View the Futurescape Libraries AI Toolkit Workshops page for information about those events and to register.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Futurescape Libraries: A Toolkit for Library Leaders Navigating the Future of AI
Introduction
Module 1: Thinking About the Future
Module 2: Surfacing Opportunities and Concerns
Module 3: Scenario-Based Development and Evaluation of Options
Module 4: Exploration of Strategic Options
Module 5: From Workshop to Practice
Facilitator’s Guide
Complete Toolkit: Modules 1–5
Foreword
This toolkit is designed for leaders of research libraries who want to integrate the ARL/CNI AI Scenarios into ongoing planning activities—such as annual operating plans, strategic reviews, or cross-institutional conversations.
Organized into five flexible modules, the toolkit offers structured activities to help leadership teams, staff, and occasionally external stakeholders:
- Explore future possibilities
- Test current strategies
- Identify opportunities and vulnerabilities
- Build readiness for long-term change
Each module includes facilitator-ready guidance, reflection prompts, and templates to support flexible use—whether you’re designing a half-day retreat or a longer foresight process.
This toolkit is not a linear playbook—it’s a modular resource. Use the full set in a structured retreat, or select individual activities to fit the planning moment you’re in.
Here’s how you might use it:
As a Workshop Guide
Use the toolkit to run a structured foresight workshop—ranging from a half-day to a full strategic retreat. Each section includes clear activities, facilitator notes, and worksheets.
As a Strategic Conversation Starter
Use individual exercises (e.g., environmental scanning, scenario action planning, impact mapping) to guide planning discussions with your leadership team or board.
As a Capacity-Building Tool
Use the framework and activities to build foresight literacy among staff, collaborators, or campus partners—especially around strategic risk, resilience, and innovation.
As a Companion to Strategic Planning
Use the scenarios and action-planning tools to test, prioritize, or strengthen existing strategies. This can support planning, budgeting, space design, hiring, or external engagement.
Futurescape Libraries: A Toolkit for Library Leaders Navigating the Future of AI
In an era marked by accelerating technological, societal, and geopolitical shifts, today’s decisions shape tomorrow’s realities in increasingly unpredictable ways. For leaders in research and university libraries, this means grappling with uncertainty not as a short-term hurdle but as a permanent feature of the strategic landscape.
Foresight—the ability to anticipate change, consider multiple possible futures, and act with agility—is a critical leadership skill. It expands our thinking beyond immediate pressures and singular forecasts, encouraging more imaginative, inclusive, and adaptive planning. Futures thinking is not about predicting what will happen. Instead, it prepares us to make more resilient and intentional decisions by asking: “What could happen? What should happen? And what will we do now to shape a better future?”
This toolkit is designed to help library leaders who wish to use the ARL/CNI AI Scenarios: AI-Influenced Futures report to inform thinking and planning for the future of their organizations.
It provides a brief overview of scenario planning and futures studies and provides a series of activities to help assess a library’s readiness to build towards an uncertain future.
Practical exercises include the identification of strategic initiatives that will serve a library across the four scenarios, and consider the risks, benefits and impacts of decisions. These exercises are presented with guides for use by leaders and/or facilitators.
Introduction
The ARL/CNI Scenarios
Module 1: Thinking About the Future
Builds mindset readiness through personal reflection, strategic questioning, and early conversations about AI.
Module 2: Surfacing Opportunities and Concerns
Introduces core foresight concepts like drivers, signals, and environmental scanning. Helps teams surface key trends, uncertainties, and tensions in the external landscape.
Module 3: Scenario-Based Development and Evaluation of Options
Uses the ARL/CNI scenarios to explore how libraries might operate in four distinct futures. Includes immersive exercises, SWOT/TOWS analysis, and scenario-based action planning.
Module 4: Exploration of Strategic Options
Helps teams evaluate and prioritize strategies based on impact, feasibility, and alignment with possible futures. Includes tools for mapping AI opportunities and identifying short-term priorities.
Module 5: From Workshop to Practice
Offers a suite of ongoing leadership practices to extend foresight beyond the workshop—through scanning habits, early warning systems, and culture-building routines.
Facilitator’s Guide
Complete Toolkit
This Futurescape Libraries toolkit was developed by Keith Webster, dean of libraries at Carnegie Mellon University and a practicing futurist, as a means to explore scenario-specific strategies and activities that research libraries can undertake to prepare for various possible AI-influenced futures. The toolkit integrates the ARL/CNI AI Scenarios published in spring 2024 along with priorities trialed and refined by strategic thinkers working directly in or adjacent to the research library field during a Strategic Implications forum held December 7–8, 2024, in Washington, DC.
This toolkit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Deed.
