“Human in the Loop” – CARLDIG South Mini Conference
I went to my first academic conference today. I joined the California Academic and Research Libraries group and registered for the CARLDIG-S Fall Program. The mini conference was in person at MiraCosta Community College and on Zoom, earlier today. This group is a special interest group of reference librarians and I met some wonderful, smart, and passionate folks as well as saw a series of great presentations.
“CARLDIG South is an interest group of the California Academic & Research Libraries (CARL). We hold meetings and programs to discuss current reference issues. ”
Presentations
“No sycophants in the Library: Advocating for the Reference Interview in the Chatbot Era” – Sol Werthen
“Beyond the Superficial: Empowering Future Fact Checkers In a One-Shot Lesson Plan” – Jennifer Joe
There were also lighting talks and structured discussions about LLM and chatbot/AI issues in libraries, including licensing and copyright questions. I was very interested in these as I have, to this point, been an AI skeptic.
MiraCosta Community College photo by grafzepp
But I am interested in opening my perspective to potentially beneficial application of this technology. I do believe that by keeping people first, by maintaining agency in the technology rollout, we have a better chance of seeing a net positive outcome. The wonderful librarians at the conference were all working in and around the issues attendant with students exploring chat tech, professors assigning projects that require students to use it, and misunderstandings of the technology’s functions and application on all sides. We had breakout sections and the one I joined used the prompt: “Teaching ChatGPT in a Oneshot.” I’ll be posting more on these issues in my next reflection post.
After the conference we were treated to a short tour of MiraCosta’s library.
MiraCosta Community College photo by grafzepp
MiraCosta Community College photo by grafzepp
MiraCosta Community College photo by grafzepp
MiraCosta Community College photo by grafzepp
It’s great to read about your experience at this conference! I was unable to go due to scheduling, so I appreciate getting a little insight into how it went. The presentations and discussions that you mentioned all sound so interesting and important, especially with our constantly changing digital environments. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Megan – it was cool, and I’ll post the links after the organizers send it out. There were some surprising issues – like the contractural and licensing requirements around journal databases and uploading content to LLM systems – pretty fascinating.