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Last Updated: November 20, 2023

Unlocking the Power of AI: Enhancing Research with Gale Resources

While AI may sometimes seem unreliable, there are effective strategies to harness its potential in both library and classroom settings. We invite you to view this 15-minute recorded webinar, where we delved into innovative methods for leveraging AI tools to enhance your research experiences within Gale resources, benefiting both educators and students alike.

Duration: 15 Minutes
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Alright, hello everybody. I'm welcome. I'm Stacey Knibloe, your Gale Trainer for unlocking the power of AI and enhancing research with deal resources.

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So Hey, AI is here, right? It's no longer just something we're seeing in the movies.

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It's easily accessible when you've got access to technology and people want to use it, right?

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So we thought we'd share some ideas for maybe a low stakes way of introducing it into people's research process.

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It's certainly been a topic that has been under a lot of discussion over the last couple of years, certainly in schools, a lot of, , districts have banned it and things like that, but.

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We've got people who want to use it. Let's show them some ways that they might be able to take advantage of it and incorporate it into the research process with your Gale databases.

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So let's go over a few things and then we're going to jump right in and share some examples.

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This is a quick session. We just want to give you a taste. And I have a lot of things I want to share.

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So let's go ahead and dive in.

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Alrighty, so AI is, of course, sorry, get my slides to advance there. Can't be troublesome.

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Certainly it is not without concerns and worries and , not always great information or true information. But that doesn't mean there aren't ways to make it work for you.

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And in preparing for the session, I read a really interesting article from School Library Journal. I’ll share the citation in my follow-up email that you'll receive tomorrow.

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But there was a quote there that jumped out at me and let me get it right here. Librarians are perfectly suited for this new role they have experienced curating content and that's true.

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Librarians can be a great guide for AI and their users showing the ways it can assist them.

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And that's really the approach we're going to take today. So we're already using it in many ways, predictive text and our phones and emails and things like that.

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But here's another way we can kind of bring it into our process. So rather than asking AI to complete a text, right, that's kind of the big concern, particularly in schools.

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Kids just having it write a paper for them or complete a task. In this case, we're going to ask the AI to assist us in the process.

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And be more of an assistant. And I actually had a great example from a librarian I worked with in Boise, Idaho who had shared a teacher, teacher story, he had a group of kids, he put them into 4, subsets of groups.

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And they needed to write an outline and a paper. One group used no AI at all, did all the work themselves.

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Another group went the other way, all AI for the outline for the paper. And then the 2 other groups took approach with AI with the outline and they're both paid for themselves and any other group vice versa and then they evaluated their results.

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They looked at what they ended up with. And really the group that ended up performing the best was the group that had them assist with the AI assist with the outline.

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And then they wrote the paper themselves, right? So that's a great example of a way you can use this as an assistant.

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So let's go ahead and talk a bit about how it can play a role in your Gale resources.

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So Gale content is something you can trust, right? We can feel iffy about AI and the information we're getting from it.

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But then if we take it to an authoritative resource like a Gale database, you're getting vetted, reliable sources of information.

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You've got a publisher to back it up, you have someone to reach out to if you have questions.

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So. Taking this step is using it in an assistant to then get to the good stuff. It's a really great way kind of low stakes way of bringing AI into the conversation.

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Particularly with the students. So we're going to go ahead and take a look and I'm sorry I'm just going to go off video now I don't mind want my video to block anything I'm doing in the screen so I'm just going to stop that before we dive into our first example here.

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Alright, so how can AI enhance the research process? So I'm going to start with an example for K 12 overwhelmingly that's the kind of library that signed up for this session, but we got something for public and academic libraries as well.

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So we've got a unit that's asking me a sounds, an essential question. Was Westford expansion inevitable and was it beneficial for all people living in America?

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And to get this unit started to get students started the research, they're going to fill out a concept map with different related ideas and specific ideas.

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Less for expansion. Pardon me. Let's go ahead and see what AI can do for us into is an assistant, right?

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So, AI, I've used chat GPT here, but of course there are other tools out there, but in this case we can use it to prompt some searches.

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We can take into a database. And The prompt is an important part of working with AI. The question you give it, kind of giving it enough information so you can get a good answer back.

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Some of you may listen to the school, I've range United podcast from Amy Herman.

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I got to see her action at a conference a month ago. And really, was engaged with our content, but then also started following her and she shared recently a digital literacy and AI playbook for educators that was created by a group of folks in Oakland County, Michigan.

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And again, I’ll share a link to that. And my follow-up email from tomorrow. But one of the things they go into in that playbook is how important it is to create a good prompt.

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They call it prompt engineering. So giving the AI enough information to kind of help give a better answer. So in this case, We're giving it a bit of our essential question and asking person searches to try.

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And we've got a variety of things we can take into a resource. So I'm actually going to go ahead and take one of these searches into our Gale and Context High School Resource.

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One of the items suggested there was the California Gold Rush, so we've got a little help there from, predictive text.

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Suggesting and our dealing context databases are built on these portal pages and you always start out with a good overview of the topic to kind of set the stage for what you're about to read as you go into all the rest of the results.

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So diving down into. Journals, biographies, primary sources and so on. We start out with a good overview and that's a great place for a student to start because here they can pull out key concepts of the California Gold Rush.

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We even offer some help ourselves to kind of get them thinking critically about the topic, right? We're asking an essential question.

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So here are more questions to jump start that thinking and giving them a few critical thinking questions here in our topic overview.

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And we're the end features in our resources. We can kind of mark up this article. So am I as I come across key ideas, key concepts, facts.

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I can highlight these as if I'm going to copy. The and that's going to act like a highlighter marker and I can choose whatever color I like there and keep marking these up to add to my concept.

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Map so I can go through the whole article, find good info, maybe mark up the things I want to investigate more.

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Hi, as well as add to my concept map. Now what's important is as you're doing this.

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Oh, and I'm going to grab this timeline here too, that would be great. So we can take advantage of later, research project.

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As you're doing this, marking up these articles, it's keeping track of them for your session, but it's going to clear out all this data when you leave the database.

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Privacy is important. It's especially important when we're working with people under 18. So these highlights of notes disappear when they leave the database, right?

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We don't really know who the student is who's behind marking up this article. So you got to take them with you before you go.

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And a great way to do that is to take advantage of our send you tool. And send this to Google to Microsoft One drives, send it via email, even print it or download it.

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But our cloud tools have become the most popular way to do this. It goes to work for a minute.

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And usually it's a little quicker than this, but of course it's going to take an extra minute when you are on a webinar that's only supposed to take 15 min.

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So. Let me see if it's just gone ahead and done it. What it will do is land in your

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Okay, I think we got it now. Yes. There's our confirmation that was said. So just took a look.

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A couple seconds. What it will do is create a folder named after the resource you're using.

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There's Gale and Context High School.

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And I'm just, I think I've got a, in my computer today, there we go.

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Here is my article. I'm all marked up with those highlights throughout the article and then at the bottom of the page it reprints them again.

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So I can start maybe using this to fill in my concept map, right? And it lives in my Google drive now so I can share it out with other people on my team or wherever I need it to go, right?

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So really handy. That to the PowerPoint here for a minute too. So the question I asked I have to research the Westward expansion was a good for all Americans, what are some searches to try and it gave me a bunch of searches at first but notice at the end of the response from Chat GPT.

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It's actually reminding me to use reputable sources. Academic journals, history books, that's, , a great example of our topic overview and primary documents, right?

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So let's go ahead and pop back into Yeah, in context high school, go back to the.

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And we've got primary sources. We have a count of the California Gold Brush. We have some productions.

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Oh, pardon me. And testimony of Captain Jack at trial. Ways to kind of build some real-life examples and if we jump in part of the question was , for the, Westward expansion to benefit all Americans.

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And of course there are lots of answers to that, but here's one particular tape from a mother who had 8 children, half of her children once California, the other half stayed with her in Illinois.

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And you can hear about kind of ways it maybe broke apart, , some families in cost, of course, in real hurting too.

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So we've got a real life account of that happening and we can take advantage of that in our research as well.

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So let's go ahead and pop back. Now, talking again, some more about what else, how else we could also use in AI.

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So search suggest is always a good path. But we've got students who are going to have to produce a project at the end of this and I love the amount of student choice we see nowadays in our schools.

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They can pick the type of report they're doing, the topic they're working on and really what they're going to produce.

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So in this case, we can ask AI for ideas. What might be something interesting to do. And in this one, notice I gave it as part of my prompt that I'm in eighth grade, right?

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So kind of giving. Bit more information always is going to help. I’ll not always, I shouldn't say, but is going to help us in getting a better answer.

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And in this case, say with the suggestions, I really like the digital storytelling. Idea but we're working with an eighth grade so I may not want to use G and context high school or may want to take advantage of scale and context to middle school.

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The reading levels going to be more appropriate. And in this case, go ahead and use our Westward expansion as a search.

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We've got a portal for that too. And right off the back for our digital storytelling suggested following a person's life we have a whole group of biographies to work with.

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For people associated with the West expansion. And if I use our subject limiter over here on the right, , these are kind of tools you don't see, , on the web or routing Google.

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I open up that subjects filter I can isolate to say presidents. A civil war or in this case go ahead and choose tribal leaders.

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Cause again, we're looking for aspects of this benefit all Americans and reading, you know, different stories.

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So we come across. Sitting bowl, we jump right into a bio. So a great starting point for our.

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Our digital story and oh I see someone's got a hand raised I'm sorry because I should have mentioned if you're going to use the chat or the QA if you have any questions along the way.

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I have my colleague Cindy here to help handle those in the chat. But here we again start with a biography for sitting bull and can build start building our digital story and there's lots of other content here too our explore panel makes it really easy to find more content can select sitting bowling it goes out and searches for all the info we have for sitting ball and we've got of course some great reference.

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Articles, some more bios. You can use different reading levels, maybe differentiated learning, but I want to pop into the magazine results.

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You've got lots of academic journals and some of our other databases because this one's for middle school we focus more on general interest magazines.

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And we find some. Articles with some great quotes from Sitting. Okay, and I can take part of that, make that part of my digital story.

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Right. And when I need to site it. Well, your Gale resources always have our handy citation tool, so I can happy and paste that right in my bibliography.

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Well, let's say I'm using other tools. Where I don't have that handy cite tool.

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That's another place AI can assist. So with the basics helping to site so asking chat GPT how should I site their help and getting advice for how to do that when I'm using it as part of a tool in writing that project or working on that project.

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You can also take advantage of, as I mentioned, , that example from I/O before creating an outline for your paper and again notice that prompt telling it's a college history paper.

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It's given me a good jumping off 1. One of the great things about AI is helps you not start with a blank piece of paper.

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It gives you something to work off of. And I can say, , we use it in our work on our team quite a bit at Gale to help avoid that white piece of paper, give you something to edit and work with.

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So the outline is a really good jumping off point too. So to share a couple of other examples, we do want to keep an eye on the time here.

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I just have some screenshots but wanted to share some things. An example for our academic and our public library.

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So in college, I took different LIP courses and for me to really kind of see themes and different story elements, it always took a couple reads and there wasn't really that time to do that.

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In college, right? So sometimes I need a little help jump starting my research process. So as I'm reading Jane, what are some themes within that work so I can maybe understand it a little better?

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And then I could take those, again, use these as kind of search prompts to take them into a resource like Gale Literature Resource Center, find literary criticism, work overviews, and read other people's thoughts on these things to jump start my own thinking.

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So again, kind of avoiding that blind piece of paper and giving yourself a little help, a little assist from an AI.

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And then also for our public libraries, , say you've got an entrepreneur who comes in, they're looking to write a business plan, they're starting their own business.

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You might point them to our Gale business plan builder. And within that resource, we've got prompts to help you do that.

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We're working here on our business ideation, which is basically like a one page description of the problems you're business is going to solve, what you need to value proposition you have.

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Here it's asking for key metrics for your business and what are some key performance indicators that are strategic for your business.

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That might not be something that I feel ready to talk about or understand yet. So we're working kind of backwards here to help fill in this blank here.

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I can again use AI. So if I'm starting a quick service for What might be some KPIs I can take advantage of and it kind of then gets me started maybe I can research more of these things and get better prepared to write my business plan.

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So it can come in handy. A lot of different ways. These are just a few options for ways you might take advantage of AI.

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And have it work together with your Gale resources again kind of a low-stakes way. To get people involved in using AI.

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As their virtual assistant basically. So I'm going to go ahead and wrap up here. Recommend you always take a look at our support site.

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Lots of good stuff out there, free marketing materials, lots of great training materials to help books, find your resources and take advantage of them.

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We've got great activities you can use with students, for example, our escape rooms and scavenger hunts.

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There are lesson plan examples. Lots of marketing materials to point to these resources as well. Always good stuff on our support site.

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And then of course you can always feel free to reach out to your Gale team. I'm happy to hear from you.

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You'll get an email tomorrow around this same time with all my follow up. I'm going to include links to those resources I mentioned.

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Of course I’ll have a lead to the recording of the session as well, but then also all of our contact info.

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So your Yale customer success manager is always a good person to get to know you can always find your account wrap on our website and of course keep up with Gale on our blog and social media posts.

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Thank you. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I am going to stick around and see if we get all the questions answered but for everybody who tuned in today thanks so much I hope this was helpful and gave you just a taste of what might be.

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A way you can bring AI into your library. Thanks all.
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