FAQs

According to Ex Libris, the new Primo AI Research Assistant "helps users find an easy starting point for their research by leveraging the power of generative AI. In its initial release, Research Assistant includes the following functionality:

• Natural language search
• Answers with references based on the abstract of top 5 results from Central Discovery Index (CDI)
• Links to the full text
• Links to the complete results list in Primo
• Search suggestions to expand topics and explore further
• Local language support"

It's now live and ready to be activated in your Primo view. Because it is view-specific, you can set up a test view and choose to enable it as a header link or as a widget.

Set up Test View:

• Go to Discovery>Display Configuration>Configure Views
• Click the three dots next to your default view and choose "duplicate":
  
• In the Code box type the name of the test view with no spaces
• To go to that view for testing, click the three dots next to the view and choose "Go to view"

Activate Research Assistant:

• Go to Discovery>Display Configuration>Configure Views
• Click the three dots next to the view where you'd like to activate the Research Assistant and choose Edit
• On the landing page (General tab), scroll down until you see the options "Enable Research Assistant Using Icon" and "Enable Research Assistant Using Widget" and choose which option you'd like to use:
  

Changes in the November 2024 Release:

"Below is a summary of the enhancements included in the November release, many of which are based on your feedback.  

• Search history: Until November, only the current session’s searches were saved and displayed. Now, users can view previous sessions’ questions, allowing them to build on their work with greater continuity.
• Ability to change the order of menu links: Previously, the Primo Research Assistant link in the menu links could not be ordered and defaulted to the first position. With this enhancement, it will continue to default to the first position, but you can now change its order in the menu links. 
• User guidance: The Research Assistant does not currently support search filters, such as requests for specific resource types like articles or books, or specific dates. We are planning to add support for such requests in the coming releases, but for now, as part of the November release, we have added a message to the screen for such queries, to alert and guide the user that certain elements in their request may not be supported at this time.
• Overview structure and content: We continue to work on the overview structure and content based on your feedback. In the November release, we amended the prompt to be more sensitive to excluding unrelated information (noise robustness), and to indicate in the narrative if there is not enough information in the context to answer the user question directly. 
• Switch to GPT-4o mini: We routinely test and implement newer versions of the Large Language Models used in our Research Assistants. We are now using GPT-4o mini. 

Ex Libris Documentation:

• Getting Started with Primo Research Assistant
• Primo Research Assistant training session