57 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 299 2019 A Role for Research Librarians in the Use of AI in University Administrative Systems The core mission of research universities is to educate and do research. The previous sections addressed these two areas and ways that research librarians can be integrated into the teaching and research activities to help with establishing processes for greater transparency in AI teaching and research. Establishing university policies and practices to support accountability in both research and education can begin addressing issues that AI-empowered systems can cause in society. But the use of AI in higher education is also proliferating in systems being adopted to improve decisions and services for students, faculty, and staff. Universities are investing in enterprise systems that can process massive amounts of data to detect patterns that will help with admissions decisions, student retention, advising, and understanding how students learn (that is, learning analytics).30 These same approaches can be used to analyze faculty productivity and impact to provide insight into promotion and tenure decisions. While there is clearly a lot of benefit to be gained from these systems, there are challenges with visibility into the algorithms that commercial systems use and a lack of insight into the training data that was used to enable ongoing pattern detection with new data. There are also a number of issues related to privacy and compliance with such regulations as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). An area where librarians have become increasingly engaged with the use of AI in higher education is the area of learning analytics. With Librarians bring expertise in working with personally identifiable information, data privacy and security, informed consent, and access-controlled data storage. Leveraging this expertise can help universities adopt informed policies regarding the use of AI systems in making decisions that can have a significant impact on students.
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