Developing Locally-Grounded Ethical Artificial Intelligence Frameworks for South African Academic Libraries
Domaine:
digital infrastructureType de record:
paper
Créateur:
Dic
Éditeur:
Hôte:
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.