Awareness and adoption of artificial intelligence towards information management in selected academic libraries in Southwestern Nigeria
Ayokunle Oluwadamilola Giwa, Ayomide Ayoola Ogundana, Opene Sunday Ozonuwe · Library and Information Perspectives and Research · 2024
Information management is a critical aspect of academic libraries as they serve as repositories of knowledge and resources for students, faculty and researchers. The rapid advancement of technologies such as artificial intelligence has significantly transformed the information management landscape of academic libraries. However, literature has established that many factors could inhibit the management of digital and physical collections in academic libraries, including awareness and adoption of AI. Thus, this paper examines the awareness and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in information management (IM) in academic libraries. This study adopted a descriptive survey method to gather the opinions of librarians in academic libraries in Southwestern Nigeria. Its population consists of 117 academic librarians in nine selected university libraries in Southwestern Nigeria. The census enumeration sampling technique was adopted to allow the targeted population to participate in this study. Findings revealed that most respondents had a high awareness of AI (mean 10.41). The types of AI adopted by academic libraries are RFID technologies (mean=1.42), security scanning machines (mean=1.37), machine readable catalogue (MARC) (mean=1.27) and chabots (mean=1.26). The results also showed that the benefits of AI include AI saving time spent on generating information (mean 3.40), AI automating library routines (mean 3.36), and face recognition used for library security (mean 3.27). The challenges mitigating the adoption of AI in information management by librarians are: AI is perceived as a threat to the job of librarians in academic libraries (mean 2.68); high disruption brought by AI on traditional library services (mean 2.42) and the need to redesign workflow (mean 2.42).