The Role of Chatbots in Academic Libraries: An Experience-based Perspective

ABSTRACT

Today, with the rapid advancement of technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots have become omnipresent across sectors like e-commerce, travel, hospitality, banking, EdTech, etc.; but they still haven’t been predominantly adopted by academic libraries. This paper reports on a qualitative study aimed to explore the perceived risks and challenges behind the adoption of chatbots in libraries and how chatbots could help deliver superior experience to all library users as well as stakeholders. We conducted interviews with multiple stakeholders of academic libraries: the library staff, doctoral students and the faculty, to understand their perspectives on the adoption of Chatbots. We used CAQDAS NVIVO 12 content analysis software to analyse the interview transcripts. Our findings suggest that the majority of the stakeholders we interviewed favour the adoption of chatbots, as they believe that integrating chatbot technology with an existing library information system could deliver diverse services, which in turn would help in research and scholarly communication. However, ‘perceived risk’ with respect to employing chatbots among stakeholders was high. Also, the stakeholders raised some serious concerns with respect to privacy intrusion by chatbots, and with respect to chatbots’ comprehension of task complexity, which are issues that must be addressed by chatbot developers while designing them, specifically for libraries.

KEYWORDS:

• Chatbots
• Artificial Intelligence
• experience
• academic libraries
• perceived risk
• integration

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. Vikas Choudhary (NIT, Kurukshetra), Prof. Anil Kumar Singh (FORE School of Management) and Dr Bikramjit Rishi (Shiv Nadar University) for their assistance in completing this study. We would like to thank the reviewers for their detailed feedback, and the editors of JALIA, especially Dr Bhuva Narayan for her extensive help in editing this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vaishali Kaushal

Ms. Vaishali Kaushal is a skilled researcher and consultant who is passionate about consumers and brands. She is currently a Doctoral candidate with Delhi Technological university (formerly known an DCE) in Customer Experience. She is a National Eligibility Test (NET) qualified candidate with double masters - M.Sc. (Hons)- Mathematics and MBA from a reputed B-school in India. She has over 6 years of corporate, teaching and research experience. Her areas of interests include customer experience, consumer behavior, luxury marketing and digital transformation. She has successfully published research papers in journals of repute, book chapters and presented her research papers at various international conferences.

Rajan Yadav

Prof. Rajan Yadav is a Professor at Delhi School of Management, Delhi Technological University. His area of interest is marketing management. He graduated from Delhi University and obtained his master's degree in business management from the Maharshi Dayanand University. He was awarded PhD in organized retail and also qualified National Eligibility Test (NET) conducted by UGC. His research interests include behavioral dimensions of technology diffusion, online social networks, retail management and student community-related social marketing issues. He has more than 18 years of post-graduate teaching experience.