Balisages Issue n° 10 : Artificial intelligences, libraries, cultural institutions
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Haut de pageArtificial intelligences, libraries, cultural institutions
Thematic issue coordinated by Emmanuelle Chevry Pébayle (University of Strasbourg), Arnaud Zeller (University of Strasbourg) and Susan Kovacs (ENSSIB)
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools into the activities of cultural institutions raises many issues and questions. The rise of multimodal models, capable of handling text, images and audio, makes AI more versatile (Stanford, 2024) ; these innovations are a source of promise but they also raise doubts and objections.
What do AIs, and in particular generative AIs (GAIs), bring to the services, to users and more broadly to the stakeholders of cultural institutions? What challenges and difficulties are posed by the appropriation of AIs by institutional actors ? What issues are raised by the creation of services and dispositives supported by AIs or made possible by AIs? What motivations, social representations, strategic aims and imaginaries are at play regarding AIs and GAIs within these institutions? What kind of support can professionals provide for the members of their public who use AIs?
This thematic issue seeks to present a panorama of recent humanities and social sciences research on the integration of AIs in cultural institutions, in particular in libraries. Our goal is to offer critical perspectives on the emergence of an « AI culture » in today’s places of knowledge (libraries, museums, archives) in France and around the world. This call for papers is structured around three themes: (1) the appropriation of AI tools by cultural institutions and in particular, by libraries ; (2) professional adaptations or reorientations as related to the deployment of AI in these institutions ; and (3) the ways in which AI is linked to cultural establishments’ management and governance strategies.
1/ AI, libraries and cultural institutions: tools, uses, appropriations
The aim here is to provide an overview of recent humanities and social science research on the ways in which AI tools have been appropriated by cultural institutions, and in particular by libraries. We wish to develop an understanding of how these institutions have appropriated AI technologies currently and in the past, starting from early initiatives with AI-supported dispositives, and to what extent these initiatives have raised issues of social acceptability and acceptance (Bobillier-Chaumon and Dubois, 2009).
We welcome empirical studies and analyses addressing how AIs have been (or are currently) deployed and integrated, successfully or not, into various existing services, and how AIs have formed the basis for creating new services. Contributions offering historical and/or information-communication perspectives on the conception, design, implementation and evolution of various services are invited, for example with relation to collection access and management (Moreux, 2019) ; process automation (Alcantara, 2020) ; institutional hospitality and user welcoming practices (Fareed, 2025) ; the automation of artistic, informational and communicational content generation (Kulesz and Dutoit, 2020) ; content indexing (Cox, 2023) ; documentary research and monitoring activities (Subaveerapandiyan and Gozali, 2024) ; and AI-assisted mediation (De Nobrega, 2025). Contributions should seek to advance our understanding of the incidence of AI on service creation, implementation or innovation and provide insight into the imaginaries, perceptions and social representations of AI held by actors in these institutions.
2/ AI and professions: how cultural institutions and professional identities adapt to GAIs
How are professions and professional identities affected by the use and integration of AI tools in libraries and other cultural institutions? In what ways do professionals working in cultural institutions (librarians, archivists, museum curators, mediators) adapt, or not, to AI tools in their work, including their work as cultural and information mediators and as trainers or educators ?
Professional identity is a dynamic process (rather than a fixed or stable position), shaped by social interactions and organizational contexts. Identity is constructed through individuals’ discourses and “interpretative repertories” (Hicks, 2014). Professionals construct and adjust their identities as situations change, in a process that reveals both organizational transformations and values and forms of attachment to the profession. How are professional identities challenged by the new technological demands of GAIs? In what ways, and to what ends, do cultural institution professionals seek to adopt or integrate forms of AI-driven innovation into their day-to-day practices and gestures? How are these technological and professional changes presented, brought up and debated upon by professional networks, partners, organizations and training centers ? How does the emergence of a new AI culture, and its associated injunctions, affect professionals' feelings of legitimacy and their perceptions of their profession ? How are such feelings and perceptions linked to individual career trajectories, positions held and functions performed ?
As observers and mediators of users’ cultural and information practices, library, archive and museum professionals need to adapt to emerging technologies and to anticipate the needs and the skill requirements of their users. Libraries, for example, play an important role in democratizing access to emerging technologies. It may therefore seem natural for librarians, and other cultural institution professionals, to position themselves as key players in promoting an informed use of GAIs, yet the nature of their role in this regard is not self-evident and raises various questions (Favel Kapoian, Kovacs, 2025).
With the arrival of ChatGPT 3.5 in 2022, generative artificial intelligences (GAIs) have been taken up, particularly by students, as part of their academic work (Mazarakis et al., 2023) in order to access information more quickly and directly (Crevier et al., 2023; Kooli, 2023; Uzan et al., 2024) but also for assistance in writing academic papers (Zeller and Chevry Pébayle, 2024). GAIs stand out for their ability to produce new content, whether text, images or music (Forsyth, 2022) in response to instructions describing the content and form of the desired result. These new tools, used in a variety of contexts including education, raise a number of questions.
Proposals related to this theme will more specifically°: qualify the transformations, be they concrete or symbolic, in the professional activites and working conditions of professionals in cultural institutions resulting from the emergence of GAIs (Jacob et al., 2022) ; explore how new GAI tools and the gestures associated with their deployment or mediation call into question professional identities and forms of attachment to these professions ; analyze emerging student and user practices and the ways in which professionals adapt to these practices as mediators and information literacy trainers (Chiriac, 2025) ; investigate the ways in which these professionals take part in debate regarding AI and/or in the design of dispositives intended to raise awareness about the opportunities or risks involved ; explore how professionals in these institutions define their role in these processes of mediation, training and awareness raising.
3/ AI in organizations : issues and opportunities for the governance of cultural institutions
This line of inquiry seeks to examine the aims and strategies pursued by cultural institutions (Zhang and Prebensen, 2024) which include the use of artificial intelligence in their development projects. The aim here is to identify and analyze the strategic goals defined by cultural institutions with regard to the governance and management of their organizations (Liebig et al., 2024) which have developed (or are in the process of developing) policies and services that address the environmental, legal and social challenges of AI (Coeckelbergh, 2020; Whittlestone et al., 2019). Contributions will seek to clarify how AI redefines or reconfigures human activities in cultural institutions, including performed roles and tasks, responsibilities, work processes, and skill or competency requirements and expectations. We particularly welcome proposals which question stakeholders’ perception of the legitimacy and the acceptability of these reconfigured activities.
We invite empirical studies addressing these questions (corpus analyses, case studies of innovation and appropriation processes) and in particular studies which explore how AIs have been conceived and/or deployed for the management and governance of cultural institutions. Proposals will examine the impact of AIs on the governance of institutions, on the steering of activity, on the life of the organization; contributions may also study the ways in which institutions participate in the circulation of discourses on the governance of AIs or GAIs, such as national and international guidelines, roadmaps for action and frameworks seeking to regulate AIs and relationships to AIs (Chevret-Castellani and Labelle, 2021).
Important dates
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December 5, 2025: Deadline for full research articles : 30 000 to 40 000 signs including spaces and references
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December, 2025: Notification of acceptance with proposed revisions
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January 30, 2026: Deadline for final revised version of full article
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April-may, 2026 : Publication date
Submission guidelines and evaluation process
Submissions of full articles in both French and English are welcome.
Length 30,000 - 40,000 characters (including spaces, notes and references) ; articles should be anonymous
See journal guidelines on text formatting and citation policy : https://journals.openedition.org/balisages/415
Proposals for full articles should be sent to the three coordinators of this issue in the format of their choice (doc, odt or md) :
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Emmanuelle Chevry Pebayle : chevry@unistra.fr
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Arnaud Zeller : zellera@unistra.fr
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Susan Kovacs : susan.kovacs@enssib.fr
Manuscripts will be subject to two blind peer reviews by a review committee; reviewers are selected according to their field of expertise upon receipt of submissions.
Important note: no payment from the authors will be required.
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