Accountability, Integrity: AI Policy in Public Libraries

Abstract

As organizations that are explicitly values-driven, public libraries play a critical role in building and maintaining a democratic, equitable, and sustainable information environment. With the growing potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to reshape library collections, services, and workflows, public libraries must determine how to engage with these technologies while maintaining longstanding library values. Despite widespread discussion of AI’s impact on public libraries, to our knowledge there exists no published analysis of American and Canadian public library AI policies to date. In this paper, we address this gap first through an environmental scan of public library websites to identify publicly available AI policy statements. We then analyze these policy statements according to how they include library values. In our scan of over 200 library websites, we identified just 16 publicly available AI policies. ese policies all govern internal or staff usage rather than patron usage. All policies reference at least two library values, with privacy and security the most frequently cited.

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