Announcement | Our Head of Department Bahar Biçen Aras Spoke as a Panelist at Goethe-Institut Ankara

Dear İstinye Family,

Our Head of Information Resources and Library Department, Bahar Biçen Aras, attended the panel titled “Public Space in the Digital World, Social Media, Disinformation, and Information Services” as a guest speaker. The event was held on Friday, October 9, 2026, at the Goethe-Institut Ankara Conference Hall in collaboration with the Turkish Librarians' Association and Goethe-Institut Ankara.

Bringing together information professionals, academics, and researchers, the panel comprehensively addressed the future of information in the age of algorithms, strategies to combat disinformation, and the impacts of artificial intelligence technologies on the librarianship discipline.

"The Changing Role of Libraries in the AI and Digital Ecosystem”

Delivering her presentation titled “The Impact of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence on Information Services” during the second session, Bahar Biçen Aras drew attention to the trust crisis created by information pollution and echo chambers on digital platforms. She emphasized that libraries have transformed into "safe havens and verification hubs that validate truth" against fake content in today's digital era.

Key highlights from the presentation included:

• Automated Cataloging and Semantic Discovery: How AI enhances data processing efficiency to offer contextual, personalized access to information beyond traditional keyword matching.
• Accessible and Inclusive Libraries: Eliminating barriers to information access through natural language processing (NLP), voice command assistants, text-to-speech (TTS) converters, and optical character recognition (OCR) technologies.
• Risks and Ethical Governance in the AI Era: The necessity of ethical AI governance frameworks based on transparency, data security, and information integrity to counter risks such as AI hallucinations (fabricated citations), algorithmic bias, and cybersecurity threats.

"Human Intelligence Will Always Be the Key to Verifying Truth and Ethical Use”

Underlining that new-generation competencies like AI literacy and prompt engineering are vital for information professionals, Bahar Biçeb Aras concluded her speech with the following statement:

“No matter how advanced technology becomes, it is ultimately human intelligence that will govern the ethical use and accuracy of information.”

As İstinye University Library, we will continue to integrate the innovative opportunities of digital transformation into our information services under ethical principles and provide our users with access to the most reliable knowledge.