Leveraging AI in Cataloging: What Works, and Why?
Heather Lea Moulaison, Zach Coble
Abstract
ChatGPT and other generative AI systems are the latest in a long series of technologies that seem poised to support automated approaches to carrying out mundane tasks, including the creation of catalog records or portions of records. AI is a suite of technologies that have been around since the 1960s, and today, librarians are actively seeking to understand how best to harness them. Although systems like ChatGPT can create catalog records, their accuracy and adherence to norms cannot be taken at face value. Now is the time to look to the future and to be creative with the affordances of these technologies, but with a sense of the full understanding of the limitations. The notion that freely-available, general-purpose AI systems are able to solve cataloging problems easily, with the click of a button, if only the right prompt is created, is problematic to perpetuate – at least for now.