Archive - Aaron Tay's Musings about Librarianship

Hot take: Learning from Google Scholar and why a tool does not need to be flawless to be useful

What 2004 can teach us about 2024 — and the librarians who keep getting the lesson wrong

Jun 15 • Aaron Tay

What a year of testing & thinking about AI academic search taught me

The Chatbot Is the Wrong Mental Model

Jun 8 • Aaron Tay

Hot take: Stop calling poor search rankings necessary friction for learning

Boundary learning, adjacent literature, and why intentional design beats accidental noise.

Jun 1 • Aaron Tay

May 2026

[Hot Take] AI Academic Search and the Missing Middle of Literature Discovery

Is overly focusing on Undergraduate information literacy and evidence synthesis making us underestimate AI academic search tools?

May 25 • Aaron Tay

April 2026

Better AI Search Rubrics: Roles, Gates, and Retrieval Tests

Some suggestions on how to construct AI search evaluation frameworks

Apr 29 • Aaron Tay

AI academic search needs better frameworks for understanding and evaluation. These three librarian projects are a start

What it looks like when the AI search conversation and understanding gets serious

Apr 20 • Aaron Tay

From Fixed Search Workflows to Agentic Academic Search: Promise, Progress, and the Invisible Menu Problem

Undermind's Projects features gives a taste of the promise and challenges of managing agents by users

Apr 12 • Aaron Tay

March 2026

The Horseless Carriage of AI Search: Why Using LLMs to Generate Boolean Alone Is Likely of Little Benefit

Not exactly saying Boolean must die.....but... maybe less focus?

Mar 21 • Aaron Tay

February 2026

The agentic researcher - building custom, transparent and extensible workflows with Claude & MCP

Why generic LLM + academic MCP servers might be as good if not better than specalised Academic deep research

Feb 23 • Aaron Tay

Are AI Tools Killing Review Articles? Two Failure Modes Suggest Otherwise

arXiv recently restricted review article submissions in computer science, requiring journal or conference acceptance before deposit. They noted…

Feb 12 • Aaron Tay

January 2026

The Sycophancy Fallacy: Why You May be Worried About the Wrong Bias with Search

AI search tools aren't "agreeing" with users—they are retrieval systems. Confusing the two is a category error that obscures the real risks.

Jan 31 • Aaron Tay

Classifying the Ways LLMs Summarise in Academic Search

Understanding AI Summaries in EBSCO, ProQuest, and More

Jan 24 • Aaron Tay