Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems: Will They Change the Library?

"Artificial intelligence" and "expert systems" are terms that have appeared with increasing frequency in the literature of library and information science. Some writers have been cautious in their claims, but others have been rather extravagant, implying the existence of capabilities well beyond those of systems that now exist or are likely to in the immediate future. Misuse of the terminology has also occurred in the literature; in particular, the term "artificial intelligence" has been applied to techniques that involve computation but no real intelligence. The 27th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held March 25-27, 1990, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was designed to correct some of these misconceptions by presenting a balanced picture of present and potential capabilities of artificial intelligence and expert systems. The papers presented here deal with these capabilities as they relate to a wide range of library applications: descriptive cataloging, technical services, collection development, subject indexing, reference services, database searching, and document delivery. Other papers deal with the underlying design issues of knowledge representation and natural language processing.