A few months after ChatGPT was launched last autumn, faculty and students at Northwestern University had many questions about the building wave of new artificial intelligence tools. So they turned to a familiar source of help: the library. “At the time it was seen as a research and citation problem, so that led them to us,” said Michelle Guittar, head of instruction and curriculum support at Northwestern University Libraries. In response, Ms Guittar, along with librarian Jeanette Moss, created a landing page in April, “Using AI tools in your research”. At the time, the university itself had yet to put together a comprehensive resource page. “It was knowing this was not just one person that was going to ask about this,” Ms Guittar said. Librarians have often stood at the precipice of massive changes in information technology: the dawn of the fax machine, the internet, Wikipedia and now the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which has been creeping its way into classrooms.
