{"id":13713,"date":"2026-09-01T08:09:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T12:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/?p=13713"},"modified":"2026-09-01T08:09:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T12:09:48","slug":"purdue-libraries-and-school-of-information-studies-faculty-advance-ai-innovation-across-research-teaching-and-knowledge-stewardship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/2026\/09\/01\/purdue-libraries-and-school-of-information-studies-faculty-advance-ai-innovation-across-research-teaching-and-knowledge-stewardship\/","title":{"rendered":"Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies faculty advance AI innovation across research, teaching, and knowledge stewardship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies faculty Gang Shao, Spencer Stewart, Samantha LeGrand, and Zoeanna Mayhook are leading a collection of Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS)- funded projects that demonstrate the expanding role of libraries in an AI-driven research and learning environment. Across research data and metadata infrastructure, digital humanities and archival scholarship, and AI literacy and education, their work explores how artificial intelligence can strengthen the ways knowledge is created, organized, preserved, discovered, and understood. Together, their projects represent more than $818,000 in support<\/a> for Purdue-led research and implementation initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Associate Professor Gang Shao: Building an AI infrastructure for metadata<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"IMLS<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Associate Professor Gang Shao, along with the Purdue Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, is leading a three-year implementation project<\/a> to develop the Agentic AI Infrastructure for Metadata Intelligence, or AIMI, through the IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries program. AIMI will establish a modular, human-centered architecture in which multiple AI agents work together to analyze and improve metadata records. The agents will identify gaps in existing metadata, retrieve authoritative vocabularies and ontologies, generate standards-aligned enhancements, validate outputs against established schemas, and document provenance, confidence measures, and decision-making processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project will be prototyped across four data ecosystems: the Purdue University Research Repository, Illinois Data Bank, Amazon Web Services Open Data, and NASA Open Data. The goal is to transform how libraries move from records to actionable knowledge and to create an infrastructure that prepares metadata and digital collections for emerging AI-driven discovery, research, and service environments. By making digital collections more understandable to both people and AI systems, AIMI will explore how libraries can prepare their collections to be AI-ready and agent-ready while maintaining human-centered oversight, standards compliance and transparent documentation of how metadata is enhanced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assistant Professor Spencer Stewart: Advancing AI research in historical archives<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this Early Career Research project,<\/a> Dr. Spencer Stewart is exploring how artificial intelligence can help restore lost structure and context to digitized historical records. Although millions of archival materials are now available in digital form, the process of digitization can strip away important relationships and connections\u2014for example, identifying who is speaking in a transcript or who is the recipient of a letter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spencer\u2019s project will use generative AI to develop a structural recovery framework that can automatically identify and reconstruct these relationships while maintaining archival accuracy, transparency, and accountability. Working with Purdue University Archives and Special Collections and external disciplinary consultants from major U.S. institutions, the project will develop a generalizable and reproducible AI workflow and test it through three case studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project will also produce online learning modules to make the resulting tools and methods more accessible to researchers, archivists, and other cultural heritage organizations. By restoring context that can be lost during digitization, the research aims to make historical collections more useful for discovery and analysis while preserving the integrity and transparency essential to historical and archival work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clinical Assistant Professor Samantha LeGrand and Assistant Professor Zoeanna Mayhook: Preparing librarians to lead AI literacy initiatives<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clinical Assistant Professor Samantha LeGrand, with Co-PI Assistant Professor Zoeanna Mayhook, is leading a national initiative<\/a> in collaboration with Ohio State University Libraries to prepare academic librarians to lead conversations about artificial intelligence and AI literacy on college campuses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project builds on Purdue\u2019s validated Partners for AI Literacy (PAL) program,<\/a> which brings students and instructors together to collaboratively shape how AI is used in teaching and learning. Over two years, a cohort of 15 academic librarians will participate in professional development designed to help them adapt the PAL framework to the needs of their own institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project aims to give librarians the training, confidence, and institutional framework to facilitate meaningful campus conversations about AI while giving students and faculty a greater role in shaping responsible AI use. Its broader goal is to create a scalable model for AI literacy leadership that can be adopted by academic libraries nationwide. The project\u2019s resources and lessons learned will be shared through a PAL Implementation Toolkit, extending the initiative\u2019s impact beyond the participating institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Extending AI expertise to museum collections<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Separately, Gang is also the AI consultant for Building a Smarter Museum: AI-Integrated Curation Excellence and Workforce Development,<\/a> a project supporting the Haan Museum of Indiana Art. The initiative will pair Purdue University, Indiana University, and Ivy Tech Community College in evaluating and deploying AI tools to accelerate collection documentation and cataloging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Haan Museum, AI tools will support collection-management activities including metadata generation, image recognition, transcription, and provenance research. The project will also strengthen the museum’s collections workforce through a new full-time collections manager position and a structured internship program focused on collections care, cataloging, database management, and educational interpretation. Together, these efforts are intended to move museum collections care from a reactive, fragmented process toward a systematic, AI-assisted professional function with documented standards and trained personnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advancing the role of libraries in the age of AI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together, these IMLS-supported projects highlight Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies\u2019 commitment to advancing AI and innovation across three areas central to its academic mission: research data and information infrastructure, digital humanities and cultural heritage scholarship, and AI literacy and education. By combining emerging technologies with human expertise, Purdue researchers and partners are developing new approaches to preserve, organize, discover, and engage with knowledge in an increasingly AI-driven world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies faculty Gang Shao, Spencer Stewart, Samantha LeGrand, and Zoeanna Mayhook are leading a collection of Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS)- funded projects that demonstrate the expanding role of libraries in an AI-driven research and learning environment. Across research data and metadata infrastructure, digital humanities and archival […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":13714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13,13101],"tags":[13102,3],"class_list":["post-13713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-news-and-announcements","tag-general","tag-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/files\/2026\/09\/imls-logo.jpg?fit=732%2C330&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pT6ms-3zb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13713"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13719,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13713\/revisions\/13719"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.purdue.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}