Pam McKinney live-blogging from day 3 of the ECIL conference, in the second session of the morning. Danielle Degioirgio from Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, spoke about a project she did with colleagues Hilary Yerbury, Nicole Johnston and Maureen Henninger to understand the university response to generative AI. TEQSA: The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency asked all universities to create action plans for the use of generative AI and created a national generative ai toolkit. However, libraries were not central to this conversation, and in many universities, were not consulted at all. So the broader role of information literacy in this space may not have been considered. The team bring academic and professional perspectives to developing a snapshot of 39 library responses to generative AI. Most had created some kind of guide to AI use, but what are the characteristics of these guides? If AI is being introduced into Lib Guides, what does it look like? Does this align with traditional conceptions of information literacy? LibGuides are considered to be resources that are owned by the library to connect users with information, provide access to resources and highlight new technologies.
Data collection featured a systematic search of the university library website, Lib Guide directory and Google search, only resources that were publicly available were included in the analysis. Resources that explicitly addressed generative AI or broader AI concepts. Inductive thematic analysis was used to analyse the content of the guides. Out of the 39 universities, 25 used the LiBGuide platform. 10 had guides that sat outside the library, and 4 universities did not have any publicly available information. Three categories emerged: information literacy (47.1%), academic integrity (32.4%) and AI Literacy (20.6%). However, none of the guides featured algorithmic literacy.
33 guides specifically linked AI use to academic integrity, and 29 to referencing, but only 19 featured prompting as a focus. Danielle then showed a few examples of AI guides drawn from the study. Under academic integrity, resources emphasised academic misconduct, detection in assessments and ethical use in Learning. Characteristics of the IL guides were referencing, prompting and research, and AI Literacy guides focused on AO basics, types of AI tools and evaluation of AI tools.
Libraries are responding, but are only through the lens of academic integrity, which means that information literacy is muted as a concept. The absence of algorithmic literacy is a problem. The very concept of IL is shifting, which risks the de-professionalism of information literacy. Libraries need tgo be in this future.
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