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CILIPS Council Conversations

Category: Blog, CILIPS Council Conversations

CILIPS Council Conversations, with white text on a blue background and a graphic showing a diverse crowd.

At our biannual CILIPS Council meetings, representatives from each of our Regional Branches and Special Interest Groups come together to share updates on their committee’s activities, help shape the future of CILIPS event content, and discuss key themes related to cross-sector professional practice.

At our first meeting of 2025, reps reflected on the question:

Does AI have a place in library services?

  • YES! Our discussion explored our own uses of AI as professionals and our profession’s ethical imperative to inform users about its potential and pitfalls.
  • From organisation-specific training, CILIPS members are discovering that AI can generate useful starting points and ideas, but these invariably require human editing, enhancement and clarification before the information can be relied upon.
  • When library users struggle to articulate exactly what they are searching for, our professional skills and support become key. AI can assist with this process, saving staff time and capacity, but users and professionals alike must remember that AI is only as good as the information it is ‘fed’. A deeper, more nuanced understanding of what AI is and how it works actually reveals the significance of our professional skills in articulation, synthesis and research.
  • For example, when we don’t know a lot about a topic, the Google AI search engine summary seems helpful – but when we do know a topic well already, it appears poor!
  • From an ethical standpoint and particularly concerning questions of copyright and plagiarism, AI is worrying. As a profession, we must not be seen to be promoting content theft and misuse.
  • Equally, the reality is that this technology exists and its use is increasingly widespread. The schoolchild of today cannot be truly information literate without knowledge of AI: its accuracy or lack of it, its potential problems and biases, and the enduring importance of a human element in knowledge generation.
  • Ultimately, there is a place for AI in libraries, but it should come with a health warning!
  • One of our key messages as a profession must be that what AI generates can be a starting point but not an end point.
  • Users and colleagues must also understand that machine-aided does not equate to impartiality: all AI content is determined by what the machine was fed and the world in which that content was created and (re)generated.
  • CILIPS members would welcome training in how to use AI responsibly and support users in doing the same, particularly children and young people.
  • What remains clear is that AI content is still unreliable and requires a lot of cross-checking. It has its uses for the profession e.g. summarising material that is already in the public domain for literature searches and records management etc., but inaccuracies endure.
  • It also remains intensely problematic for research in general – AI tools are still prone to hallucinating sources and often trained on AI content themselves so stuck in a cannibalistic feedback loop! We must build researchers’ stamina to avoid the assumption that there is one easy AI-generated answer to their queries.
  • The environmental impact of AI must also be considered – a 2022 JISC report highlighted the hidden carbon cost of digital services (through server cooling and other sources of energy generation) and earth.org estimates that for a simple conversation of 20-50 questions, AI ‘consumes’ the equivalent of a 500ml bottle of water.
    • This theme will be explored in detail at the Green Libraries Conference, Monday 27th October at the British Library in London.
  • The day before our Council meeting, a CILIP webinar on Unlocking eBooks for Innovation and Growth also raised concerns around AI from another perspective – when ebook prices are prohibitive and content is paywalled, AI is being trained (often without user awareness or consent) on a far shallower pool of knowledge.
  • Sharing reading recommendations, CILIPS Council members have found that a good introduction to AI, how it works, and its implications in workplaces is ‘The AI Revolution’, no.23 in the New Scientist Essential Guide series.

CILIPS members, what are your thoughts on AI and its place in library services? What might an ‘AI health warning’ look like as our library users find themselves faced with this increasing complex terrain? How can we harness the AI benefits cited above whilst being equally conscious of the potential for ethical, informational and environmental costs?

Email the CILIPS team anytime at admin@cilips.org.uk to share your views and stay tuned for another post in our Council Conversations series coming soon!

The next CILIPS Council meeting will take place online via Microsoft Teams from 2.30 – 4.30pm on Wednesday 19th November. To join us and add your voice to these vital member discussions, please contact kirsten.macquarrie@cilips.org.uk.

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