Dilex Search: Supporting Human Intelligence in Academic Search

Dilex Search is a discovery interface layer that integrates seamlessly with Ex Libris Primo. Based on years of research on the search behaviour and needs of university students, Dilex Search provides a novel approach to enabling the pursuit of medium- and long-term academic search tasks. As other search providers move towards integrating Generative AI into their search and discovery tools, the activity of searching is increasingly becoming focused on question-answering. While such an approach may be sufficient for everyday search tasks, it is counter to the needs of academic searchers. Instead, Dilex Search focuses on supporting the human intelligence needed to engage in search, discovery, and learning processes. This includes features to keep track of multiple different search interests, histories of search sessions and queries, workspaces for saving resources, and resource highlighting methods to enable comparison and investigation. These features work seamlessly across multiple device types (from mobile phones to desktop computers), allowing students to use whichever of their devices is most convenient with the confidence that their search activities will be saved across all their devices. These benefits extend to other library users, enabling researchers to maintain long-term search interests and easily re-issue queries to find the latest publications, and enabling librarians to create template search sessions to show new students how to effectively find academic resources.