The Full SLAAIT

Dr. David Lankes advised that the SLAAIT project was always designed to have an end, and the official project is now reaching completion of the projects. These projects and resources will continue to be available, however, and this group may desire a new direction. Due to David's changed position at UT, his time to participate will be limited moving forward.

Don Means spoke about the evolution of the Gigabit Libraries Network and Libraries in Response, and how these have been born of the idea that libraries are societal Swiss Army Knives that serve so many varied functions. Don reported that the AI-related webinars were far and away the most popular offered.

As a reminder, the paid versions of ChatGPT, Midjourney, Perplexity, and OpenArt are available in the AI Petting Zoo.

Kim Silk gave an excellent overview of all the SLAAIT resources available to users, to include the Knowledge Base, interview data analyses, newsletter archive, and dashboard. Please poke around on the website to explore and use these resources.

David gave an overview of our NotebookLM to use with our uploaded resources, and demonstrated how you can use it to search for topics within this project. Invitations to access this are forthcoming.

State library participants shared their thoughts and experiences. Highlights include state libraries that

• are focusing on rural libraries and their use of AI
• have digital specialists to teach classes on AI
• are presenting at conferences about AI use in public libraries
  
• set up a cohort series for AI ambassadors to their own public libraries
• training librarians on how to use AI themselves
  
• are hosting "pool parties" to allow participants take a deep dive into AI
  
• are receiving grants to facilitate student creation with AI
  
• are hiring AI trainers for public libraries
• are collaborating with universities to educate on AI
• have created custom chatbots to use with patrons
• are finding solutions for funding high interest but cost prohibitive AI/IT tools
• are using Gemini API for app creation (I found this cool Prompt Gallery, too!)
• are teaching AI-assisted grant-writing to local community non-profits.
  

Thanks so much for all our participants for sharing your work. There's some really neat ideas and projects ongoing across the country's state libraries.

Daniel Zeiger from the Georgia Public Library Service volunteered to share his open source platform. He said that to gain access, you may go to 41.galibs.org and sign up with a work email address, and then send him an email to dzeiger@georgialibraries.org indicating what address you used.

Group feedback revealed strong interest in continuing to receive more information from SLAAIT, with a preference for summaries of interviews to be shared after approval. Peer to peer discussion appears to be valuable to participants. SLAAIT may look different than it has in the past moving forward, but this meeting was see you later, not goodbye forever...