I’m sure by now, you, like me, have explored ChatGPT for coding, writing articles, and and just about everything else you can think of. And, like me, you probably are both excited and concerned about its possibilities. I couldn’t resist trying it with a prompt of “write an editorial about ChatGPT for the Code4Lib Journal”, and it did a good job that I probably could have passed off, especially if I had asked it to do it my writing style. I also asked it to write an editorial of its impact on libraries, which was also quite impressive, and, truth be told, would probably be accepted into this journal if submitted.

This is the first issue which includes some code written by ChatGPT, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more. For fun, I asked it to convert some old perl code to python (on my to-do list with lots of old scripts I have floating around) and while it didn’t make an attempt, it did give me ‘guidance’ on the variations in syntax between the two languages, fwiw. I also asked it to write me a Perl script that would identify marc records with invalid marc tags, which spit out a reasonable little bit of code, though it only checked that a tag was numeric, and not for length, and only took one record at a time for input. Still, it seems like an easy way to get the outlines of small tasks written. I’m sure many of you will show us some more powerful ways to use this tool and others.

As AI technology progresses and permeates our libraries, I’m sure we’ll be talking about it in many areas from systems to reference to bibliographic instruction and information literacy (good luck with that!). For example this issue also features an article exploring locally hosted AI for image metadata creation.

But for us here at C4LJ, the real excitement is not about AI and chatbots, but about the 4 new LIVE editors who joined our editorial board this month. We are happy to welcome them and trust adding them to our ranks will help alleviate some of the bottlenecks we’ve run into over the past few years. Please join me in welcoming:

• Mark Eaton – Associate Professor/Reader Services Librarian at Kingsborough Community College
• Kirsta Stapelfeldt – Head, Digital Scholarship Unit at University of Toronto
• Christina L. Hennessey – Systems Librarian, California State University at Northridge University Library
• Herbert Van de Sompel Research fellow at DANS (Netherlands) and guest professor at Ghent University (Belgium)

And with that, here are the articles in issue 56:

• Apples to Oranges: Using Python and the pymarc library to match bookstore ISBNs to locally held eBook ISBNs
• The Brooklyn Health Map: Reflections on a Health Data Dashboard for Brooklyn, NY
• Building a Large-Scale Digital Library Search Interface Using The Libraries Online Catalog
• PREMIS events through an event-sourced lens
• Strategies for Digital Library Migration
• To Everything There Is a Session A Time to Listen, a Time to Read Multi-session CDs
• Utilizing R and Python for Institutional Repository Daily Jobs
• The Viability of Using an Open Source Locally Hosted AI for Creating Metadata in Digital Image Collections