Talpa Search is an AI-powered library search tool developed by LibraryThing that allows users to find any book or media using true and authoritative bibliographic data. The tool combines large language models from Anthropic and OpenAI and authoritative book data from Bowker, Syndetics Unbound, and LibraryThing to validate every item against trustworthy bibliographic data. Talpa uses AI to parse and understand queries and answer them using traditional library data. Unlike other chatbots, Talpa does not “hallucinate” books that do not exist – everything is checked against their vast database of true and authoritative bibliographic data. Talpa Search works on library holdings and prioritizes items in a library’s collection in search results. The tool also allows users to configure it and get links and buttons for their site on the Syndetics Unbound Admin for free, for a limited time. Talpa Search is still an experiment and aims to collect feedback to improve its performance. It has some limitations, such as working best finding older titles and not being very reliable in finding recently-published ones. Talpa Search is a project of LibraryThing, and its name means mole in Latin. In summary, Talpa Search is an innovative and useful AI-powered library search tool that provides accurate and reliable bibliographic data for books and other media.
