February 2026 Table of Contents Newsletter - Artificial Intelligence

While artificial intelligence (AI) takes the world by storm, students and faculty may notice AI popping up in library databases like weeds in the spring. Variety in AI functionality in scholarly databases remains limited, with the majority of AI being used to power tools called “reading assistants. ” Reading assistants attempt to summarize text, recommend adjacent sources, or extract search terms. While these tools can be useful, they are not foolproof and are still prone to hallucination, thus it is always important to read and cite the actual source material. Additionally, the ability to use these tools can depend on what database you’re in, what source type is open (e.g. research article vs conference proposal), and even the way you phrase your search string (Boolean vs natural language question). For those that would like to wield these tools, see summaries and visual indicators of a few of these tools already in library products: