Journal of African Development

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly important to university libraries as they can help with the discovery, metadata work, virtual assistance, research support, personalization of services, and data-informed service design. At the same time, AI brings serious concerns about privacy, bias, transparency, copyright, accessibility, misinformation and the ongoing need for human professional judgment. This practice version is a mixed-methods research paper with a simulated dataset of 60 hypothetical respondents. Our data shows moderate AI readiness and adoption intention, high ethical awareness and governance needs and positive bivariate associations between readiness and both adoption intention and ethical awareness. These statistics only show that we are reporting as we do not present any empirical data about Indian university libraries. The paper retains the underlying framework for a future primary data study of AI readiness, adoption intention and ethical governance in university libraries