Federal Grants Fuel Illinois Research on AI, Libraries, and Children’s Books

Researchers at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences have secured a substantial vote of confidence from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the federal agency that funds nation-leading projects in libraries and museums. Three faculty members—Professor Jiangping Chen, Professor Sara Schwebel, and Assistant Professor Kahyun Choi—appear on four National Leadership Grants totaling well over one and a half million dollars. The funded work spans an unusually wide swath of the information sciences: how public libraries can serve older adults as artificial intelligence reshapes daily life, how multimodal large language models can be made trustworthy stewards of oral history archives, how America’s founding story can be told to young readers through rare books and digital exhibits, and how librarians can be equipped with an AI literacy toolkit grounded in their own professional strengths. Together, the awards signal that the nation’s library research agenda is converging on a single, urgent question: how cultural and informational institutions can adapt to intelligent technologies without leaving their most vulnerable or youngest users behind.

The largest of the new awards, valued at $620,095, places Chen in the principal investigator’s seat for a project titled “Public Library Services for Older Adults in the AI Era: Status, Gaps, Solutions, and Recommendations.” Chen will collaborate with Ping Li of the City University of New York’s Queens College on an effort to strengthen public library services for older adults, a population that often faces the steepest barriers when new technologies arrive. The project will work directly with four public library systems in Illinois, New York, and Washington, DC, grounding its findings in the operational realities of institutions that serve millions of patrons. Rather than treating older adults as an afterthought in technology adoption, the research aims to develop new service models designed explicitly for this group in an era when artificial intelligence increasingly mediates access to information.

The deliverables planned for the project read like a practical roadmap for library systems nationwide. The team intends to produce practical guidelines for developing programs and services focused on older adults, training materials for librarians who must now field questions about AI tools they may never have used themselves, and literacy courses that teach older adults how to navigate AI-mediated information environments. The project will also generate evidence-based recommendations intended to inform library policy and practice, closing the loop between research findings and the institutional decisions that determine whether older patrons benefit from or are excluded by technological change. Both of Chen’s funded projects begin in September 2026 and are expected to run through August 2029, a three-year horizon that allows for iterative design, testing, and refinement across the partner library systems.

Chen’s second award, on which she serves as co-principal investigator, tackles a different frontier of the same technological shift. “ORAL-AI: High Efficacy Content Representation and User Engagement of Oral Digital Collections with Multimodal LLMs” is led by Haihua Chen of the University of North Texas and received $490,396. The project confronts a genuine technical problem: multimodal large language models—systems that can process combinations of text, audio, and images—are being promoted as tools for searching and summarizing archival collections, yet their limitations in the delicate context of oral history remain poorly understood. Oral histories are not ordinary documents. They carry the voices, cadences, and memories of individual narrators, often recounting events of profound historical significance, and errors introduced by an AI system can distort testimony in ways that violate archival integrity.

The ORAL-AI team plans to evaluate those limitations systematically and then build the infrastructure that responsible AI-assisted access requires. Central to the effort is a structured benchmark dataset, which will allow researchers to measure how well multimodal models actually perform on oral history materials rather than relying on anecdotal impressions. The project will also develop a modular, open-source framework supporting three capabilities: cross-modal retrieval, which lets users find relevant passages across different media types; evidence-grounded question answering, which ties the system’s answers back to specific source material instead of allowing free-form generation; and narrative summarization, which condenses long testimonies while preserving their meaning. The research team will collaborate with the Densho Digital Repository and other nationally significant oral collections, ensuring that the framework is tested against real archives with real stakes rather than synthetic test data.

While Chen’s projects probe the intersection of AI and adult services, Sara Schwebel is directing a grant that reaches younger audiences through the material culture of the book itself. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children’s Books, is principal investigator for “Reading the Revolution: Telling the Story of the Nation’s Founding to America’s Youth,” a one-year project valued at nearly $100,000. The project takes an exhibit-and-field-trip model as its organizing structure and brings together an unusually rich set of campus and community partners: the University of Illinois Library, Skeuomorph Press & BookLab, and the Champaign County Forest Preserve. At a moment when public understanding of American history is intensely contested, the project bets on a time-tested method—putting young people in direct contact with historical artifacts and the books that have carried the founding story to each new generation.

The interpretive and digital exhibit at the heart of the project will draw on the University of Illinois library’s remarkable collections, including the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, and the Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library’s School Collection. That last holding is particularly significant for the project’s aims, since the School Collection documents how children’s literature has transmitted national history to young readers across decades of changing pedagogy and politics. To complement the physical and digital exhibit, the project will create a digital collection and a readers’ advisory guide prepared by the editorial board of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, one of the field’s most respected review journals. Supplemental materials will be developed by Center for Children’s Books staff together with a “Reading the Revolution” Scholars Council drawn from other colleges and universities, giving the project scholarly depth beyond a single campus.

The programming built around the exhibit is designed to reach multiple audiences simultaneously. Plans include American history-themed storytimes for young children, school-aged library programming, field trips for middle school students throughout the region, and professional development workshops for area librarians and teachers—the adults who will carry the project’s resources into classrooms and libraries long after the grant period ends. Coordination of this ambitious slate falls to Center for Children’s Books Assistant Director Suzan Alteri, Associate Professor Ryan Cordell, doctoral student Owen Monroe, and additional graduate students, a staffing model that doubles as training for the next generation of youth services and digital humanities professionals.

The fourth grant shifts the focus to the librarians themselves. Kahyun Choi serves as a consultant on “Asset-Based AI Toolkit: Leveraging Librarian Cultural Wealth for AI Literacy,” a three-year, $455,066 project led by Hee Rin Lee of Michigan State University. The project’s premise is a deliberate inversion of the deficit framing that often surrounds professional development: instead of asking what librarians lack in their understanding of artificial intelligence, it asks what assets they already possess—what the project calls librarian cultural wealth—and how those strengths can be recognized and leveraged to build and sustain AI literacy programs. The concrete output is a web-based interactive toolkit that librarians can use to identify their own capabilities and translate them into programming for their communities.

Choi’s role in the project draws directly on her distinctive research profile. As an expert in AI for music and poetry within the field of library science, she will provide subject-matter expertise, curate supplementary resources, and offer iterative feedback as the toolkit is developed. Her involvement is not new to this line of inquiry: the toolkit project builds on the team’s earlier IMLS-funded AI literacy work, which produced a program for public libraries with Choi as co-principal investigator. That continuity matters, because AI literacy is not a one-time curriculum but a moving target—each new generation of models changes what patrons need to know and what librarians need to teach.

Taken together, the four National Leadership Grants sketch a portrait of where library and information science research is heading. The projects share a conviction that intelligent technologies will not simply be absorbed by libraries and archives on their own terms; they must be studied, benchmarked, and shaped by the professionals who steward the nation’s information resources. They also share a methodological commitment to partnership—with public library systems in three jurisdictions, with a nationally significant oral history repository, with campus special collections and a community forest preserve, and with peer institutions across the country. Whether the subject is an older adult learning to question an AI chatbot, a researcher probing whether a language model can faithfully summarize a survivor’s testimony, a middle schooler encountering the Revolution through a rare book, or a librarian discovering that her existing expertise is the foundation for teaching AI literacy, the Illinois-led projects treat information institutions not as casualties of technological change but as the places where that change can be made humane, accurate, and broadly accessible.

Subject of Research: IMLS-funded information science research on AI in libraries, oral history archives, children's literature, and librarian AI literacy

Article Title: IMLS grants support information science projects from Illinois researchers

Article References: IMLS grants support information science projects from Illinois researchers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: IMLS, information science, artificial intelligence, public libraries, older adults, oral history, multimodal large language models, children's literature, AI literacy, digital exhibits, University of Illinois, library services