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Short abstract:

Our contribution uses an ecological perspective to argue for the importance of changing alliances between actors over time to better understand AI adoptions. On the case of two AI search tools, we show how dissonant understandings thereof account for their unlikely adoption by Swiss libraries.

Long abstract:

Our contribution addresses a puzzle: that recent adoptions of AI applications in the Swiss library field seem to contradict the century-long vision for knowledge organization in academic librarianship. We propose an ecological perspective (Abbott 2005) that follows the changing alliances between various professional and organizational actors over time to understand these surprisingly uncontested adoptions.

In our analysis, we draw on our ongoing research on the platformization of the Swiss library ecology. Specifically, we focus on the adoption of two AI applications by external providers in the cloud-based national search portal used by over 500 libraries.

We start by exemplifying how the mode of ordering knowledge embodied by these AI tools diverges by several dimensions (imagined primary user, presentation of the factuality of results, used sources of data) from the traditional project of librarians, which is the provision of access to universal “knowledge-from-nowhere” (Abbott 2011). We then show how the changing alliances between librarians, libraries, library networks, IT providers and publishers over time holds answers as to why the two AI applications now appear notwithstanding as the right tools for the job. Following different actors in the process of platformization, it appears that the adoption of these tools succeeded not despite, but rather because of rather different understandings of the problems they ought to solve. In this vein, we also argue that an ecological lens, accentuating the historical roots of imaginaries and important power relations, bears great potential to enrich the broader research agenda of rehumanising automation (Pink et al. 2022).