I was working on a slide today about "searching is like using a flashlight in a dark cave." Coincidentally, Caulfield also referenced caves, but in the context of AI mode being like having a drone map the cave for you! ...can I be forgiven for thinking of it as "generation-augmented retrieval?"😊

This is a good tip, I have never even heard of ECIL but this looks like a conference I wish I had been at. I am going to need to start running similar product trials soon and would be nice to benefit from others' work!

For sure, if it were me, I would rather the vendors get a front-file data load and do all their pre-processing. Otherwise all the tools lose their retrieval special sauce. Consensus has all those fancy filters for example that you can apply before even running the search.

Aha, I forgot to think about MCP. If publishers start offering full text via agents it doesn't give any one product the clear content advantage... and allows the vendors in this class of product to continue duking it out. Wish I was going to be able to see this panel!

Consensus is making a very aggressive push for market share right now. I wonder if their ultimate goal is to be purchased by a publisher-agnostic library vendor like Clarivate.

I've just been revisiting your blog post on abstracts as the "petrol tank for AI discovery" and I wonder how long these tools can continue to exist before publishers find a way to collect licensing fees for their front-file abstracts - and in that scenario, which products will survive.

But if it helps you evaluate and select which system your library should invest in… that’s valuable knowledge!! Eg if I need a reason we need to pay for e.g. Scite vs the corny AI implementations from traditional library vendors you were mentioning earlier… I think this kind of thing helps for sure!

I don’t mean to project my own limitations onto the profession but I wonder why we aren’t talking about this more

Are we focusing on these features as a profession because most of us didn’t get into the technical side of information search and retrieval in library school? When I was in school semantic search barely existed. But I don’t feel like I see a lot of presentations on this topic at library conferences

That surprises me, does that require them to maintain both a lexical index and a vector embedding database separately and update them both whenever they get new data loads?

I was able to meet with a Consensus rep and was interested to hear how they do retrieval by both keyword and embedding search. I wish I could’ve learned more but I’m sure after a point what they do becomes proprietary but they seem to have done some thoughtful development of the info retrieval part