Listening First When Your Community Is Skeptical of AI

***BEFORE YOU REGISTER FOR THIS WEBINAR PLEASE REVIEW IMPORTANT REGISTRATION INFORMATION BELOW***

Most public libraries exploring AI right now are figuring it out as they go. There is no established playbook, and the communities and staff we serve have well-founded reasons to be skeptical.

King County Library System (KCLS) in Washington state serves one of the most economically and linguistically diverse regions in the country, with a significant existing digital equity gap. KCLS believes public libraries have a role to play in making sure AI works for everyone, not just people who can already access it. With little existing research on what library patrons actually want from AI programs, KCLS conducted structured listening sessions and surveys with both staff and community members—including communities that are often left out of technology conversations entirely. The goal was not to build consensus around AI, but to understand what patrons actually need, what concerns they have, and what conditions would have to be true before they would trust a library AI tool.

In this webinar learn how those engagement programs were designed for skeptical audiences, what the facilitation approaches looked like in practice, and what staff and community members actually said. It will also cover how findings were analyzed using a structured qualitative method adapted for a small team.

Attendees will leave with practical tools they can adapt: session question guides, a facilitation framing tested with resistant audiences, and an analysis approach that does not require dedicated research staff.

Learning Outcomes

At the conclusion of this webinar, participants will be able to:

• Design staff and community engagement processes to inform AI pilot or program decisions;
• Anticipate and address skepticism and concern about AI tools in public library communities; and
• Translate community and staff input into concrete AI pilot design decisions; and
• Apply a structured qualitative analysis approach to engagement data in a low-resource, one-person team context.

Who Should Attend

This webinar is intended for library staff at all levels who are curious about AI, facing skepticism from their communities or colleagues, or want to ground their program decisions in real community input before committing to a direction. Especially useful for staff exploring or beginning to plan AI programs or pilots, including emerging technology administrators, library directors, and program managers.

Panelists  

Grace Miles (she/her) is the emerging technology administrator at King County Library System, where she leads the design and strategy of AI pilot programs across forty-nine community libraries, with a focus on digital equity and responsible technology adoption in a public sector environment. Grace holds an MPhil in Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion from the University of Cambridge and an AB in Sociology with honors from Princeton University. Her research examined how structural dynamics shape who belongs and who gets left out of technology communities. That grounding in how technology can reproduce societal harm, combined with training in both quantitative and qualitative methods, directly informs her approach to equity-centered program design and community engagement at KCLS.

 

Important Registration Information

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Accommodations

This live webinar will be captioned in English (United States). Zoom desktop client or mobile app is required to access captions.

Attendees using screen readers are advised to turn off speech prior to joining the Zoom event because PLA webinars make extensive use of chat functionality. Attendees who find chat distracting may wish to disable it in the Zoom event, as PLA moderators will verbally highlight important topics raised in chat and chat transcripts will be provided post-webinar.

If you have a physical or communication need that may affect your participation in this webinar, please contact us at plawebinars@ala.org or 800-545-2433 ext. 5PLA (5752) at least two weeks prior to the webinar. Without prior notification of need, we may not be able to provide appropriate accommodations for the live event.

Attendees are prohibited from using any artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language model, automated decision-making tool, or any other software or tools to record this event and from using this event to train, develop, or improve any artificial intelligence system, machine learning model, or similar automated technology. This does not preclude attendees' personal use of AI notetaking tools for accessibility purposes.

Archived Recording

If you're unable to attend this live webinar, an archived recording will be available to all registrants typically within 1–3 business of the live event. Access to closed captions will be provided in the webinar recording.

Tech Requirements

This webinar will be presented using the Zoom platform. Please review Zoom technical requirements and support information, and test your connection.

Once you've joined the webinar, there are two ways to connect your audio: via computer (VoIP) or via telephone. No microphone is required. PLA works with its webinar platform provider to assure the highest quality audio is being delivered to attendees. However, variables over which PLA has no control—such as the speed of your Internet connection or traffic on your local network—can affect the end quality of the webinar audio delivered by your computer. Each webinar’s audio is also available by telephone via a toll number, so we recommend you have access to a long-distance enabled phone as a backup in case you experience audio issues with VoIP. If you do encounter any problems during the webinar, you will receive a link to its archived recording within a week of the live event and can review anything you missed.

Contact

This webinar is presented by the Public Library Association (PLA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA).

Questions about this webinar? Please contact us at plawebinars@ala.org or 800-545-2433 ext. 5PLA (5752).