IN DEPTH ‘‘
Elena Macevičiutė is a Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Vilnius University, Lithuania, and Professor Emerita of the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden.
Thomas Wilson is Professor Emeritus of the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Borås, Sweden, and of the University of Sheffield.
Artificial intelligence literacy has the makings of a useful term, but at present it is doing more rhetorical than analytical work...
Artificial intelligence and the library: A survey of the recent research
Researchers across several disciplines have begun to examine how artificial intelligence is changing the way people seek, evaluate, and use information. The findings are of practical interest to working librarians, and somewhat more nuanced than recent commentary might suggest, say Elena Macevičiutė and Thomas D. Wilson.
THE people using libraries today are not those of three years ago. They have ChatGPT on their phones, they use an AI system to assist with their writing, many are using them to assist in work tasks, and many con- sult such systems for medical advice before approaching the reference desk. Some have ceased to approach the reference desk at all. Whether this is welcome, unwelcome, or simply a fact of contemporary practice, the research commu- nity has taken notice. When the journal Information Research published a call for papers on the impact of artificial intelligence on information and com- munication activities before the new year 2026, we were discussing how we could study the impact of artificial intelligence on the topic of our interest, namely, its connection with information behaviour. We were collecting material to determine what is already known on the subject. Although general artificial intelligence systems are still a relatively new phenomenon, their great influence and instant popularity has attracted the attention of a wide range of scholars.
16 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL Over the past year, not only has all sorts of orig-
inal research appeared in journals of library and information science, business and health research, information systems and communication sciences, but also more than 20 review articles on the use of artificial intelligence in information activities. We have recently examined 11 of the most substantial of these reviews, with two questions in mind: what is genuinely new about artificial intelligence as an information tool, and what gaps in research do the reviewers themselves identify?
Not simply a faster search engine The first observation, on which almost all the reviews agree, is that artificial intelligence is not merely making existing behaviour faster. It is altering the behaviour itself.
When a user consults Google, the result is a list of links: the user must then click, judge, and syn- thesise the material. When the same user consults ChatGPT, or Gemini, or any other generative AI sys- tem, the result is an answer. The intermediary work that was formerly the user’s responsibility, that is,
August-September 2026
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