Using AI to facilitate discoverability and curation of the ASU Library repository collections: Report

In summer 2024, as part of Arizona State University’s collaboration with OpenAI, the ASU Library launched a pilot project using the AI tool ChatGPT. This project aims to enhance the discoverability and curation of digital collections within the library’s repository ecosystem. The use of AI in libraries is gaining attention, with many institutions exploring AI for generating descriptive metadata. ASU Library’s extensive repository platforms, including an institutional repository, data repository, and a digital collections platform, hold approximately over 10,000 objects, with numbers expected to grow. The library lacks a dedicated position for creating metadata, with the responsibility distributed among various units already tasked with other duties. This project aims to determine whether ChatGPT can effectively generate accurate metadata that meets best practices. The library will use an existing archival collection of government documents, which already has human-created metadata, as a benchmark, in comparing the generated metadata for the fields Title, Description, and Keywords. By comparing ChatGPT-generated metadata to the existing metadata, the library will assess the relevance of AI outputs and the level of oversight required. If the AI-generated metadata shows minimal variance from the human-created metadata, the workflow could expand to other collections and reduce the backlog of unpublished archival collections that require descriptive metadata.