Developing Locally-Grounded Ethical Artificial Intelligence Frameworks for South African Academic Libraries

Domain:

digital infrastructure

Record type:

paper

Creator:

Dic

Publisher:

Host:

This paper explores the real-world ethical challenges and governance gaps that South African academic libraries face as they adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI). Through conversations with library directors, focus groups with frontline librarians, and analysis of information technology (IT) policy documents from six universities, the study uncovers four main problem areas: absence of local, relevant AI governance; algorithms often overlook African and Global South scholarship; staff don’t always have the training or direction they need; and librarians themselves are often sidelined, expected to use new technologies rather than shape how they are used. To address these issues, the study offers a practical Ethical AI Integration Framework (EAIF), built on five key pillars: epistemic justice, algorithmic transparency, data sovereignty, multilingual equity, and participatory stewardship. Ultimately, the research argues that South African academic libraries need to develop their own ethical approaches rooted in local values, languages, and a commitment to fair access to knowledge rather than relying on imported frameworks that may not fit their contexts. This study provides, for the first time an evidence-based, co-designed governance model for AI adoption in African libraries by shifting the narrative beyond mere description of adoption towards providing the tools for responding to the epistemic exclusion, multilingual silencing and de-skilling in an interdependent yet distinct, complex cluster of ethical, infrastructural and agentic issues neglected by existing work which has tended to foreground access and equipment over ethical implementation.

Visit

doi.org

Licenses

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Artificial Intelligence and Global Trends in Academic Libraries: Lessons and Implications for South African Universities

This study explored global trends in artificial intelligence use in public academic libraries, exami

Artificial Intelligence in Academic Libraries: Opportunities and Challenges

The study investigates the dual benefits and challenges that KNUST and UDS academic libraries in Gha

The Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in South African Law Libraries: The Role of a Law Librarian

Abstract The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatG

ADOPTION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-DRIVEN LIBRARY SERVICES IN ACADEMIC LIBRARIES IN SOUTH-SOUTH NIGERIA

The study investigated the extent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in academic libraries in

Artificial intelligence-driven multilingual corpus for enhancing information retrieval in academic libraries

Academic libraries in Sub-Saharan Africa and China face persistent challenges in cross-lingual retri