Earlier this semester the USF Libraries catalog, powered by Primo and hosted by the Florida Virtual Campus Library Services, was upgraded with an AI research assistant. When searching with the Primo Research Assistant, your keywords or question will now be turned into a complex Boolean search string across library collections, excluding newspapers and retracted documents.
What does this mean for your search results in the catalog? The result of a search with the Primo Research Assistant will be accompanied by an overview of the topic created by the tool’s analysis of metadata and abstracts of the first five results. A full list of search results can be obtained by clicking ‘view all results.’
The Research Assistant also features additional language support. According to Exlibris documentation, questions can be asked of the Research Assistant in the user’s own language. Library materials in both the user’s language and in English will be returned in the results.
How It Works
Primo Research Assistant uses a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to combine the language capabilities of the LLM (Large Language Model) with the knowledge from material indexed in the Central Discovery Index (CDI). Responses are generated as follows:
Query Conversion – The user’s question is sent to the LLM, where it is converted to a Boolean query that contains a number of variations of the query, connected with an OR. If the query is non-English, some of the variations will be in the query language, and the other variations will be in English.
Results Retrieval – The Boolean query is sent to CDI to retrieve the results.
Re-ranking – The top results (up to 30) are re-ranked using embeddings to identify five sources that best address the user’s query.
Overview Creation – The top five results are sent to the LLM with the instructions to create the overview with inline references, based on the abstracts.
Response Delivery – The overview and sources are returned to the user in the response.
-Quoted from Exlibris ‘Getting Started with Primo Research Assistant’
In addition, Primo Research Assistant is designed with privacy first in mind. User questions and inputs are not stored or used in training the AI model.
Want to learn more about AI Tools?
- Check the Libraries AI Tools and Resources guide for more information.