Why Academic Libraries Are Making Critical AI Literacy Part of Research

AI literacy is becoming part of the work academic libraries already do: helping students judge information, understand how it was produced and use it thoughtfully. At Loyola Marymount University (LMU), librarians see AI tools entering familiar academic spaces, from institutional email to research databases such as EbscoHost and JSTOR. Their response is to connect instruction about these tools with the broader habits of critical inquiry.

AI literacy grows from information literacy

Librarians often approach new technologies through information literacy, understood as a set of abilities that includes finding information reflectively, examining how it is produced and valued, using it to create knowledge and taking part ethically in learning communities. From that perspective, AI is another kind of information source for students to assess. Teaching AI literacy builds on existing instruction, while asking students to pay attention to how automated tools shape what they find and how they understand it.

Leo S. Lo, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia, defines AI literacy as the ability to understand and use AI technologies, and to think critically about their effects on society, ethics and daily life. The definition can shift across disciplines and professions. For librarians, the practical focus is how generative AI affects research and learning—and what that means for teaching information literacy.

That work includes research by LMU librarians. Susan Archambault, Nicole L. Murph and Shalini Ramachandran’s “Fostering AI Literacy in Undergraduates: A ChatGPT Workshop Case Study” in Library Trends considers how AI literacy curricula can bring ethical questions and critical reflection into prompt engineering. Murph’s companion contribution, “Beyond Information Literacy: Exploring AI’s Impact on Labor in Academic Libraries,” considers how AI may affect library work and the ethical questions that follow. Other contributions in the same issue examine librarians’ views of AI, teaching approaches, bias, critical refusal and decolonization.

Tools are changing library work

AI’s presence reaches beyond the student’s research process. Information vendors, including database providers, publishers and research platforms, are building AI features into services used by students and faculty. That can affect collection management, metadata creation, research and access. Libraries are therefore responding both to the tools people use and to the changes those tools bring to library services.

Academic libraries are working with campus colleagues to design and deliver AI literacy instruction. The aim is to help students understand how AI tools work and consider the ethical questions around their use, while extending the skills they already practice when evaluating information. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has also revised its “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education,” which has guided academic library teaching since 2016.

“The ubiquity of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), is reshaping how we interact with information, raising practical, social, critical, and ethical considerations. […] As traditional boundaries between knowledge creation processes and resulting information outputs become blurred and complicated by information generated or mediated by automated systems, a need is emerging to expand concepts such as scholarship, research, and authority. Additionally, emerging technologies present complex ethical challenges for information use and creation which call for close examination through information literacy lenses.”

The framework’s language reflects a central challenge: when automated systems help create or present information, familiar ideas about scholarship and authority need closer examination. Librarians study how these technologies operate, the choices made by the people who build them, and the human work involved. They also look at how people search, how reliable the resulting information is, and how information environments change within communities.

Keeping people in control of their research

For LMU librarians, transparency, data privacy and ethical information use remain guiding values. Their work includes talking with the campus community about AI’s effects, developing shared guidance for using these technologies and making sure that new services reflect the ethical standards of the library profession and the university. Those conversations matter as AI features become more common in tools that students and faculty already rely on.

Instruction also extends to AI research tools such as Consensus and Undermine. Students learn to use these tools and to assess the information they return. The teaching goal is not to issue a blanket instruction to use or avoid AI, particularly beyond the classroom. Instead, students should understand enough to make their own choices and remain in control of the technology they use. LMU’s workshop “AI, Integrity, and You: Navigating Ethics in College Research” is one example of that work.

This approach also reflects librarians’ longstanding interest in questioning how knowledge is made. Students are encouraged to examine the systems behind scholarly publishing and to ask what counts as a primary source. Doing that well takes research, informed questions and conversation with people who know a subject, including librarians and faculty. AI adds new tools and complications to that process, but the habits of inquiry remain useful.

Critical AI literacy, then, is not only about learning where to click or what to type. It means asking what a tool provides, how its output should be judged and how its use affects the process of learning. For students, those questions can serve beyond their time at LMU, wherever they encounter information shaped by AI.