Lightning Talk
Presentation Title:
Principles → Practice: Deakin Library’s AI Lab
Presenter:
Kat Cain
Date:
Thursday 14 May 2026 | 11:30am – 12:00pm
Presentation Description:
AI enablement isn’t just a policy or framing. It has to live in workflows and practices. From 2023, Deakin Library undertook focused work in our own services: we built AI literacy modules, analysed AI intersections and impacts on our Library work, and formed an AI Learning Group to lift staff capability. This created momentum. It also helped surface where gaps and opportunities still existed. Analysis and training are only part of the approach needed to ensure a robust, future-proved library value proposition in an AI impacted world.
In 2025 we stood up the Deakin Library AI Lab to meet that need. The Lab advances Library strategy and Deakin-wide AI goals. Grounded in Deakin’s GenAI Framework and Principles, the Lab also aligns to Library priorities around experience-centred and data-informed practice. It also has ongoing connection to the university’s AI direction through connection and support to the Deakin GenAI Framework Activation Program (GAP), a strategic body of work led by the Library.
Why a Lab? Our plan commits us to designing around user experience, using data to guide choices, and learning by doing. The Lab makes that real: a safe, accountable space to trial, evaluate, and scale practices that improve services and staff workflows. It is local action in engaging with AI, from a Library lens, that turns intent into working practice at Deakin.
What the Lab does? We test and evaluate AI tools and functions. We run focused pilots to explore AI potential and its pitfalls in Library work. We publish toolkits and practice notes that teams can lift into teaching, research support, and other service operations. We provide targeted AI and Library advice at the moment of need.
How it connects? The Lab team and the work we lead or surface connects to, augments, and reflects Deakin University AI enablement. In turn, our approaches and outputs inform GAP work in capability building. The connective loop is deliberate. Local evidence shapes enterprise choices. Enterprise principles guide local action.
The AI Lab is Deakin Library’s space for responsible experimentation and shared learning. We turn principled, human-centred AI into confident, context-aware practices in academic library work. The AI Lab positions the Library as not just an adopter of AI, but a critical shaper of how the university experiments and learns. It asks what it truly means for libraries to lead in this age of intelligent systems.
Kat Cain (she/her)
Library Partner and Library AI Lab co-lead at Deakin University
Presenter Bio
Kat Cain (she/her) is a Library Partner and Library AI Lab co-lead at Deakin University, turning tech curiosity into people-centred change and innovation. Her research on digital fluency as a dynamic capability continuum underpins frameworks, toolkits, and learning that make technology legible and practice better. In her partner remit she works as a relationship manager and knowledge broker, connecting strategy to workflow, stakeholders to outcomes, and insight to delivery. Whether partnering or leadership work, Kat talks widely, listens hard, reads the patterns and flows, and brokers the right connections to move work forward. Kat is currently scheming with colleagues across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to form a trans-Tasman community of practice focused on AI’s intersections with academic libraries in our part of the world. Active in industry bodies and sector programs, she champions shared practice, open knowledges, and reusable methods that travel. Colleagues know her for clear scaffolds, practical optimism, and a cheeky streak that keeps the work human.