AI and Prompt Engineering for Library Discovery Services

We have seen the rise of generative artificial intelligence in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide answers to users’ queries. Services such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini have quickly become accepted and adopted in the research process. Now library vendors are adding artificial intelligence (AI) to their discovery services to allow for natural language queries to produce generative results. However, the AI model used for discovery services differs from normal LLMs in a significant way that has several positive benefits, but it affects how prompts are written. Library discovery services use a model called Retrieval- Augmented Generation to enhance the normal keyword searching function.