Clemson Libraries now offers Primo Research Assistant, a generative artificial intelligence tool to help students, faculty and staff search library resources more efficiently. It’s like having ChatGPT specifically search for items in the Libraries’ catalog.
To access Research Assistant, students, faculty and staff can click on “AI Research Assistant” in the main search bar area of the Libraries website. After logging in with Clemson credentials, the AI Research Assistant allows users to ask any research question, and all results will stem from books, journals and other publications already available in the Clemson Libraries catalog.
“The catalog can sometimes be very restrictive in how it searches, but the AI assistant allows for a more flexible natural language search,” said Anne Grant, history librarian and instruction coordinator.
Research Assistant will also provide an AI-generated overview of the five sources most relevant to the research question and give users the option to view more sources in the catalog if necessary. All sources can still be filtered according to content type, peer review, publication date and more.
Because the meta-data in this new AI Research Assistant is hyper localized to sources housed in Clemson’s catalog, students and faculty will have access to material that might ordinarily be missed by other AI search tools, such as books or more exploratory journal articles.
“You’re able to search for resources in a way that’s not typically accessible to other users of (Generative Pre-trained tools) that don’t have our resources at their fingertips,” Grant said. “I think that’s probably its biggest advantage for faculty and students, that it’s searching in a different way and in a different bucket than other GPTs.”