By Carrie Fry, Nursing and Health Science Librarian, University of San Diego
As a new member of MLGSCA, joining just last year, I was delighted to attend the MLGSCA/NCNMLG Joint Meeting. I appreciated the opportunity to meet other members in person and was energized by being in community with you all. I had the pleasure of leading one of three immersion sessions, and I walked away with a renewed sense of pride in the creativity (and healthy AI skepticism) of our members.
Centering Human Values and Experience When Using AI
In my session, we moved beyond the “black box” nature of LLMs by focusing on priming the tools (using the personalization settings) to be more responsive to our values and professional context. Then by being more strategic in how we prompt and question AI tools we can move beyond generic outputs to responses that actually reflect our specific needs as health science librarians.
The Balancing Act: Upskilling vs. Deskilling
One of the highlights for me was hearing from Katie Hoskins and Katie Houk. As someone who keeps a wary eye on AI’s hallucination tendencies and its impact on information literacy, I was struck by their nuanced take on the student experience. We know that even though AI is prone to inaccuracies, students turn to it regularly. The Katies challenged us to look at upskilling and deskilling. For instance, if students use AI to find articles, are they losing the ability to identify keywords and perform searches for themselves? But what if we, as librarians, use AI to help compensate for that by creating an assignment where the student uses AI to build a PubMed search out of a PICO clinical question and evaluate that search string? In this way, use of the AI tool is integrated, but the assignment still maximizes critical thinking and research skills as work done by the student.
Playing Detective
Finally, Morgan Choate and Katie Jefferson turned us all into investigators. They led us on a hunt for the elusive hacker, “The Librarian” using a mix of real and GenAI- generated images and reports. I must admit, even as a skeptic, I was floored by how sophisticated AI imagery has become. Recognizing the real from the fake was no easy task. This only reinforces why our roles in information literacy are more vital than ever – and must include an understanding of GenAI.
If you want to learn more about any of these sessions, I recommend reaching out to the leaders of the immersion sessions. Also, I encourage each of you to consider leading a session in the future! We are all learning, and the immersion sessions are a place where we can play, fail, and learn together in a supportive space.
