I’ve been keeping a running list of AI tools that are being used, or explored, across library services.
*Cataloguing and metadata*
My Custom GPTs — *Click and Catalogue Books, MARC for KOHA,* and *DOT MARC for KOHA* — help draft MARC records from book-cover images or ISBNs.
For general-purpose AI, you can also look at:
ChatGPT: chatgpt.com Claude: claude.ai WorldCat: www.worldcat.org
Whichever tool you use, verify the generated MARC record against WorldCat before importing it into your catalogue.
*Reference and ready reference*
Perplexity is useful for quick, cited answers grounded in web sources.
www.perplexity.ai
*Literature and research support*
Consensus searches academic research and connects answers to research papers.
consensus.app
Elicit is useful for literature reviews, research screening and extracting information from large sets of papers.
elicit.com
*Citation verification*
Scite helps researchers see whether later studies support or contradict the findings of a paper.
scite.ai
*Reference management*
Zotero remains a strong open-source choice.
www.zotero.org
Mendeley continues to be widely used and includes AI-based research features.
www.mendeley.com
*Discovery and search*
VuFind is an open-source library discovery system worth watching as natural-language search becomes more common.
vufind.org
*Repository work*
DSpace remains a major open-source platform for institutional repositories and digital collections.
dspace.org
*Digitisation and OCR*
Google Document AI provides OCR and document-processing capabilities that can be useful for digitisation projects.
cloud.google.com/document-ai
*Chatbots*
For simple FAQ assistants, Custom GPTs are one option:
chatgpt.com/gpts
For website-based conversational assistants, take a look at:
Botpress: botpress.com Voiceflow: www.voiceflow.com
*Circulation and self-service*
Bibliotheca provides self-service, RFID, automation and other library technology.
www.bibliotheca.com
This list will keep changing. Library technology is moving quickly, and some tools will mature while others may disappear.
*Which of these is already part of your library’s workflow?*
*What would you add to the list?*