BHU Library Research on AI Wins Two Honours at Kuala Lumpur Conference

VARANASI: Research by librarians and alumni associated with Banaras Hindu University has received two honours at an international conference in Kuala Lumpur, putting the changing role of university libraries at the centre of an academic conversation on artificial intelligence. The papers were presented at the tenth international conference on library and information society in the Malaysian capital. One was named the best research paper, while another received the award for best paper presentation.

The winning paper examined how library services at BHU are changing in the digital and artificial-intelligence era. A second study looked at the gap between the AI skills demanded in library and information science and the professional development currently available to practitioners. Together, the subjects move beyond the popular idea of a library as a room of books. They ask how cataloguing, discovery, research support and staff training must evolve when students increasingly begin their searches through digital systems.

The delegation named in the local report included BHU deputy librarians Dr Vivekanand Jain and Dr Sanjeev Saraf, assistant librarian Dr Praveen Kumar Singh, and BHU alumni now working at other institutions. Among them were Delhi University librarian Dr Rajesh Kumar Singh, assistant librarian Dr Abhay Chaurasia and Rajesh Kumar Mishra, a documentation officer at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. The mix of current staff and alumni gave the presentations a network wider than a single campus.

For students, the practical test of such research will be visible in everyday tasks: whether a search produces dependable sources, whether old collections become easier to discover, and whether librarians can explain the limits of automated tools. AI can speed up classification and retrieval, but it can also reproduce errors, hide weak sourcing or produce confident answers unsupported by a collection. Library professionals therefore occupy a crucial place between a new tool and a reader who may not know what to question.

The recognition also continues a run for the group. The report noted that papers by BHU alumni Dr Chaurasia and Dr Rajesh Kumar Singh were honoured at the previous year's conference as well. The latest awards do not by themselves announce a new product or campus service, and the university had not detailed an implementation timetable in the report. They do, however, show that a Varanasi institution is contributing to an international discussion with immediate consequences for classrooms, archives and serious research.

The subject also reaches beyond university campuses. Public libraries, school collections and specialised archives face the same questions with smaller teams and budgets. A method developed in a large institution should therefore be judged by whether it can be explained, audited and adapted elsewhere. The awards give the researchers visibility; sharing their findings in an accessible form would give librarians outside the conference room a chance to test the ideas.