AI Literacy - AI in Search Engines and Databases

This is an outline of a session conducted by the Texas Tech Librarians in February 2025. Includes workshop description for entirely online workshop.

Session Description:

Many of the databases that you may be using (Web of Science, JSTOR, Scopus) are developing generative AI features. This workshop will discuss how search engines work, what adding generative AI has done to searching, and the interesting ways in which RAGs (retrieval-augmented generation) is being applied in the databases. This session was conducted solely online.

Learning Objectives:

1. Participants will learn which databases are developing generative AI
2. What a RAG is and how databases and other library search functions
3. How to use these generative AI models in the databases

To make the session more interactive, create a padlet and allow particpants to "rate" or "thumbs up" a particular resource, and ask if they are planning on using it in the future and why or why not. Also give participants time to try the resources.