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During the summer the Library has had trial access to “Summon AI Assistant”, a Beta product made available as an enhancement to our Library Search software.

The AI Assistant allows for natural language searching within the Library Search database, and from the results retrieved, ranks by relevance to the original query. The 5 ‘best’ sources are identified and the abstracts used to create an overall summary response to the original query.

We have extensively tested this product and have sought feedback from academics and students.

We have found that it does not currently meet the needs of our users. The results it supplies are not sufficiently and reliably accurate to enable us to recommend it as there is a significant risk that students may end up missing key resources from their research if they rely on this tool. For example, some publishers and content aggregators such as Elsevier and JSTOR do not allow their content to be indexed via the tool.

We have therefore made the decision to withdraw access to the Summon AI Assistant at this time.

However, it is a Beta product and may be subject to development and enhancement. We will continue to monitor this and will consider making it available to our users at a future date if future testing suggests it would be helpful for our users.