This initiative uniquely positions Karnataka's librarians as cultural data stewards in the age of AI, bridging public knowledge, technology, and community identity. Unlike generic digital literacy efforts, it fuses AI toolmaking, open-data ethics, and cultural participation into one integrated framework. Delivered bilingually through Gooey.AI's participatory workflows, the program empowers librarians to not only understand AI but to shape it, curating datasets that reflect Karnataka's languages, imagery, and heritage.

The vision is to transform libraries into living laboratories of inclusive innovation, where citizens encounter AI as something they can question, train, and trust. By teaching AI to see Karnataka through its libraries, the project models how public institutions can lead in building ethical, locally grounded, and globally resonant AI ecosystems, a blueprint for participatory AI emerging from the Global South

Working with librarians as co-designers, we will develop local community created bird field-guides that document local bird species through naming, observation, description, and collective knowledge gathering. Librarians will facilitate participatory processes within their communities, creating place-based guides that foreground local perspectives and knowledge systems and offer alternatives to more conventionally colonial approaches to natural history documentation. Each participating library will contribute pages to a community-fuelled guide of birds across Karnataka, collectively creating a rich, plural, and regionally grounded record of avian life.

Building on these field-guides, librarians and their communities will explore how birds live within local stories, literature, and folk art traditions. From the pages they create, librarians will selectively develop fantastical animated birds, reimagining species through local narratives, legends, and heroes. Each librarian will then be invited to create a short looped video clip that brings these interpretations to life, interweaving folk representations of birds with observations and footage of the birds themselves. The programme and its outcomes will be co-developed with participating librarians, ensuring that both process and outputs emerge from local contexts and community knowledge.