Mr. Evans Introduces: The Virtual Nerd Librarian

Recently, our school received some new library technology, which Mr. Evans refers to as the "Virtual Nerd Librarian," but to learn more about it, I interviewed Mr. Evans and asked him a series of questions.

Q: What is the new technology, and what does it do?

“So it is a librarian chatbot that assists students with finding books and book recommendations. And it can also discuss all things books.”

Q: Why did you decide to get it?

“Okay, so when I first got here, I noticed that there was a problem with suggesting books to students because they would come in large groups, and they all have a lot of interest in finding the correct book. And well, there was only one of me, and I couldn't dedicate my time to each individual student and help them as effectively as I wanted to. So what I did was create an actual physical catalog of book suggestions that they can look through on their own time before they meet with me and then take it from there, and it's still active for the people that want to use it. But then AI and ChatGPTcame along, and it would help me with assisting students to find books. While I've been doing this for a long time and know how it does help a ton, I thought, “Wow, this is really great, but I need to give students access to this so they can use it on their own time.” So I uploaded our library catalogue into the chatbox so that the primary source of book recommendations are from the books we have here on our shelves.”

Q: What do you hope for the future of the librarian chatbot?

“So right now it is the prototype phase that I have actually just started with the district on working out the kinks and making sure it is safe, secure, and that it is as effective as possible for the students. Right now my goal is to expand it outside the walls of the library and give teachers access to it so that they can use it with students on Chromebooks and Google Classroom, and hopefully students can then access it on their own on and off campus. I've paired it with a QR code to our library YouTube channel, and my hope is that eventually it'll be a lot more like, for example, I hope for it to be the actual chatbot, the QR code to the YouTube channel, and the library catalog so you can see the availability of the book because it gives you suggestions on books we have, but it doesn't show you if we have any copies available, so I would like to embed the catalog into it as well so students can check for availability.”

Q: How does this technology help you as a librarian?

“So it helps me immensely, like, for example, it helps me when I have a class of 30-35 students come in and I want to but I can’t help them all and give them the attention that they deserve. So when the students are in here, I can help so many more students find a book that they would be interested in, and it also helps with the age-appropriate reading level, and also some students are more comfortable with talking to a chatbot than they would be talking to me.”

Thank you, Mr. Evans, for this interview so that more people can learn about the new technology that we have in our library, and hopefully this cleared up some questions that people may have had about it.

Image courtesy of Mr. Evans.