Posts by Lydia Middleton

Alexa, Please Understand Me by Win Shih For non-native speakers, people with regional lilts, dialects, drawls, or people with speech impairments or mobility issues, it can be frustrating sometimes when voice assistant seems not getting their utterance. “Sorry, I can’t help with that,” “Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding right now,” or “Sorry, I didn’t get that.”…

Integrating AI Technology in School Librarian Preparation Program by Gigi Mohamad According to AASL, school librarians are instructional leaders, technology integrationists, Collaborators, and program administrators. Budget cuts in many school libraries deprived librarians of any personnel assistance and restricted them from extending their reach outside of their library spaces. With the advances in AI technology,…

Close to the Machine by Anchalee (Joy) Panigabutra-Roberts I thought about AI (artificial intelligence) and it took me back to a book I read many moons ago by Ellen Ullman, a woman computer programmer, with the title, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its Discontents (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997). It is her memoir…

Skill Deserts: How Pressures and Unfamiliarity Kill AI Projects by Cas Laskowski Great AI applications require deliberate application, thoughtful planning, and meaningful data. Unfortunately, many projects are subject to various pressures that work against best practices. The seemingly never-ending hype around AI, and more specifically machine learning (ML) creates serious institutional fear of falling behind…

Machine Learning for Archival Image Classification by Ismail Msuya I believe that the adoption of Artificial Intelligence in libraries and information environments would open the door to transformative opportunities for increasing library usage and enhancing the overall user experiences. A prime example of such opportunities includes the implementation of visual sensors that utilize AI technologies…

Digital Transformation and the Public Librarian’s Role by Tienya Smith A few years ago, I began to notice that my public library’s out-of-school time (OST) environment was changing. My OST colleagues at the New York Hall of Science and the American Museum of Natural History were using tools like evidence-based learning models and design thinking…