Primo VE — USF's Library Catalog & Discovery Service

Beginning in March 2025 the USF Libraries catalog, powered by Primo and hosted by the Florida Virtual Campus Library Services , will be powered with an AI research assistant.  To access the assistant within the catalog, click on the ‘Research Assistant’ option in the top menu bar.  Users must be logged in with their USF NetID to use the Research Assistant.

By entering your research question the Research Assistant’ will create a complex Boolean search string excluding newspapers and retracted documents.  The first five results will be analyzed by a Large Language Model (LLM) to create an overview of the results with in-line citations.  The overview is based on the search results and should not contain extraneous material.   

Each search is unique.  Clicking try again will give you a slightly different overview or different top-five sources.   

Clicking ‘view all results’ will take you to the full list of search results and the option to filter or refine using the search facets in the catalog.