‘Starting AI [@ Your Institution] From Scratch’

Feeling behind with AI? Want to stimulate AI activities at your institution but don’t know how or where to start? Are resources, technical expertise, and personnel limited? Even at a top technical university, we encounter similar constraints, but we must not let this stop us from professional development and progressing towards AI-related goals.

Let us share our working experience with you to jump-start AI initiatives/projects/prototypes and an AI knowledge community at your institution from scratch. Nowhere near ready to train large language models? That’s okay; we aren’t either. The forward development of AI still needs your domain expertise!

In an era where AI is becoming ubiquitous, GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) institutions face the challenge of integrating AI into their services to remain relevant and add value. However, limited resources and the complexity of AI can make this integration daunting. This workshop aims to demystify the process by guiding participants through establishing their own AI knowledge groups, fostering a community-driven approach to AI adoption.

Integrating AI into GLAM institutions is not just a technological endeavor but a cultural shift that requires collaboration, curiosity, and courage. This workshop empowers participants to take the first steps on this journey, amassing practical tools, shared experiences, and a supportive community.

We are not the experts with everything figured out; we are here to share our experiences, projects, and advice—basically how we started an AI community and initiative in our library from scratch. We will share our wins and fails, and how we keep adapting to better serve our institution in the ever-changing landscape of AI (for GLAM).

We also want to learn from you, and see this workshop as an opportunity to do just that. We will keep this formal workshop informal, and while it is geared to first or second-time conference attendees, we also welcome more experienced members of the community to join and share with us all (as well as help reflect on and further refine your goals and mission; ours is overdue for an updatet too). Similar to how Fantastic Futures began and continues, let’s form personal and institutional bonds that lead to even more interest networks and alliances.

Outcomes:

Attendees of this workshop will:

• Get a confidence boost to start (even if it’s from scratch!), or come to be inspired by others or share your institutional approach with fellow GLAM colleagues

• Obtain a model and practical steps for forming n AI initiative / knowledge community, which you can adapt for your institution

• Leave with initial drafts of:

  • Goals

  • Mission

  • Brain map for activities

  • Inventory and Use Cases

• Share/reflect on priorities, strategies, and approaches, especially for prototyping

• Begin to form networks for collaboration and knowledge sharing

Outline:

1. Introduction to Instructors and TU Delft AI in Library Community (20 mins)

2. Develop Goals & Mission

   1. Activity: brain mapping (20 mins)

   2. Advanced Activity: Inventory Data & Usage Cases (15 mins)

   3. Discussion & Recap to create Goals & Mission (15 mins)

3. Failing forward presentation community & prototyping - build, fail, get feedback, and build some more (15 mins)

   1. Activity: Small interest group discussion on priority topics like policy, prototyping, etc. to produce co-created output using selected AI tool of choice, e.g., using Whisper to make a transcript of conversation and then upload to NotebookLM for a podcast or ChatGPT to make an agenda for a first workshop offering to your colleagues) (15 mins)

   2. Share & Discussion (15 mins)

4. Wrap Up Challenge & Steps Forward (5 mins)

   1. For atendees that create and demonstrate an AI knowledge community at their institution in following 5 months (May 2026), instructors offer two one-hour consultancy sessions as a follow-up

Instructors:

Vincent A. Cellucci is a curator, writer, artist, editor, teacher, & libraries-education professional working at the TU Delft Library in the Netherlands. There, along with his colleague Jaap, he founded the AI in Library knowledge community after attending Fantastic Futures in 2019. The group has taken practical steps to advance AI training, prototyping, community building/surveying, data literacy, policy development, and research publications. Also pursuing doctorate studies in the field of computational creativity, his research involves using AI to continue to push the envelopes of experimental writing (poetry) & publishing, performance, interactivity, and exhibition in the worlds of education and fine arts.

As part of the Shanachies (Irish storytellers), Jaap van de Geer travelled the world visiting libraries big and small, collecting best practices and sharing innovations. The motto: Keep stories, tell stories, make stories still holds true, also in this new age of AI. For the TU Delft Library, Jaap is committed to building the most customer-friendly library in the world with humans in the loop but with the help of AI. He has also been a member of the AI in Library knowledge community from day one as he believes we are living through another fundamental shift for libraries and related organizations. As innovation booster, he is always looking for opportunities to help deliver more value and fun to library users and information professionals.