Patience Eméfa Dzandza Ocloo, the first international librarian-in-residence at KU, has months of research in Lawrence ahead of her as she funnels ideas about technology and information between cities, countries and cultures.
“My presence here is equipping me with much skills, which I will take from Lawrence to Ghana as a gift from the Lawrence people to the people in Ghana,” she said.
Dzandza Ocloo is a newly tenured professor in the Department of Information Students at the University of Ghana in Accra. Her residency at KU Libraries, supported by the Institute for Globally Engaged Librarianship, kicked off in March.
She said the IGEL program is unique because she’s not here to simply use the library’s collections — she’s here to share experiences and collaborate with staff.
She believes that people in her field have a “great mandate” to give communities the tools they need to survive in the modern era.
“Librarianship is a great profession to give back to the society, to impact people’s life,” she said. “We offer training, we provide resources, we meet people’s information needs.”
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Public librarianship, and the library profession as a whole, receives greater recognition in the United States than Ghana, according to Dzandza Ocloo. She’s touched by the way KU Libraries engages the Lawrence community outside of university staff and faculty, and it’s inspiring her to envision more public programming at the University of Ghana.
“That’s a special connection the library has,” she said. “You know, it’s not a public library, it’s a university library, but I can see a strong connection between the KU libraries and then the Lawrence community. It’s one of the things I am going to take away with me.”
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Dzandza Ocloo said global librarianship is essential, as libraries have grown from providing resources to their local communities to making information discoverable the world over.
“That calls for diverse skills in order to be able to serve the diverse societies we have across the globe,” she said.
Dzandza Ocloo’s term at KU is folded into a yearlong research sabbatical. She’ll focus on how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence fold into librarianship.
AI can be a challenge for libraries, she said. But for Dzandza Ocloo, large language learning models can also be a way to connect people to more sources of information. Speaking as an information professional, but not on behalf of KU Libraries, she said the library could explore how to train AI on its collections.
“It can make our work a little bit easier by helping us identify which information is available out there,” she said of AI. “But again, that also serves as a challenge, because if the information is not in a digital form or has not yet been used to train an AI tool, that AI will not be able to make us aware of the availability of that information.”
Dzandza Ocloo said that AI regulations vary across states and countries, but most libraries don’t currently have AI policies in place. She sees the potential for librarians to serve as ethical guideposts as the technology evolves.
“We have to take into consideration the legal regulations and the ethics of doing that, because it’s one of the concerns we have as librarians, of using unethical data to train the AI tools,” she said. “So we should take into consideration people’s privacy, cultural backgrounds when making such data available.”
She was clear that AI isn’t a database to be referenced unquestioningly — rather, a way to aggregate information.
“Libraries have been recognized by UNESCO as one of the trusted institutions to help people cope with the challenges of the 21st century by providing digital literacy skills to individuals,” she said.
At the University of Ghana, Dzandza Ocloo leads her students through an exercise: use AI to find out information about her biography and background. She already knows that many of the language learning models will erroneously say she teaches in the field of food and nutrition.
It serves as a lesson to her students to not take AI at face value, to compare sources of information and seek out the original materials that the technology pulls from.
“We’ll need to have what we call AI literacy, where we train both librarians and the information users on the pros and cons of using AI, and also train them on critical thinking,” she said.
One of the primary controversies circling AI is environmental impact. Dzandza Ocloo acknowledged that the more technology people use, the more strain it will put on the natural environment, like water resources. She said some technology companies have started to explore alternative storage media outside of data centers.
“If we want to develop these AI models, we need to generate data, we need them to work at a very fast pace, and we need a balance, sustainability,” she said. “And, again, we would need rules and regulations, and not let anybody work against the environment in the name of technology.”
Dzandza Ocloo plans to present her research at a public seminar in August. More details will be announced closer to the date.
Libraries worldwide are facing budget cuts and financing restraints. Dzandza Ocloo encouraged the people of Lawrence to donate to KU Libraries and IGEL so more librarians and information professionals across the globe can benefit from residencies like hers.
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Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at [email protected].
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