What I Did During the Charleston Conference

A scene report, plus Gary Price's favorite AI tools

Posted on November 20, 2024 in Blog Posts

It’s not exactly spring break, but for a New Englander during late fall, attending the Charleston Conference in lovely Charleston, South Carolina, is a treat. And after a six-year absence(!) from the show, I was happy to see that it remains the program-packed networking juggernaut it’s always been.

This year was the first fully produced conference under new owner Annual Reviews, which acquired the Charleston Hub, the organizer of the conference, in October 2023. Now more than 40 years old, the conference remains largely unchanged under its new ownership, although a new digital publication called Katina, named after conference founder Katina Strauch, was announced during the event.

I flew in on Wednesday, which means I missed the vendor showcase, a curiously short—to me, at least—single-day feature of the conference. But this conference is about programming and networking, and I spent a lot of time in the lobby of the Francis Marion Hotel meeting with friends and colleagues.

AI is the “more cowbell” of the conference circuit these days, and Charleston did not disappoint. By my count, there were 17 sessions addressing it, including one presented by Choice. Called “Evaluating Generative AI-Powered Resources for Higher Education: Separating the Toys from the Tools,” I presented along with Choice Editor and Publisher Rachel Hendrick (who wrote a preview of the session last week); Amy Handfield, Associate Librarian and Director of Access Services at Manhattan University; Rosalyn Metz, Chief Technology Officer, Libraries and Museum, at Emory University; and long-time industry watcher and consultant Gary Price. We presented during one of the “bitter end” session slots (11:50–12:30 on Friday), but I was delighted to count about 60 attendees in the room, a sign that, despite its reputation for networking, the programming kept people in their seats until the final minutes of the event.

---

🌟 Subscribe to the LibTech Insights newsletter for weekly roundups and bonus content, including: 

• Library Tech Highlights from ACRL’s State of Academic Libraries Report
• Quest for the Perfect ERM: Using Airtable to Manage Electronic Resources
• Understanding Bias in AI through Guardrails

---

As Gary Price does, he showcased several AI tools that have captured his interest as of late. Here’s a quick summary of those:

Notebook LLM

Gives you a nice summary of whatever document you upload. And the RAG will give you suggested questions to ask of your document. But there are no citations back to the original document, so you can’t check for hallucinations very easily.

Illuminate

A text-to-audio AI, this is a very cool way to listen to academic articles (on the go?), but there is no way to check the veracity of the podcast (unless you read the academic article, of course, which doesn’t really save you time).

Perplexity

One of Gary’s favorite tools. You can choose your dataset using the Focus option, and responses should have citations that allow you to verify facts. If you want to limit your answers to a particular website, use “site:www.nameofyourwebsite.com” in your prompt. 

Semantic Reader

Some articles in Semantic Scholar are Semantic Reader–enabled. This layer enables the Skimming Assistant feature that highlights key components of the article: method, result, goal, etc. Because this AI assistant lies on top of the article, users can immediately recognize whether or not the AI has done a good job. 

Scholarsy

This tool allows users to analyze academic papers. Just upload the document, and the AI will give a snapshot of what the paper is about, including methods, key findings, results, etc. The tool will also analyze the quality of the research, the limitations of the study, and give recommendations for future studies that could build on this work. It provides citations so that users can go back and verify the AI’s information.

If you missed the in-person event but really want to see our panel, a digital version will air December 9–13. Check the Charleston Conference for details.

---

🔥 Sign up for LibTech Insights (LTI) new post notifications and updates.

🧠 Join us for a free webinar on AI literacy in libraries.

✍️ Interested in contributing to LTI? Send an email to Daniel P. at Choice with your topic idea.

Related Posts