An overview of Generative AI initiatives at Minnesota State University, Mankato (so far)

At Minnesota State University, Mankato, we’ve undertaken several experiments and initiatives focused on Generative Artificial Intelligence. We provided several examples at the Generative AI in Libraries (GAIL) conference. For this presentation, we provided a revised and expanded overview of our initiatives for the Northern Ohio Technical Services Librarians (NOTSL) Fall General Meeting. We explained license-related restrictions on uses of AI. We discussed the limitations of the retrieval-augmented generation tools currently available in the library. We summarized how we’ve tested ChatBots to support licensing and we showed how we’ve tried to use AI to improve data visualization for collections outreach. We talked about how we’ve used generative AI as a supplemental tool at the reference desk, for instruction, and when preparing for meetings with faculty. Finally, we provided some examples of how we’ve investigated generative AI for data analysis applications.