Choosing Academic Library Leaders in the Age of AI

The UN’s 2025 Global Survey on AI and Human Development revealed that 20 percent of respondents already use AI. Two thirds expect to use it within a year in education, healthcare, or work. As the technology becomes a fact of daily life for growing numbers of people, academic libraries are at a crossroads, grappling with how best to plan for a future that is transforming as quickly and comprehensively as AI technology advances, prompting deep questions about how librarians think about their work and identity.

For those of us involved in search and hiring processes for library leaders, this means identifying candidates who are prepared to navigate a new era. And for prospective leaders, it means communicating to search committees and hiring officers how they can help libraries and institutions move into uncharted territory.

In this article, I’ll explore how the interview process might evolve to meet this changing reality.

A Strategic Perspective

The process for identifying new leaders of academic libraries has always been complex, with first-round interviews attempting to gauge a candidate’s interest level as well as their capacity to move the library and campus forward. Generally, search committees from all manner of institution are looking for empathetic connectors of people who can also effectively manage units of all sizes with significant budgets, fundraise in myriad ways, work productively across the institution, and deal with unexpected local and global crises. Mix in educational requirements, among other desired characteristics and qualifications, and committees and candidates are often burdened with a sprawling list of multipart questions for an intense 60- to 90-minute “conversation.”

As academic libraries grapple with AI, the ground beneath this already challenging process is shifting.

In 2018, Karim Boughida, now dean of university libraries at Stony Brook University, led the establishment of the first multidisciplinary artificial intelligence lab within an academic library, at the University of Rhode Island, where he was then dean. He sees AI’s impact in a number of dimensions of library work: “technical services, cataloging, metadata, acquisitions, procurement,” areas, he told me, that have “an incredible need for detail-oriented work.”

“Those can be streamlined with AI to have better outcomes,” he said.

For Leo Lo, the new university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia, now is the moment to ensure the library workforce becomes AI literate.

“The technology isn’t there yet to trust it completely, but I’m providing support and infrastructure for employees to learn and engage with it,” he told me. “At this point, I’m upskilling the work force so they can make good decisions. Even if they’re against it, they’ll be able to make their arguments stronger.”

As AI becomes integral to the day-to-day functioning of academic libraries, prospective candidates should prepare to address granular questions around the tool and its impacts. These questions should gauge not only a person’s grasp of the technology, but also their capacity to think strategically about how their libraries and campuses are and should be engaging with it. For example:

Is AI in your library’s strategic plan, and does your library have training and scaling plans? Are you involved with AI beyond the library?

We need to understand how your library is using AI—would you please share examples of how your library faculty/staff have developed application programming interfaces or other apps?

How have you used AI to affect your workflows? Have you collaborated with other units on campus to explore using AI for process efficiency? What were the outcomes for the library and its stakeholders?

Tell us about the conversations you are currently having with faculty, staff, students, and administrators regarding AI. How have you positioned the library as a central and indispensable partner in these campus-wide discussions, and have projects resulted from them?

Effective answers to these hypothetical questions would demonstrate not only the candidate’s competence with the technology, but also their involvement in nuanced strategic discussions regarding AI at both the library and campus levels and their participation in planning with measurable outcomes. Even if the candidate doesn’t have concrete experience and/or quantifiable metrics, explaining what they would do in various scenarios and showing that they understand the bigger issues at play would demonstrate to the committee their capacity for vision and provide a sense of their leadership style.

A Vision for the Long Term

Keith Webster, the dean of libraries and director of emerging and integrative media initiatives at Carnegie Mellon University, worked with the Association of Research Libraries and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), among others, to identify a number of possible scenarios for how AI could affect research libraries over the next decade. A workshop he ran based on the ARL/CNI Scenarios left him with “a clear sense that some research libraries aren’t making bold moves.”

“They were more focused on protecting their turf, maintaining their collections the way they have always done,” he told me. “Most resisted AI solely on concerns about ethics and bias.”

In an era of tightening budgets, Webster contends, these institutions “risk a sudden reckoning.”

Boughida sees similar pressures at play. “Probably there will be fewer people in libraires—you need to be able to do more with the people you have,” he said. “This isn’t about expecting staff to take on more work with fewer resources. It’s about using AI to augment and strengthen the capabilities of the people we already have.”

According to Webster, institutions that “are thinking about the bottom line … will want to know how candidates for deanships will help them plan for a future that seems to be nearer and likelier than people think.”

This means we need questions to ask candidates that require them to think bigger picture. These could include:

How do you imagine AI impacting libraries one year from now, 10 years from now?

Think about AI in your library three to five years from now. What are the capacities and strengths that you see today, and how can you leverage them as you build toward the future? What challenges or concerns do you face today, and how would you address those?

Given that AI is dramatically altering how students and faculty conduct research and access information, how do you see the library's most critical value proposition evolving in the age of AI?

Answers to these three questions would require candidates to articulate that they understand current AI trends and how they think, tactically and strategically, about AI; about leadership, by prompting them to offer a scaled SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis; and about how the libraries of the future might transform through the age of AI.

A Commitment to Library Values

Even as we think about the future, we must remember the enduring charge of academic libraries. The Standards for Libraries in Higher Education (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2018) emphasize that academic libraries “enable and enrich the institution’s mission through the development of services, collections, spaces, and programs that advance teaching, learning, and research.” The manner in which libraries go about their work may be rapidly evolving, but that mission remains unchanged.

Barbara Rockenbach, the university librarian at Yale University, wants to see conversations with candidates about AI move beyond “the usual objections” to focus on how AI affects “the way we think about work and identity.”

“Librarianship has moved from transactional to relational,” she told me. “AI does transactional well. If library leaders embraced and doubled down on the relational skills in libraries, we would have done something for the profession.”

Boughida also sees an opportunity for libraries to shape the conversation, and the technology, according to their values—“intellectual freedom and privacy, access, equity, etc.”—for example, by developing their own open-source AI tools.

“When you have those values, you’re not simply deploying AI as is,” he told me. “You can’t just follow big tech, you need to have a critical view of it. If AI was handled by central IT, they wouldn’t have that strong academic sense and those values: DEI, social justice, what is harmful AI, how people in Africa and Asia are being exploited to create AI.”

To get at a candidate’s ability to articulate and defend library values in their engagement with AI, we could ask:

How would you lead a campus-wide conversation about the ethical use of AI in teaching, learning, and research, ensuring the library is a central and trusted voice?

AI raises questions about privacy, intellectual property, and data ownership. How have you, or how would you, create or influence institutional policy and practices that address these issues?

In an AI-influenced academic environment, how can the library ensure that a diverse and complex range of voices, perspectives, and content remains discoverable and valued?

These questions would elicit answers that continue to illuminate a candidate’s leadership style and ethical lens regarding AI as well as other issues that are important to libraires and institutions. Additionally, they would invite candidates to provide evidence that they understand and can manage the advocacy piece of the role and that they have the ability to convene and facilitate significant and meaningful conversations across campus.

Conclusion

Librarianship is in a constant state of transformation. While AI isn’t a threat to the mission of academic libraires to advance teaching, learning, and research, it’s the most recent test of how libraries can remain true to their values even as they adapt. As we move forward, our interviews of prospective leaders must reveal not only their technical fluency, but also their imagination, empathy, and vision for what libraires can become. By asking the right questions, we can help to shape the kind of leaders, and libraries, that will develop through the age of AI.

References

Association of College and Research Libraries. (2018). Standards for Libraries in Higher Education. https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/standardslibraries