Artificial intelligence (AI) unsurprisingly remained a hot topic at this year’s “Top Tech Trends” panel at the American Library Association’s 2026 Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago on June 27. Several speakers, however, tempered their enthusiasm with nuanced discussion of specific applications for the technology.
Moderator Amanda Gray Perry, web and digital user experience librarian at Hesbergh Libraries at University of Notre Dame (Ind.), grounded the panel’s discussions of AI in lived experience. “The more time I spend with technology, the more I am aware of the importance of including humanity in the process,” she said, also citing Notre Dame’s faith-informed DELTA framework for ethical AI.
Nicole Steeves, library technology director at Chicago Public Library, addressed the situations where AI may be appropriate, and where it isn’t. In reference services, for example, “AI doesn’t have the skills of a human, and it doesn’t have the judgment of a librarian.” Readers’ advisory and traditional catalog search are areas similarly ill-suited for AI, she said.
A more promising use of AI is in real-time translation, she said, noting that Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood is among the most linguistically diverse neighborhoods in the world. “Real-time translation can make it possible to serve them in a way we never have before.” Other potential uses include improving accessibility and large-scale digitization.
Witt Salley, teen services librarian at Montgomery County (Md.) Public Libraries, focused on privacy concerns in providing AI-supported services to teens, particularly teens who are seeking information about sensitive topics. Minimizing the data collected by the library can help improve privacy, he said, while noting that physical browsing is also central. “The shelf provides a discovery layer that provides no profile, no prompt, and no login,” he said.
Independent consultant Marshall Breeding, editor and writer of Library Technology Guides, observed that AI has emerged quickly and significantly reshaped how information is found online. On his own site, he said, he’s seen as many as 100 automated requests for every human visitor. “I don’t want my information to be invisible to AI,” he said, because turning off all bot traffic makes the information on a website irrelevant in an era where search is no longer the primary point of discovery.
Still, Breeding warned that AI’s dominance is unlikely to remain permanent and warned about hard-wiring library practices to search techniques that may rapidly fall out of date.
Shifting away from AI, Rebekah Silverstein, digital services librarian and assistant professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, spoke about a Microsoft 365-based tool she built to help measure and increase usage of electronic textbooks. Her library sent emails to faculty it believed was using textbooks that the library offered electronically, but “outliers in the data became an action item,” helping the library identify titles to acquire.
Erica Acevedo, bilingual teen and adult services specialist at Fox River Valley Public Library District in East Dundee, Illinois, spoke about how cloud gaming affected video game access in public libraries. “The shift to digital media brought us convenience, but also the experience of opening three streaming services to find that what we want isn’t on any of them,” she observed, which is likely to become common for video games.
PlayStation 4 disrupted libraries’ traditional game-lending model because many games require downloadable components in addition to physical media. Rising technology costs are continuing to drive the shift, she said, as users try to use their current computers and devices rather than making upgrades that might be prohibitively expensive.
Acevedo’s library responded by adding Nintendo Switch Lites to its Library of Things, and then additional hardware such as controllers and adaptive gaming supplies. Now, she said, “instead of providing games for the patron’s equipment, we’re providing the equipment for patrons’ games.”
