Telling apples from Apples
Campus & Community Telling apples from Apples Students using card catalogs at Widener Library, 1945. Courtesy of Harvard University Archives Tenzin Dickie Harvard Library Communications March 11, 2025 4 min read Harvard Library search tool will understand intent behind the terms In the 50 years since card catalogs moved online, the way we search for library materials has stayed much the same. Users enter keywords into a search, the system looks for those keywords and returns results. As collections and data have grown exponentially, it’s become more complicated to finetune for the right results. If you search a library catalog for “the history of Apple,” you’ll get results mainly for the fruit rather than the company. The system only understands the words, not the meaning. A Harvard Library team is building a new search tool to change that. Using generative artificial intelligence and semantic search technologies, its new Collections Explorer will break through the limitations of keyword search to decipher the...