This is the inaugural post of our new blog dedicated to sharing the ongoing explorations and work of our new directorate of AI and Ideas Adoption.

We’ve been doing some soul searching recently over the the changing nature of our roles in an AI-enabled world, thinking about the need to acquire new knowledge and skills as well as the need for access to appropriate infrastructure and tools to carry out our work. We’ve made early attempts to address these needs through, for example, having devs attend Harvard’s open access Introduction to AI with Python course and through acquiring a GPU so we can run AI models without our laptops catching fire.

Like many others we’ve also been looking at applying existing tools to assist with various tasks such as summarising large volumes of text, image editing and manipulation and assisting web design and accessibility testing to name a few.

We’ve started to chat with colleagues across the library seeking areas where AI could make a difference in enhancing services, solving problems and helping with complex tasks, as a result of this we’ve started various experiments such as developing a pilot chatbot for the Office for Open Research, running an Open Source LLM and exploring how ChatGPT 4o can assist cataloguers with creating archival records but its still very early days.

There are many exciting possibilities ahead and we hope to share details of some of our ongoing experiments on this blog so please check back regularly to find out more about what we’re doing and do please get in touch if you have any ideas you want to discuss or know of any other innovative activity happening across the library (or elsewhere) that could be shared here.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Ian Gifford (Head of Digital Development)