libraries

Generative AI platforms like Chat GPT and Google bard will continue to grow and develop, and this will have an enormous impact on the way that University libraries deal with Information searching and use. Due to AI’s nature of compiling information from different sources there are many issues with privacy that University librarians should be aware of including, ‘bias, privacy, autonomy and informed consent, transparency and accountability, and intellectual property’ (Lund & Wang 2023).  Library professionals could be the best people to inform both students and colleagues alike about the many different strengths and weaknesses of the many different uses of AI (Torres 2024). University Librarians can also play a central role in informing students on the different mechanisms to use AI to get the best possible results that also meet the academic requirements of the University.

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I believe there is an important role for the information professional in the next few years and beyond. The information professional can be the overseer of the development of generative AI use in university library settings. As Marchionini says, the information professional can learn how to adapt to AI to best serve their clients and humanity (Marchionini 2024). Now and in the coming years information professionals will become more important than they ever have been, they will need to expand their knowledge of AI and then bring that knowledge to the students so that they can use AI to its full ability.

We cannot control the development of AI, we can only control how we respond!

References

Marchionini, G. 2024. Information and library professionals’ roles and responsibilities in an AI-augmented world. Journal of the Association for the Information Science and Technology, 75 (8), pp. 865- 868

Torres, J. M., 2024. Leveraging ChatGPT and bard for academic librarians and information professionals: a case study for developing pedagogical strategies using generative AI models. Journal of business and finance librarianship, 29 (3), pp. 169- 182

Zhang, L. 2024. Exploring Generative AI with Chat GPT for Possible Applications in Information Literacy Instruction. Journal of electronic resources librarianship, 36 (1), pp. 64- 69

Lo, L. S. 2024. Transforming academic librarianship through AI reskilling: Insights from the GPT-4 exploration program. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 50 (3), pp. 1- 7

Millam, D. 1980. Way of a Peaceful Warrior: A Book that changed lives. Canada: Publishers Group west