CNI Spring 2026 Membership Meeting

Academic libraries are under increasing pressure to deliver fast, high‑quality virtual reference services amid rising demand, staffing constraints, and expectations for always‑available support. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is frequently marketed as a scalable solution, often without sufficient evidence about where automation might genuinely help or where it may introduce new burdens or risks of suboptimal service. This project briefing details a multi-institutional study of nearly 35,000 anonymized transcripts using a structured natural language processing (NLP) framework. It shares lessons learned from methodological evolution, testing a spectrum of approaches from off-the-shelf interfaces (Microsoft Copilot, Gemini) to a custom-engineered API pipeline. By pairing human expertise with an auditable codebook, the framework generates AI-reasoning trails for every assigned code, allowing researchers to see exactly where model logic aligns with or diverges from professional judgment. The results highlight promising opportunities for responsible automation but also document the extensive iterative cleaning and error-correction cycles necessary to achieve reproducible results. By foregrounding these insights and the often-invisible labor required, the session will provide library leaders with a realistic roadmap for responsible AI integration, moving beyond theoretical promises to offer evidence-based guidance on staffing, workflow design, and long-term strategy in scaling AI-assisted virtual reference.

The University of Texas Libraries (UTL) entered into a charter program with ITHAKA in the fall of 2025 with the objective of testing Seeklight, JSTOR's artificial intelligence (AI)-based metadata generation tool. The goal for the first year of the charter was to test the quality of Seeklight's metadata output and its compatibility with multilingual and complex records. UTL evaluated the quality and changes over time over several months of testing, using born-digital and digitized records sourced from UTL's Benson Latin American Collection and Alexander Architectural Archive. The rubric used during this testing period is a four-point, subjective rating scale, which was developed by UTL's AI Metadata Creation Working Group during earlier tests with out-of-the box LLMs. This presentation will highlight our initial impressions of Seeklight's metadata output on a field-by-field basis. We will explore UTL's continued testing of Seeklight and its current ability to provide the subject knowledge and enhanced discoverability needs for archival records.

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes how students conduct research, academic libraries face a critical opportunity to redefine their value proposition. This session presents findings from two years of research with over 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students across disciplines, revealing that while AI chatbots have become essential cognitive partners for brainstorming and navigating complex research, students consistently turn to library resources for credibility verification and validation. The data demonstrates that students are thoughtful, skeptical consumers of AI who routinely cross-check AI-generated content against library sources, who view AI outputs, particularly citations and reasoning, with appropriate caution. Rather than displacing libraries, AI has elevated their role as the authoritative validator underlying AI-mediated workflows. This research offers evidence-based insights to inform strategic decisions around discovery systems, research support services, and resource access in an AI-integrated environment, positioning libraries not as competitors to AI tools but as essential stewards of trustworthy, credible knowledge in an era of information abundance.

Washington University (WashU) Libraries and the University of Kentucky Libraries have recently completed downloading millions of previously uploaded digitized files from the Internet Archive. This process was part of larger migration projects at both institutions: WashU's Newman Numismatic Portal's 76,000 assets are migrating to AM Quartex, and the University of Kentucky Libraries Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program's 86,000 assets were recently copied to a new local online discovery interface powered by Ex Libris Primo. This briefing will share background information on both institution's asset migration projects and details on the tools used, including the Internet Archive API, the command line interface from Internet Archive, and ChatGPT to assist with writing Python code to achieve this. Staff from both libraries will share how they independently developed workflows and discuss goals and desired outcomes that inspired the work, including preservation and access.

https://kdnp.uky.edu
https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/18510
https://nnp.wustl.edu/

Over the last thirty years, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) have built large-scale networks to make cultural heritage collections more widely searchable and available, including the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and its hubs, (e.g., The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Digital Collection and Mountain West Digital Library), as well as aggregators of cultural heritage collection descriptions (ArchiveGrid, Online Archive of California, Archives West), and other crowd-sourced efforts like Social Networks and Archival Context. All have engaged key challenges of standards, infrastructure, metadata, and of end users and their needs. However, most aggregations have struggled to define their value and to garner financial and organizational sustainability. Most are dependent on federal funders, foundations, and R1 institutions. Final reports from the National Finding Aid Network project, Allison-Bunnell's research, and the issues behind DPLA's transition all point to the critical gap in this area. Yet to date, there has been no cross-cutting analysis of these networks, the projects that confronted and overcame these challenges, and the successes and failures that will define the present and future of public knowledge and cultural heritage in the United States. The community can meet this existential moment with a thoughtful and informed reinvention of cultural heritage aggregation. This session will describe a new effort among key practitioners in this space and Ithaka S+R that proposes to find a new way forward for these large-scale networks. As the principals plan the project and seek out expertise on this economic and collective action challenge, they will use the session to engage with the CNI community on economic models, digital libraries, metadata, repositories, and special collections.

Collaborative Stewardship of Government Information Across Legacy and Born-Digital Formats 
Merrilee Proffitt (Democracy's Library US, Internet Archive)

This presentation will overview how the Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and the Institute of Governmental Studies Library at the University of California (UC) Berkeley have collaborated to preserve and provide open access to government records and publications across legacy analog formats (books, paper records, microforms) and contemporary born-digital content. Drawing on efforts including the digitization of important federal materials in both Canada and the United States, the US End of Term web archive, and the LoCal Digitization Project's ongoing unification of dispersed local government documents, the session will explore how cross-institutional stewardship can enable new forms of research and public use. Beyond capture, the session focuses on designing collections and services responsive to researcher workflows, including longitudinal and cross-jurisdictional analysis, improved discovery, bulk access, and computational use. It will discuss prioritizing collections, metadata strategies, and infrastructure decisions. Because government information and publications are widely and redundantly held across CNI member institutions, the session will highlight opportunities for coordinated digitization, aggregation, and service development that extend the impact of work already underway. The presentation was developed in collaboration with Kathryn Stine (Digitization Project Planner, Institute of Governmental Studies Library, UC Berkeley), Kris Kasianovitz (Director, Institute of Governmental Studies Library, UC Berkeley), and Andrea Mills (Executive Director, Internet Archive Canada).

https://archive.org/details/democracys-library
https://igs.berkeley.edu/library/ca-local-documents-digitization-project
 
Building a Resilient Ecosystem for Publicly-Funded Research Data
Kristi Holmes (Northwestern University)

The Center for Open Science, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is leading a community-driven initiative to develop a strategic plan to ensure the long-term preservation, accessibility, and usability of publicly funded scientific data. This project emerged in response to the 2025 sudden removal of public data from multiple federal agency websites, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in scientific data infrastructure. The initiative convenes experts across research, policy, and data infrastructure to coordinate approaches that strengthen and sustain access to data generated through federal funding. The project aims to complement existing efforts by developing a framework for long-term stewardship of federally funded scientific data. Focus areas include monitoring at-risk repositories, ensuring the resilience of data repositories, promoting repository sustainability and resilience, and developing an outreach and advocacy framework to raise awareness among researchers, funders, policymakers, and the public. This effort aims to inform community-wide data stewardship practices and support the broader movement toward transparent and sustainable research data management.

https://www.cos.io/ensuring-preservation-accessibility-usability-of-public-data

Documenting Disruption: Collecting and Communicating About Rapid Change in the Scientific Enterprise (Lightning Talk)
Trevor Owens (American Institute of Physics)

Amid rapid policy and funding shifts under the second Trump Administration, the American Institute of Physics is leading efforts to document and preserve records and data of disruption across the US physical science enterprise. This talk highlights how an interdisciplinary team of historians, librarians, archivists, and social scientists is building infrastructures to capture contemporary change through story collecting, data analysis, and digital preservation. These initiatives aim not only to inform future scholarship but to empower communities today to navigate and shape scientific futures. We invite collaborators from across the CNI community to collaborate and help document, preserve, and explore change and resilience in the scientific enterprise.

https://www.aip.org/library/ex-libris-universum/physical-science-careers-disrupted
https://www.aip.org/statistics/impacts-of-restrictions-on-federal-grant-funding-in-physics-and-astronomy-graduate-programs
https://www.aip.org/library/ex-libris-universum/adding-your-photos-to-the-story-of-science-is-now-easier-than-ever
https://www.aip.org/library/ex-libris-universum/join-us-in-documenting-celebrating-womens-contributions-to-the-physical-sciences

Expanding Access to Historic Scanned Documents Using R's Tesseract Package
Adelynn Shirts and David Advent (Utah State University)

Utah State University's Institutional Repository, DigitalCommons@USU, hosts over 100,000 PDF documents, many of which were originally printed pre-1975 and then later scanned. As such, they lack embedded text layers, rendering them inaccessible to screen readers without additional processing. A scalable pipeline was built to identify documents lacking embedded text and perform optical character recognition (OCR), making the content accessible to screen readers. Two preprocessing functions deskew, denoise, and enhance document clarity prior to performing OCR. Dictionary coverage from light and heavy preprocessing functions were compared: light preprocessing was computationally faster but resulted in less dictionary coverage, while heavy preprocessing added a modest amount of time and increased dictionary coverage slightly. After evaluating outputs, it was determined that the dictionary coverage of documents lacking embedded text layers were similar to those containing embedded text layers. While this doesn't make documents exactly compliant with Americans with Disabilities Act standards, it is an important first step in working towards accessibility for older publications, especially considering the open source nature of the code and process.
https://github.com/ashirts/Expanding-Access-to-Historic-Scanned-Documents

Improving Accessibility and Discoverability Utilizing Open Source Models in a Novel Modular Design
Brian McBride, Harish Maringanti, and Bohan Zhu (University of Utah)

University libraries are under growing pressure to expand access and improve discovery while meeting new accessibility expectations for  digital collections. At the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library, the digital infrastructure development team is building a flexible, modular workflow to help bring large audio-visual (AV) collections into alignment with the Department of Justice accessibility requirements at scale. The platform orchestrates open source speech-to-text and language models to generate time-aligned transcripts and captions, structured segmentation, word clouds, entity recognition, and descriptive metadata that improves both compliance and discoverability. The session will highlight the  implementation approach, early results, and lessons learned including human review checkpoints, staff support and buy-in, provenance and auditability, and how adaptable workflows are being designed  as models and standards evolve. The session will also focus on practical strategies other institutions can reuse to accelerate accessible AV delivery without locking into a single vendor or toolchain and the team’s future development plans for supporting other formats, including images, PDFs, and other formats.

Strategies for Responsible AI in Manuscript Transcription (Lightning Talk)
Sara Brumfield (FromThePage)

FromThePage is a crowdsourcing platform for archives and libraries where volunteers transcribe, index, and describe historic documents. This talk will overview how the platform and community are making decisions that make the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in historical document transcription transparent, optional, and tentative, including topics such as:
- Optional usage of AI by transcribers and institutions
- Surfacing and logging use of AI drafts
- Provenance in exports showing both AI and human contributions
- Detecting unauthorized use of AI
- Measuring accuracy

http://www.fromthepage.com