A new profile for librarians brought by AI
By Nora Quiroz, University Librarian, Universidad CES, Medellin – Colombia.
What current trend do you wish would become part of the higher ed canon? Why?
Artificial intelligence – AI – is transforming the landscape, bringing with it new challenges, contexts, questions, concepts, and new paths for librarians. It is essential for us to develop the necessary skills to perform these new roles and adapt ourselves to the future.
Are you familiar with the term "Prompt"? It can be understood as a request. In the AI environment, it is a text that can be a word, phrase, or question, and when entered into an advanced artificial language model, such as ChatGPT, it returns an answer that should be coherent and clear – which means we can have interactive communication with the model. These advanced language models have built-in linguistic information and patterns that help them respond to questions reasonably and assertively.
What does this have to do with librarians?
Nora Quiroz, University Librarian, Universidad CES, Medellin – Colombia.
For decades, librarians have been the masters of controlled language, the semantic web, and linked data – or at least we should have been. Library schools teach normalization, systematization, and cataloging to facilitate the retrieval of information through subject heading lists and thesauruses. This doesn’t even mention the importance of rich metadata essential for libraries in the digital age.
AI cries out for specialists who can generate "prompts" that are precise enough to obtain answers to their users' questions. These can be quite complex since it is difficult to find the exact words for what you want to describe. From there, a new profile is born for librarians, the "Prompt Engineer." Demand for these prompt engineers is increasing, especially from companies based on AI offering very competitive salaries.
This new profile requires knowledge about large language models, technology, and programming, but even more, those that humanize the technologies. This is made clear by a job offer from the Anthropic company, which highlights that a good candidate should have strengths such as:
Communication and relationship with customers and the environment
Ability to transmit and teach technical concepts
Problem solution oriented
Organizational mentality and teamwork
Creative thinking and proactivity
Innovation, keeping up to date with industry trends
Although AI has the potential to create new jobs within the librarian community, it is necessary to develop the right skills to fill them.
Library talents
Librarians with vision must recognize that the rise of AI is an opportunity to stimulate and strengthen their talents and personal values, generating spaces for innovation while taking advantage of their unique human traits – traits that will be essential in the competitive job market of the future.
As we continue to discover the tremendous opportunities that advances in digital technology bring to us as librarians, we must also consider rethinking the changing role of information professionals in a fast-paced world that is constantly reshaping the skills and abilities of the global workforce.
About
Nora Quiroz is an expert in management, specialist in senior management, and a Colombian librarian. She is the creator of the library community "Bibliotecoach", where leadership, library, and coaching experiences are articulated around humanity in library services.
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This blog post is part of a series from librarian thought leaders sharing personal insights into the challenges and opportunities their profession faces. Read more.