The exhibit hall at ALA’s annual conference is always overwhelming. This year in San Diego was no exception, with 602 companies, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies eager to show their best faces to the 8,000-plus librarians in attendance. For attendees, the advice to “wear comfortable shoes” was never more appropriate. Resurrecting the nom de plume of the Footsore Searcher, I embarked on a journey of discovery in the vast Library Marketplace, as ALA calls its exhibit hall.
My initial quest was to find out what vendors were planning in regard to inserting AI into their products. I vowed not to be distracted by the publishing companies offering printed books, often with long lines of librarians eager to grab free, author-signed copies for their collections. In this, I was successful.
I was not quite as successful in maintaining a laser focus on technology. The booths of U.S. government scientific agencies had a magnetic effect on me, pulling me toward the NASA and NOAA displays of space science, astrobiology, weather prediction, viewing Earth from space, and STEM activities for children and adults. I enjoyed NASA’s Hyperwall storytelling and a live Kahoot! quiz on the Webb Space Telescope. I also picked up some samples of games and comic books that would be perfect for the children’s sections of public libraries. It’s amazing how much NASA and NOAA contribute to our daily lives and prove their value.
Other U.S. government agencies exhibiting included the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reminded attendees of the myriad surveys and economic reports it produces; the Patent and Trademark Office, which offers numerous workshops on filing for patents and trademarks; and the Census Bureau, which is a rich source of demographic data. Missing from the exhibit hall was the Library of Congress.
Speaking of demographic data, SimplyAnalytics showed the power of its visualization and analytics (with sophisticated cross-tabbing possibilities) to surface interesting insights from its more than 200,000 data variables. Now that Gale has decided to sunset DemographicsNow due to low usage, SimplyAnalytics is stepping up to meet the needs of that resource’s subscribers. It’s not just demographic data; SimplyAnalytics also covers consumer behavior, economic, market segmentation, general business, and health data, mostly in the U.S., but with some Canadian data as well. You do have to look carefully at the data partners of SimplyAnalytics, as some may require an additional fee to access.
PRIMARY SOURCES
At the Gale booth, the emphasis was on primary sources. Enhancements to the Gale Literature Resource Center are designed to help students understand what researching primary documents is all about and to bring in additional information to flesh out the context of a literary work being analyzed. Multimedia, biographies, historical documents, critical reviews, and other primary source documents contribute to students’ abilities to understand the differences between primary and secondary materials when conducting research. Other enhancements include native PDF access, work and topic portals, and integration with Gale College Collection. Gale added more titles after ALA Annual and has the complete title list on its website. This almost makes me want to go back in time to retake one of my college English lit courses. Almost.
Gale’s Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century, sourced from the New York Academy of Medicine, is the first in the History of Disabilities series. It also relies on primary documents, including rare books and pamphlets, periodicals, speeches, notes, and photographs. Most of the textual materials are in English and originate from the U.S. and the U.K. Some are handwritten and made searchable through Gale’s handwritten text recognition (HTR) technology. Aligning with the nature of the content is Gale’s optimizing text for accessibility and its quality assurance efforts on the OCRed text. Disability can be a difficult subject to research from a historical perspective, given its sensitivity and the often demeaning and insulting vocabulary used in the past.
Sage announced Sage Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research, a multimedia collection focusing on Indigenous research methods, disability studies, race and ethnicity studies, gender, and sexuality. By multimedia, Sage means not only audio and video, but also datasets, how-to guides (topic overviews), and case studies loaded on the Sage Research Methods platform. The use of the term “case studies” confused me until I realized that Sage was not creating the type of case studies familiar to business school students (Sage publishes some of these, although Harvard’s are probably better known). Instead, they are accounts—Sage refers to them as stories—of how librarians and academics created case studies at their institutions to support diversity and decolonization.
WHERE’S THE AI?
Still in search of AI, I visited the Elsevier booth to get the latest scoop on Scopus AI. Barbie E. Keiser wrote about it for Computers in Libraries, and François and Anne-Marie Libmann reviewed it for ILI365 eNews. It uses generative AI to provide topic summaries backed up by several actual (not hallucinated) references drawn from the Scopus database. Although Elsevier didn’t publicize it, from accessing the site in the booth, it appears that Scopus AI is out of beta. More references are now included, and the plan to add older information is still on track.
As is traditional, LexisNexis had its own booth apart from Elsevier’s, even though both are RELX companies. It previewed Nexis+ AI for company research, dubbing it a “decision intelligence platform powered by generative AI.” Typical of AI implementations, it provides short summarizations of articles from its database, prior to a full-scale company analysis. Tailored to company research, Nexis+ AI has tabs for company overviews, financial data, and news. Upload documents to the Nexis+ AI Document Analyzer to query them via a chat function with predefined prompts, or enter your own questions. This works across news articles, research papers, financial statements, and other business documents. The next step supported by Nexis+ AI is generating a first draft report.
EBSCO touted its responsible AI initiatives at its booth, saying that its guiding principles require transparency. It is introducing natural language search and using generative AI to write summaries of articles found through its EBSCOhost databases, a feature it calls AI Insights, not to be confused with Google’s AI Insights. EBSCO’s AI Insights are intended to give researchers a quick overview of an article from its databases, not the open web, so they can decide whether to read the full text. EBSCO uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to increase relevancy and linked data to pull together disparate vocabularies and authoritative metadata. Look for new search capabilities, such as natural language search, improved relevance ranking, and subject query expansion via the Unified Subject Index in the latter half of 2024.
Linked data was a major focus for OCLC. This is not a brand-new interest for OCLC—it’s been amplifying the power of linked data for more than a decade. Newer AI technologies, however, have raised both interest in and applications for linked data, particularly for cataloging, metadata creation, and entity extraction. Advances in knowledge graph technology and generative AI are creating new opportunities, some of them internal (streamlining some workflows) and others for OCLC library customers (making ILL more efficient). For ongoing information about OCLC and its involvement with linked data, subscribe to the OCLC Next blog.
Both Clarivate and its ProQuest subsidiary talked about research assistants in the Clarivate booth. Clarivate’s Research Assistant will operate on Web of Science. Searchers can enter a query or be guided through the tasks required to create a good research question. Summarization, cited sources, and visualizations are part of the tool. ProQuest’s Research Assistant will initially run on the smaller databases, such as ProQuest One Business and ProQuest One Psychology, rather than the larger ProQuest One Academic. Aimed at novice searchers, ProQuest’s Research Assistant can suggest topics and summarize key points from full text documents in the collections.
Did I find all of the companies in the Library Marketplace that were testing AI in their offerings? Probably not. This is a rapidly changing area, and what was on display this year could be drastically different by ALA 2025 in Philadelphia. One thing that won’t change, and something the Footsore Searcher is strongly in favor of: Wear comfortable shoes.
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Photos by Brandi Scardilli
