About the Librarian
How she works and what she can do.
The Reference Desk hosts an artificial-intelligence Librarian — an agent built on Anthropic's Claude language model that has been given access to the Library's content through a process called retrieval-augmented generation. When you ask her a question, three things happen in roughly five seconds. Your question is converted into a numerical representation and compared against more than a thousand chunks of indexed Library content. The eight most relevant chunks are pulled out and given to the language model as context. The model reads those chunks and composes an answer in plain language, citing the source URLs the chunks came from.
She has read, in her training context, every state dossier in the Atlas, every chapter of Schools of the Republic, The Eighth Anchor, and Who Steals from Children, every essay in the Sacred Compact, and a growing body of supporting material across the Library's other rooms. She does not have access to the open internet, to current news, to legal databases, or to any document outside the Library's own corpus.
The Librarian is a prototype. She will sometimes miss material that is in the Library — particularly when a question names two or more entities (states, eras, books) and her retrieval favors one over the others. She will sometimes phrase things in ways that read more chatty than the Library's institutional voice would prefer. She is being refined as we learn how she behaves in practice. Treat her answers as starting points for further reading, not as authoritative citations in their own right. Verify before you quote.
She declines to give legal advice, to predict the outcomes of pending court cases, to take political positions, or to engage with questions outside the school-trust scholarship the Library exists to publish. When she doesn't have the content to answer a question, she says so plainly and suggests where the visitor might look instead. That honesty is the most important behavior she has.
Access to the Librarian requires a free Library Card. Patrons can ask up to twenty-five questions per day. The Card is the way the Library knows you are a real person and lets us track the cost of running her at a sustainable level. The Library does not store the content of your questions in any way that identifies you personally.
