Todd Grappone
Associate University Librarian, Digital Initiatives and Information Technology
University of California, Los Angeles
Salwa Ismail
Associate University Librarian, Digital Initiatives and Information Technology
University of California, Berkeley
Peter Brantley
Director of Online Strategy
University of California, Davis
A small working group was formed with members from three different University of California (UC) campuses to develop a framework for how technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help UC’s libraries acquire, process, and distribute/publish their assets in ways that allow users to discover, share, use/reuse, and curate the information resources they seek. AI is impacting research and teaching across the academy, and the future of UC would be well served by an AI-aware academic library that has components of AI incorporated into its operations. Individually, every library is a small organization, and that feature of libraries makes the type of research this committee wants to undertake particularly difficult. Even the most significant academic libraries do not have the scale of items nor a large enough user base to conduct the kind of transformative research we are proposing. This is where the University of California has an advantage over other institutions and consortia that can lead to transformative change in the industry. The effort to harmonize policy and procedure around the UC’s multi-campus integrated library system (from acquisition to processing and publishing/discovery) provides a unique opportunity to innovate libraries for the future of the academy.