Key Library Tech Takeaways from the 2025 ACRL Environmental Scan 

Findings on AI ethics, cybersecurity, and research management

Posted on April 28, 2025 in Blog Posts

ACRL recently released its biennial environmental scan, offering a comprehensive look at the evolving landscape of higher ed and the implications for academic libraries. The scan covers the usual host of concerns—from artificial intelligence to politics and climate—and puts particular emphasis on growing concerns over faculty and student well-being. The report is 71 pages long, so we thought we’d offer a quick breakdown of its tech-related findings. 

📄 Read the full report. (The footnotes are especially useful.)

🧠 Artificial intelligence 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the report begins by examining AI and AI ethics. To be transparent, the topics in the report are organized in alphabetical order, but I think it’s fair to say that, second only to political pressures, AI is at the top of the list of issues facing higher ed. The report identifies a few of the more pressing areas: 

• Training: University library administrators want their institutions to address AI ethical and privacy issues. 

• Bias: Many worry that bias in the training data—particularly related to race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability—will promote misinformation and discrimination. Some are arguing for the need for more diverse programmers behind the development of these technologies. Others advocate for more “human-centered” approaches to data and programming. 

• Sale of data: Some publishers and publications have signed deals to sell their content to generative AI companies, and others are putting in place restrictions to prevent AI from using their data. Both the sale and this divide are going to shape the publishing landscape. This will also compound data privacy issues. The report recommends that higher ed institutions oppose the sale and use of their faculty’s copyrighted works to generative AI companies in order to protect intellectual property. 

• Academic integrity: The report flags continuing concerns over academic integrity, plagiarism, and AI detection. It also highlights Kari D. Weaver’s Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework as a possible solution for scholars and researchers. Learn more about Weaver’s framework. 

• Environmental costs: Many continue to worry about AI’s environmental costs. 

This section ends by speculating on the future of AI in higher ed, noting that higher ed could fully embrace it or could fully reject it, but even in both extremes, it needs to remain cognizant of the ethical costs. 

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🚨 Cybersecurity 

The report notes that the rate of cyberattacks continues to increase at colleges and universities, citing an interesting report by Verizon indicating that education was the most frequently targeted sector for attacks and data breaches in 2024. Higher ed is an attractive target because it contains troves of sensitive data, intellectual property, and research related to thousands of people and has many possible vulnerabilities in the system. Most cyberattacks exploit human errors (e.g., clicking on a phishing email) rather than computer system vulnerabilities, and universities have a lot of people, making them very vulnerable.  

Libraries, in particular, are prime targets because they hold a lot of research data and because library systems are often integrated into other university systems. The report recommends that academic libraries and their home institutions adopt strict security management practices, increase cybersecurity budgets, and expand security training for faculty, staff, and students. Intriguingly, the report suggests that librarians are well positioned to teach others about cybersecurity issues, which, it argues, falls under the “Information Has Value” frame of the ACRL information literacy framework. 

📝 Research Information Management systems 

The environmental scan details higher ed’s increased focus on research output (and its concomitant emphasis on securing grants). Of particular note is the report’s advocacy for Research Information Management (RIM) systems. These systems are designed to collect, track, curate, and showcase information about research activities, including publications, datasets, patents, research grants, impact metrics, and more. These data enable better institutional research assessment. 

The report sees librarians, with their expertise in scholarly communication and metadata, as well positioned to support institutions’ adoption and use of RIM systems. It sees this expansion of librarians’ duties as a “strategic choice” to align libraries with institutions’ academic goals. However, it also identifies several challenges, including faculty skepticism, no mandatory buy-in, resource limitations, and problems within RIM systems themselves. The report anticipates that folding RIM system management into libraries and universities will be a slow process, not an overnight revolution. 

But at any rate, one more acronym to keep on your radar! 

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