Artificial intelligence (AI) has become entrenched in various aspects of modern society as a tool of development and modernization.... As a very broad concept, with different levels of intelligence, flexibility and applications, AI strives to mimic the functionality of the human brain and surpasses it in many aspects related to speed, precision and power. Libraries, which started relying on new technologies, such as Internet of Things and RFID to automate their processes, have been unable to fully meet the technical requirements of a smart library without AI. This presentation shall explore the structure and services of a smart library, emphasizing the impact and breadth of AI applications. In several countries such as China and US, AI has laid the technical foundation for the establishment of the smart library concept and equipped its services with more precision, personalization and initiative. Deeper intelligence was introduced to various areas of library services, including physical space, resource retrieval, management, security, as well as smart, more efficient, and high-quality user services. Such areas of services include around the clock self-borrowing and returning systems, mobile phone/network self-renewal systems, intelligent inventory/positioning systems, intelligent seat reservation systems, 3D/AR/VR navigation systems, service robots, as well as other intelligent and efficient cognitive services such as search, content analysis, translation, recognition, summarization, etc. Add to that, the embedding of AI into libraries have contributed to enhancing the users’ experience and is gradually transforming smart libraries into a broader development space, a social learning centre, and a knowledge communication centre. Nevertheless, certain concerns are presented, raised by some stakeholders about the human role in future smart libraries, mainly about replacing librarians by AI and robots, and the shape of human coexistence with intelligent technological systems. This presentation shall elaborate on the above points and specifically zoom into the challenges and opportunities of transforming current libraries in developing countries such as Lebanon to smart libraries.

Sentiment analysis refers to discovering the opinions expressed in a given text toward a specific topic... Extracting sentiments from users' comments on Arabic Social media is challenging since the language used by normal users is not standard. In the last few years, Artificial Intelligence and especially machine learning showed great achievements in helping machines make better sense of the context and meaning of data. In this presentation, we will describe building a platform for applying sentiment analysis on Arabic social media. Then, will apply this platform to extract the opinion of social media users on a library’s Facebook page.

A number of papers have written about putting the library ‘in the life of the user’, by designing library services... that ‘surface[] content in the places where users actually are rather than where libraries would like them to be’ (Pinfield et al., 2017, 28). The speakers will present a case study of the University of East Anglia’s experience in bringing library support and instructional material to patrons in their workflow, via the Lean Library browser extension.