SPECIAL PROGRAM: AI Foundations for Your Library Team

AI FOUNDATIONS FOR YOUR LIBRARY TEAM
A Four-Part Training Kit for Your Entire Staff
with Crystal Trice

Two hours of practical, library-specific AI training delivered in four short sessions, plus facilitator's guides for meaningful staff discussions.

OVERVIEW

Most library staff have already used AI, or been asked about it by a patron, without anyone ever explaining what it is. Confidence with AI often runs well ahead of actual understanding. At the same time, many staff have stopped paying attention to AI altogether, even as patron questions keep coming.

AI Foundations for Your Library Team is designed to get an entire staff to a shared starting point. The content starts with the basics and is library-specific. For staff who already use AI, the sessions provide an opportunity to slow down, reflect on their habits, and strengthen their practice with new strategies for evaluating, prompting, and using AI responsibly. It doesn't assume anyone has used these tools before, and it doesn't try to talk anyone into using them. Breaking the material into four shorter sessions gives people time to absorb the ideas, discuss them with coworkers, and come back with better questions.

The four sessions are taught live during one scheduled training event and recorded. Your library gets both the live experience and the flexibility of recordings afterward. Staff who can attend join live for the full training; everyone else can watch the individual session recordings when their schedule allows. Your facilitator then leads the discussion at your library, using the included facilitator's guide.

THE FOUR SESSIONS

Session 1: What AI Actually Is
The basics in plain language, along with a few ideas that tend to surprise people. What AI tools are doing when they generate a response and what they aren't doing.

Session 2: What Can Go Wrong
Made-up sources, confident wrong answers, bias, privacy, and the assumptions patrons walk in with. We look at risks for libraries and how to talk about them without either alarm or dismissal.

Session 3: Using AI Well
Practical prompting, plus the habits that separate useful AI work from sloppy AI work. How to ask for pushback instead of agreement, when to verify, and how to reflect on your AI work habits.

Session 4: Helping Patrons with AI
What to say when a patron asks whether they can trust it, hands you a list of books that don't exist, feels pressured to use AI, or wants to know when the robots are taking over. Real patron questions, practical responses, and language staff can use at the desk the very next day.

Live training date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 - 2:00 - 4:30 pm US-Eastern Time
The live event lasts approximately 2½ hours, including short breaks between sessions.

HOW IT WORKS

Each of the four sessions includes about 30 minutes of content. Libraries can add 20 to 30 minutes of discussion after each session or schedule discussions later using the facilitator's guides.

1. Your staff watch the session.
   Live on the scheduled date if they can make it, or the recording if they can't. Both are included, and it doesn't matter who does which.
2. A facilitator at your library leads the discussion.
   The facilitator's guide includes discussion questions, suggested timing, and guidance for handling questions that come up.
3. Continue the discussion with the remaining sessions.
   Your facilitator(s) can lead discussions after each session, all at once, or on whatever schedule works best for your library.

Total: 2 hours of content plus approximately 2 hours of local discussion.

Flexible ways to use the recordings

• Watch all four sessions together during a staff day
• Watch one session at a time and discuss over several staff meetings
• Watch one session each month for four months, so conversations have time to settle
• Watch asynchronously, then bring staff together for discussion
• Run discussions twice with different groups, if you have branches or split shifts

Your license covers unlimited showings during the year, so you can mix these however your schedule demands.

Who should facilitate

Facilitator guides are written so that anyone can lead a session without knowing much about AI going in. Options worth considering:

• A staff member who's curious about AI and has been reading on their own
• A thoughtful skeptic. They often ask the questions others are thinking, and nobody assumes they're trying to sell AI.
• Someone who's good at running meetings, regardless of what they know about AI
• A different person for each session, so no one has to carry all four
• Two people together, which takes pressure off both
• A supervisor, who also doesn’t have to be the AI expert in the room

WHAT YOUR TEAM WILL GAIN

• A shared understanding of AI.
  When conversations about AI policy or practice come up, staff will start from the same foundation instead of spending the first twenty minutes defining terms.
• Better judgment.
  Staff will understand enough about AI to recognize what it does well, where it breaks down, and when human expertise still matters.
• Confidence in patron conversations.
  Practical language for responding when a patron asks if AI can be trusted, brings in information that isn't accurate, or feels pressured to use AI.
• Confidence saying, "I'm not sure—let's find out together."
  Staff don't need to have every answer. They'll understand where uncertainty belongs, how to evaluate AI's claims, and how to model good information literacy for patrons.
• Less fear. Less hype. Better decisions.
  Instead of reacting to AI with anxiety or dismissal, staff will have the knowledge they need to make thoughtful, informed decisions in their daily work.

WHO THIS IS FOR

Whole library staffs, at any level of interest or experience. Circulation, reference, youth services, technical services, pages, facilities, and administration, not only the people who volunteer for the AI committee. It should work for the staff member who's been experimenting with AI since 2023 and the one who's planning to wait it out until retirement.

If you're a staff of one or two, the individual tier covers you. Small libraries field the same patron questions as large ones, usually without anyone down the hall to ask.

Public, academic, school, and special libraries all fit. The examples lean public, but the content applies anywhere staff are answering questions at a desk.

PRICING

One purchase covers your entire library for a year, based on staff size. All orders and inquiries should be made to admin@library20.com.

Tier	Access for	Price
Individual	1 person	$149
Small library	Up to 15 staff	$399
Medium library	16 to 50 staff	$799
Large library or small system	51 to 150 staff	$1,295
System, district, or consortium	151+ staff	From $2,500

In determining your tier, count people, not FTE. A library reporting 10 FTE often has closer to 20 actual humans on the schedule, and all of them should have access.

Every tier includes live attendance, recordings of all four sessions, facilitator's guides, and one year of access. During that year, you can reuse the recordings for staff meetings, onboarding, new hires, or any other internal training.

State libraries, regional systems, and consortia: member-wide licensing is available and is usually the most affordable way to reach small libraries across a region. Get in touch for a quote.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Do we have to attend live? No. The live training takes place on one scheduled date. Anyone who can attend is welcome to join live. Everything is also recorded and divided into four individual sessions afterward, so staff who work evenings, weekends, or different branches can watch on their own time or during your scheduled staff meetings. Mixed attendance is expected.

Do we have to run all four sessions? No. They're sequenced on purpose and Session 1 lays the groundwork for the rest, but each one holds up by itself.

What if nobody on our staff feels qualified to facilitate? The guides are written for exactly that situation. Each one walks through what to expect, where discussions tend to stall, and how to handle questions you can't answer as a facilitator.

Can we use this for new hire onboarding? Yes, throughout your license year. Anyone who joins your staff during that year can watch the recordings and go through the material, at no additional cost.

Does this training focus on a particular AI tool?
We demonstrate concepts using familiar AI tools, but the goal is to build understanding rather than teach a particular platform. The principles apply regardless of which AI tools your library chooses to use.

Will this convince our skeptics to use AI? The content is not designed to convince everyone to use AI. The goal is for everyone to understand the technology well enough to help patrons and take part in library decisions about it.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

CRYSTAL TRICE

Crystal Trice is a librarian, consultant, and trainer who helps libraries navigate artificial intelligence with confidence, curiosity, and good judgment. Before founding Scissors & Glue, LLC, she spent more than 25 years working in libraries and education, giving her firsthand experience with the realities of public service, staff training, and patron questions.

She has helped more than 15 library leadership teams develop practical, mission-aligned approaches to AI through Library 2.0's ten-week AI Leadership Cohort, guiding organizations through policy development, staff engagement, ethical decision-making, and strategic planning. Crystal also led a six-month artificial intelligence consultancy for the Southeast Florida Library Information Network (SEFLIN), supporting four library systems through staff surveys, training, coaching, and policy development. 

She regularly presents to library audiences across the country on artificial intelligence, helping thousands of library professionals understand what AI is, where it fits, where it doesn't, and how to make thoughtful decisions that reflect library values. Her approach isn't about convincing people to use AI. It's about helping library staff understand it well enough to serve patrons confidently and participate in informed conversations about the future of their libraries.

Crystal holds a Master's Degree in Library & Information Science, a Bachelor's Degree in Elementary Education and Psychology, and is a Certified Scrum Master.