Smart Library Assistant

Within the domain of Smart Library Assistant, our project aims to enhance the digital library using Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Researchers, students, and theologians often struggle to find precise answers to their questions amid the large volume of Christian literature books. Traditional methods require reading through large texts and archives, such as the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL), which, unless you know where to look, is a time-consuming process. Existing search tools lack contextual understanding and may return irrelevant results that do not answer the user's question.

Our solution employs Agentic RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), an advanced approach where Claude acts as an intelligent agent that dynamically adapts its retrieval strategy to each query's needs. Unlike traditional RAG that retrieves a fixed number of passages for every query, our agentic architecture allows the AI to: analyze the user's query to determine retrieval needs, formulate optimized search queries, decide whether retrieved results are sufficient or require additional searches, and synthesize information from multiple retrieval rounds. This approach significantly improves response quality and efficiency.

The key features of our system enhance the user experience and the accuracy of the results. First, it offers a domain-specific search, explicitly tailored to theological texts from CCEL and rigorously tested on 2,716 queries. Second, the system includes citation generation, with every response linking directly to the cited paragraph in the source material. Finally, we built a user-friendly chat interface featuring intuitive filters by author or work and support for follow-up questions within conversational context.