Future Work

Participants identified several specific areas for future work as outlined in this update.

After the Symposium ended, the group reconvened virtually to achieve their first major post-event goal, producing the 2026 report. The AitL cohort aims to seek funding to continue developing resources and tools to help reference archivists navigate the changing nature of reference services and user behavior. Thus, for each work area below, we have also identified a range of potential costs.

For projects in this category, we considered an implementation cost of between $1,000–$5,000.

Research and User Studies Agenda

Acknowledging the potential to pursue many strands of research on the topic of AI and reference services, participants proposed a community-developed research agenda as a starting point for prioritizing and organizing research topics, particularly user studies.

Questions around researchers’ AI use suggest a new wave of user studies may be warranted. In 2013, Duff, Yakel, and Tibbo asked whether archivists would need better data about their users as fewer of them came through the door in person, and that question has gone largely unanswered since.

Researchers now come to archives through more external avenues, including AI chat agents, and we have very little ability to see the information flow or logic that led them to ask about specific materials.

Future studies addressing this gap could identify what AI-assisted information seeking looks like before a researcher contacts an archivist.

AitL On the Road

AitL participants would like to include additional people, particularly from different types of institutions and with different perspectives from the first 30 participants, in these conversations. One idea for wider participation is to develop regional and field-specific conferences and convenings over the next few years, taking Archivists in the Loop “on the road.”

To seed this project, In Spring 2027, two participants will facilitate a one-hour Archivists in the Loop workshop repeating two activities from the Symposium. The workshop will help surface topics for the research agenda and supports the AitL community’s goal to include additional voices in their work and recommendations.

In this category, we estimated project implementation would range from $10,000–$50,000.

Convening

Participants are eager to re-convene and continue the conversation in person. The AitL organizers are exploring the potential of a future Symposium or gathering.

AitL events could bring more voices into the conversation and address topics that couldn’t fit in the space of the two-day symposium. For example, we could convene a conversation on public-facing materials being used as training data.

In this category, we estimated project implementation to be above $50,000.

Building Our Own Tools

With significant resourcing, the community could also embark on building our own tools. We identified many requirements for AI tools in archival reference services, most of which are not met by existing products. The community could work together to build systems implementing archival best practices, designed by the archival community, centering our ethical concerns and provenance requirements.