“We survived, but it wiped out the library,” Internet Archive’s founder says.

Known as 'Mamma Erasmus,' she viewed the program, which has sent approximately 16 million students to study abroad through Europe, as her 'personal pacifist mission.'

I'm at the ECIL2025 conference in beautiful Bamberg where I (and Pam McKinney) will be liveblogging (and the wifi works!) In the conference introduction Serap Kurbanoğlu, Sonja Špiranec and Joumana Boustany welcomed us, including a reflection on how the information world and information literacy have developed since the first conference 2013. The local chair Fabian Franke also welcomed to the host institution, University of Bamberg and the city. The first keynote speaker is my colleague from the School of Information, Journalism & Communication, University of Sheffield, UK, Dr Andrew Cox, speaking on The dimensions of AI Literacy. Last month CILIP published this new report by Cox looking at librarians and AI and this year also this book was published. I give my usual caveat that this is my live perception of what was said. He started by indentifying that people characterise AI in a lot of different ways, from spy to magician. Blackbox, echo chamber, funhouse mirror or map of society are 4 ctitical metaphors that are used. Also people say things like "it's just a tool" although Cox felt it wasn't just a tool (as a tool may have serious affordances). AI is also difficult to visualise except as a robot, and the tabloid media catastrophises it (bringing in popular distrust of scientists). It can also be seen as a buried infrastructure. When you come to feelings - people tend to be confused and ambivalent. Governments and organisations, however, have developed AI strategies and given it in importance. AI has proliferated in the library and information environment, in particular generative AI. A recent Yougov (in the UK) survey asked people what they trust AI to do - and finding information and doing simple maths came top. Surveys have also shown that young people use AI chatbots at least weekly and by 2025 only 12% of students said they weren't using gen AI at all. There is, though, evidence that there is awareness that gen AI may give false or biased results and 20% thought using AI was unfair to those who aren't using AI. An important question is how information behaviour is changing because of gen AI. Anecdotally - people are preferring them to search engines, using overviews, librarians are getting requests for hallucinated items - and this could lead to a fall in library resources and enquiries. Turning to the question of AI Literacy: whilst governments say that AI should be "transparent" there are barriers (such as it is fast changing, sinking into infrastructure, and the way AI is trained etc. is obscured). Therefore AI Literacy is definitely needed. There are dilemmas in using gen AI. Firstly, the information dilemma: AI is both wonderful and dreadful at searching. It may translate, summarise, adapt to your prompts, all very quickly and can help with everyday tasks. To illustrate the problem, Cox showed how he uploaded a picture of a dog, saying "this is a cat" and the AI sycophantically agreed that it was. Also there is lack of reproducability (illustrated in multiple evaluations of a poem). Cox also noted how the instructions to co-pilot told it to be always warm and cheerful. Associated is the information quality (including bias, lack of diversity, issues of privacy, lack of knowledge of any resources outside its training). Cox mentioned how it is constantly prompting you to avoid the "boring" task of close and extended reading. Secondly there is how AI is also both good and terrible at supporting learning. On the positive side, it can engage in dialogue and personalise learning, also it can support international students and people with disabilities. Potentially damaging aspects include "cognitive offloading" (loss of critical thinking, loss of skills, and discouraging people from engaging with other people (peers, teachers) to learn. So this needs conversation about these "superceded" skills, which may actually be important rather than "boring" and avoidable. Thirdly there are the social aspects. Benefits, for example in diagnosing illness, have been identified. There are, too, arguments that AI "if managed effectively" can have a positive effect on climate (e.g. managing responses, forecasting improvements). On the other hand, the adverse impact of AI is debated, and Cox presented some evidence e.g. that production of visuals has more impact than text. A key issue is that the AI companies do not release enough information to be able to judge impact. Cox felt that the wider "infrastructural harms" seem to be of more concern than individual prompts. For example, there is the severe environmental impact of mining rare materials. Cox showed a map "Cartography of generative AI", showing the various processes and impacts. He also mentioned Chilean activists protesting about water rights: this also brings up the point that these exploitation issues are not new, but associated with other technologies too. So - the professional dilemma - how can we deal with gen AI in a balanced way? AI literacy models have proliferated (Cox presented his own very briefly). There is an European Commission/ OECD framework for primary & secondary education Empowering learners for the age of AI see e.g. here. Cox pointed out some of its strengths and weaknesses. He identified the UNESCO frameworks as more critical. Cox also mentioned the Good Things Foundation's material. "Critical Thinking" is often mentioned in these frameworks: we need to think about what "critical" means. There is a gap between the models and how/ what you teach in the classroom. Cox finished by summing up some of his main points including needing to integrate AI literacy with promotion of wider digital skills, and the need to speak up about information issues (whilst accepting that AI does have some benefits). Questions raised at the end of the talk including the trend of people becoming "checkers" rather than "creators", and whether we would be better elaborating existing frameworks (e.g. of Information Literacy) rather than creating new ones. Photo by Sheila Webber: beautiful Bamberg, September 2025.

My 2nd liveblog from the ECIL conference is A Transdisciplinary Course on AI Literacy: From Concept to Reality authored by Anna C. Véron, Marco E. Weber, Gary Seitz (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and presented by Véron and Weber. Three groups were involved in its development: School of Transdisciplinary Stdents, the Digital Society Inititiative and the Library (Open Science section) (all at the University of Zurich). They already worked togther on teaching, and in 2023 they decided they needed a ChatGPT course, which was launched and then responsibility given to the library. The name was ChatGPT and Beyond: Interdisciplinary approaches to AI literacy. Here is the link to description. There were 9 sessions, aiming to get a muliangled view of AI, including impact on impact on creators, legal issues, AI analysis of text, applications in medicine & health and critical AI literacy. Contributors came from various departments. The library was the organiser and also had a session on AI-supported literature research and led the session on critical AI literacy. The module is credit bearing. They had to demonstrate active participation (80%) and a portfolio. The portfolio included selecting an application scenario (e.g. writing a paper, creating educational material for others), selecting an AI tool appropriate to the scenario (and explaining the application and issues), and the learners also had to critical reflect on their understanding. The learner had to include a narrated screencast of their interaction with their chosen AI tool. Expected benefits that students mentioned in their portfolio included saving time, improved quality, improved understanding and improved performance. The presenters mentioned that the students were mostly not native speakers in either German or English. ChatGPT was the chosen AI tool of about half the students. This is an example portfolio https://drive.switch.ch/index.php/s/YdNehkm4dAkhOmu Students were asked what to lose, add, and have less or more of (sorry, this was shown briefly and I couldn't catch what the comments were). Photo by Sheila Webber: courtyard by Bamberg Cathedral, September 2025

 Hi everyone, I'm Pam McKinney and I'm helping Sheila live-blog from the ECIL conference this week. The first presentation I'm attending is Information Literacy and Artificial Intelligence: A Library and Information Science Perspective on Effects, Research Questions, Challenges and Opportunities by Joachim Griesbaum, Stefan Dreisiebner, Antje Michel, Inka Tappenbeck, Anke Wittich from various universities in Germany. They spoke about a workshop they developed on information literacy and artificial intelligence that aimed to connect information scientists and librarians to explore the IL challenges associated with the use of AI. They had some highly intensive discussions over a full day based on position papers written by experts. They created a synthesis of the position papers and this has now been published in german (Dreisiebner et al 2024 Implikationen von generativen KI-Systemen für die Informationskompetenz-Vermittlung English version). They did some qualitative thematic analysis of the position papers and presented a "short glimpse" of the results in this presentation. They spoke about 3 clusters: the impact of AI on existing concepts of information literacy, the impact of AI on information science research in the field of IL and the challenges and opportunities in the promotion of IL through AI. They were concerned with the actions of students and tutors, and the role of the library in this space.  Key areas of research will be the transformation of information markets, the impact of AI on information behaviour, information ethics and the integration of AI into education. They pose the question: Are existing IL frameworks suitable to cover AI-specific competencies, and how we can develop AI-specific education?Picture: A brewery in Bamberg (Pam McKinney)

Complice l'estate il progetto Theatre Luxury Apartment è diventato l’ennesimo “scempio” da dare in pasto all’indignazione popolare. Ma come stanno davvero le cose?

Ciclicamente al centro di polemiche, era lì dal 2006 per dei lavori di ampliamento del museo: non mancherà a molti

After serving more than 130 million total meals and 26 million loaves of bread over the past 18 months, World Central Kitchen no longer has the supplies to cook meals or bake bread in Gaza.

Il governo di Benjamin Netanyahu ha deciso di avviare un’operazione per conquistare l’intero territorio palestinese Leggi

La polizia israeliana ha chiuso tre scuole delle Nazioni Unite a Gerusalemme Est, tre mesi dopo l’entrata in vigore del divieto imposto da Israele alle attività dell’Agenzia delle Nazioni Unite per i ...