As institutions grapple with the rise of AI, librarians are helping to define what responsible AI use looks like, especially as faculty wrestle with ill-defined campus policies and uneven student access. Instead of pushing AI use into silos or relying on unmanaged tools, campus libraries are becoming neutral hubs where AI literacy, academic integrity and workforce readiness intersect.
At Bryn Mawr College, for instance, the campus libraries are emerging as AI sandboxes—shared spaces for experimentation and ethical use.
Lauren Dodd, director of collection management, discovery and strategic communication at Bryn Mawr, said the librarian role is evolving from archive expert to leader in AI literacy.
“[Librarians] have been actively collaborating and talking about it almost every day, whether it’s creating tutorials and digital learning objectives or thinking about the conversations to have with instructors,” Dodd said.
“It can feel like cognitive dissonance to be actively working with AI on a regular basis and also saying we’re constantly thinking about the harms and the biases,” she added. “I am judicious about my own use of it, but it really has changed the instructional mission of academic librarians.”
Dodd said librarians are using BoodleBox, an AI platform designed for higher education institutions that allows users to engage with multiple AI tools—from ChatGPT to Claude—in a centralized, collaborative environment. BoodleBox, which prioritizes privacy and ensures no user data is used to train the large language model, is now active on more than 1,300 campuses nationwide and used by over 800,000 students and faculty.
Dodd noted that BoodleBox was particularly useful in her previous librarian role at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she helped faculty map AI literacy practices and built a custom curriculum-mapping chatbot through the platform to align core course objectives.
“I think we all need to be thinking very critically about how we use these tools,” Dodd said. “What I’ve appreciated in my own journey with AI is looking for opportunities to use this unique position that we have as librarians and have those conversations with faculty and students.”
Libraries as AI sandboxes: Through conversations with faculty and students about the AI platforms they use, Dodd said she discovered varying levels of confidence in what people know—and don’t know—about the technology, highlighting where librarians can help fill the gaps.
“We just started having those conversations in classes and trying to get at the heart of what they were using it for,” she said. “Then redirecting them and saying, ‘Well, actually, if you’re using the free version of ChatGPT, you’re not going to get this feature, but you could use an enterprise license like BoodleBox or Copilot to brainstorm keywords for research.’”
“So trying to redirect them to the things they should use certain tools for, and pointing them to the AI guidance librarians have been actively developing around responsible use and academic integrity,” she added.
Dodd said one key use of AI during her time at West Point was creating a microcredential course in partnership with the math, electrical engineering and computer science departments.
She added that she has also facilitated workshops and one-on-one consultations with faculty and students on AI literacy and how the tools can be used in the classroom.
Libraries Lead on AI
Several college and university libraries have done work similar to Bryn Mawr’s. At Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania, librarians have run hands-on AI literacy workshops. At the University of Georgia, an AI literacy course and workshop was created for faculty to explore ways they can utilize AI tools in the classroom.
“We were already teaching these skills, already looking at tools for research and information literacy,” Dodd said. “So we wanted to be that resource for both faculty and students because of the unique space we occupy.”
The role librarians play: Dodd said that among academic librarians, some of the most impactful—and often invisible—work involves teaching information literacy.
Librarians often note that they’ve been doing this work all along, she said; AI hasn’t created the need for their expertise so much as revealed how essential it has always been.
“AI literacy is just a new dimension of information literacy,” Dodd said. “In terms of keeping up with these resources and figuring out how to keep up with these tools, the principles that we were teaching already are largely the same.”
For Dodd, AI literacy on campus ultimately starts with critical thinking about how AI systems are built and whose voices they represent.
“I often think about critical AI literacy, which is about understanding the power structures that are embedded in these systems,” Dodd said. “So whose voices are amplified, whose are erased, what worldviews are being encoded.”
“That’s really important to me, that librarians are a part of this conversation and remain a part of the conversation, and that we can help shape not only responsible use, but maybe responsible development of these tools,” she said.
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