Now you can ask Community Care Inform questions and get summary answers pointing to relevant documents by using its internal AI enhanced search function.
Community Care Inform (both the adult and children's social care databases) have just launched a really helpful AI feature called "Ask Inform". Unlike general generative AI bots like CoPilot, Gemini, or ChatGPT, all of which attempt to digest the opinion of social media and the whole internet and then regurgitate statistically common patterns as if they were reliable facts, this internal query bot looks only within documents held within the database being consulted to produce its answers. It also links to the documents it has used to arrive at its summary answers, so you can go back and check what it is telling you.
From experience with other similar AI bots, the summaries produced may be a little bland and superficial, but if AI can just make finding relevant documents easier, that is often a huge boon when searching across complex, interdisciplinary bodies of literature, such as that informing social work.
As Ask Inform itself is only too eager to remind anyone using it, an AI summary is never definitive: you should in every instance read the source documents it finds for yourself and exercise your own professional judgement.
Just one small hurdle
For some reason, you have to click "Login" to use the new AI tool, even if you are already connected to the University computer network. We're not sure why. Perhaps the supplier decided every database should have it's Persian flaw.
As always, if something isn't working as expected or you are not getting the information you need, please reach out to us - Library staff are here to help!