School Librarians’ AI Literacy, Readiness and Professional Engagement with AI Technologies: An International Survey

  1. Zakir Hossain
  2. Corinne Hertel
  3. Md. Sakib Biswas

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Abstract

The accelerated integration of artificial intelligence (AI) across K–12 education demands that school librarians evolve into critical AI leaders. This international, mixed-methods exploratory study investigated the AI literacy, confidence, and readiness of 319 school librarians from over 50 countries, seeking to map their preparedness. Quantitative findings revealed intermediate AI literacy, yet instructional confidence and readiness remained constrained. Strong correlations existed between AI familiarity, literacy, and confidence (r=.75 to .77,p<.01). Crucially, statistical analysis identified that formal library and information science educational qualification was the only demographic factor significantly predicting higher AI literacy. Qualitative thematic analysis showed that this limited readiness is driven by four structural barriers: institutional and policy constraints; educator attitudes and knowledge gaps; time, resource, and professional development limitations; and student misuse and academic integrity. Drawing on this synthesis, the study validates and extends the AI Leadership Framework (Hossain, 2025b) as a developmental model for professional growth. The results mandate targeted policy reforms within LIS education and institutional support to empower school librarians—and potentially other educators— to lead the preparation of future citizens for an AI-augmented world.

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  1. Version published to 10.20944/preprints202507.1362.v2
  2. PREreview

    This Zenodo record is a permanently preserved version of a PREreview. You can view the complete PREreview at https://prereview.org/reviews/16781253.

    The preprint has some interesting results on an underexplored topic that is relevant to librarianship. These results can be of interest to a wide audience of practitioners and scholars. Overall, the paper is well-written, and the results are clearly described; however, it could be strengthened with a few changes.

    Major issues

    • At the end of the discussion section, the authors suggest adopting the AI leadership framework to train school librarians in AI so they can eventually lead AI governance and ethical initiatives. This suggestion is interesting. However, it is important to mention in the paper that one of the preprint authors developed this framework. It would also be beneficial to contextualize this framework with references to similar work conducted by other researchers.

    • The last paragraph of the conclusion mentions that "the findings reveal both notable progress and persistent disparities in AI readiness across regions and institutional contexts". However, the results presented in the paper do not support this conclusion. Table 2 shows that region and school type do not have a statistically significant effect on AI literacy levels. Furthermore, regions such as South America and Africa are underrepresented among the respondents of the survey, so a more inclusive sample would be needed to support this assertion. Instead, I suggest highlighting that education was the only variable that had a significant effect in AI literacy levels.

    Minor issues

    • In the literature review section, the sentence that begins with "As of August 2024" is hard to read. Removing the text in brackets or moving it to the end of the sentence might help with the readability.

    • Also in the literature review, it would be beneficial to move the third paragraph up to discuss national AI policies first before moving on to recent studies on AI use in education.

    • In the Participants & Data Collection section, was the survey only available in English? If so, I recommend mentioning this, it could help explain why most of the responses were from North America and Europe. 

    • In the discussion section, it would be interesting to discuss why demographic variables other than education (such as country or years of experience) did not significantly influence AI literacy.

    • In the last two paragraphs of the discussion section, the "Figure 3" and "Table 7" texts should be integrated into the body of the paragraphs. 

    Competing interests

    The author declares that they have no competing interests.

  3. Version published to 10.20944/preprints202507.1362.v1