University libraries - Information Matters

A few months ago, an undergraduate student came to the library searching for a specific article. She had found a citation in another research paper complete with journal name, volume, issue, and page numbers. Everything looked legitimate. The only missing element was a DOI. At first, I thought it was a simple indexing issue. But when I checked the journal’s volume and issue, I discovered no such article existed. The citation was completely fabricated. It looked real, but it was not real. In the age of generative AI and large language models, this kind of incident is increasingly common in academic research. As we widely utilize AI tools for academic writing and literature review, a new problem has emerged: AI hallucination.

Translation

April 15, 2026 Emmanuel Kwame Cudjoe

Beyond the Boolean: Is Natural Language search opening or closing the discovery gap for university e-library users?

For decades, the “search box” at the heart of the university library has been a gatekeeper. To unlock the vast treasures of academic databases, users had to speak a specific, rigid language, Boolean. For expert researchers, terms like AND, OR, and NOT are second nature. But for many students without appropriate information searching skills and training, the traditional search interface has often acted more as a barrier than a bridge.