Evaluating AI in Practical Library Applications: Discovery, Collections, and Accessibility

Three more talks from CNI tackle practical applications of AI

Posted on March 11, 2026 in Blog Posts

This second helping of videos from the Coalition for Networked Information’s (CNI) fall 2025 membership meeting offers a practical focus on AI applications. How can AI enhance the work of the profession (and automate huge, labor-intensive tasks)? How well can it perform these functions? Where do problems, whether technical or ethical, lie? The following videos cover hot areas of applications, but offer balanced accounts that reject hype and idealism in favor of careful investigations into the practical and ethical realities of these applications today.

Below are three incredible talks on AI in library discovery, collections, and accessibility.

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“From Principles to Practice: Developing AI Applications for Discovery in the Academic Library Space”

Marketing hype around AI threatens to obscure a key question for professionals: where might AI genuinely be helpful to users (and where is it just a gimmick)? One area where many academic and research librarians see great potential for AI is in discovery services, because it allows users to explore collections and resources using natural language queries. Of course, on the other hand, are firsthand accounts of librarians trying to hunt down fake citations that AI chatbots have hallucinated. This panel of librarians explores different approaches to AI-powered library searches, examines the technical and ethical limits of these applications, and discusses ways of aligning these searches with the values of higher ed.

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“Automated Handwritten Text Recognition of Manuscript Document Collections”

Another emerging area where AI has genuine utility to the profession is in archival work. Large archival collections might take individual workers years to process, so many librarians are exploring ways of deploying AI to automate some of the labor. This talk reports on the findings of a grant-funded initiative at Lehigh University Libraries to use generative AI to produce transcriptions and indexing of handwritten digital manuscripts. The goal of this research is to develop an open-source application for other libraries to use. Expect to learn the story behind this project, the tools and processes that have animated it, and the progress the researchers have made toward developing this tool into a cost-effective and workable tool for other libraries and archives.

“Project Update: Operationalizing AI to Meet Digital Accessibility Needs” (Lightning Talk)

Librarians agree that accessibility is a lodestar professional value, but the work of making information, resources, and collections accessible can be immense. In this lightning talk, Cory Tressler from the Ohio State University Libraries discusses the workflow the Libraries have put in place to use LLMs to remediate documents and images. He notes that human quality control is still necessary, but LLMs greatly reduce the amount of intervention necessary. Tressler’s findings are promising: after remediation, 93.7 percent of accessibility checks were passed, and 82 percent of all PDFs achieved an accessibility score of 90 percent or higher. Impressive stuff!

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