are there to help people on their jour- ney. We help introduce people to new things, to give them the skills they need. Libraries do this really well – if you are curious about something, or if you just want to dip your toe in, then libraries are here to help you find out about it, or show you how to go about it.”
Developing literacies
She adds that it is not just about access to the technology and the skills needed to use it, but an emphasis on an under- standing of that technology and how it works. And again, libraries are well- placed to identify, teach and develop new literacies. Kirsty looks to new tools such as AI and machine reading as the next big shift in how users interact with collections.
At the moment, these technologies are mainly used in commercial settings and most are currently too expensive to be meaningfully implemented in HE li- braries. However, the potential benefits are clear, and Kirsty is hopeful of more affordable price points, saying: “We are in a period of information abundance. No longer am I searching for one article and three books on a subject – now, there is so much more available. The question is – how do I find that infor- mation which is relevant to my needs? How do we synthesise 2,000 articles and find the 20 that are actually useful to me?” she asks. “I think that is coming from AI and machine reading. “We are seeing this in the commercial environment, but it’s really expensive at the moment As the market expands hopefully the price will go down.”
Explore the text
ChatGPT and similar AI technologies have become high profile in recent months, offering a glimpse of how quickly things can develop and become mainstream. While they have captured the attention, there is still some work to
March 2023
Kirsty Lingstadt.
be done to finesse the products, and again questions also remain about pricing. And Kirsty points to another issue that could cloud the horizon – rights, and how they intersect with machine reading and AI technology. Commercial collection holders are already looking at possible (licensed) solutions, while institutions can forge a different path using their own collections.
Kirsty says: “Gale has the Gale Digital Scholarship Lab where you can inter- rogate their digitised collection in a walled garden. All publishers with digitised collections are starting to do this and it allows you to explore text and carry out data mining. You can start to analyse in new ways when you have full text data, rather than just the meta data. There is however, a price to this when you want to mix content from different publishers or your own collections.
“More and more institutions are making their historic content accessible. This content still has rights challenges, but some of these can be easier to navigate. The other thing we are seeing, and this touches on that discovery piece, is a huge shift from coming to the library to get your books and working within the library
catalogue to actually discovering what is available from a whole range of different sources through the library.”
Not Netflix
Kirsty says that a blended approach that searches and presents a wide range of content types and in different ways other than a list is not necessarily happening within the library ecosystem. Presenting knowledge in different ways, is a new way of working and libraries and the systems they use need to catch up. She points to a lack of intuitive design in some library management systems, saying: “[They] are just a portal into all our publishers, and digitally it is not great experience – it’s not terrible, but it is not great. “You do your search and are then sent off to different publishers and they all have similar, but slightly different ways of presenting their interfaces. There is not a huge difference, but it is just enough that it becomes chore – especially if you are having to navigate across 20 differ- ent platforms. Users want something that feels easier, that makes connections to content that might be of interest – Amazon keeps getting quoted at me. “We get questions about why you can’t
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 41
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