How to setup your archive

Welcome to Smart Library OS. This guide will take you from a list of books to a fully functioning, AI-powered reference assistant embedded on your own campus intranet.

Upload your records

Start by creating a workspace. From the Dashboard, you can populate your catalog in three ways:

Single ISBN: Just type in an ISBN. Best for quick additions or testing the system.
CSV Upload: Upload a spreadsheet where one of the columns is named isbn. We extract all ISBNs and queue them safely.
MARC 21 File: Have a legacy catalog export? Upload your raw .mrc file directly, and we parse the ISBNs automatically.

Wait for the AI ingestion

Once uploaded, items are placed in a background queue. This allows us to fetch rich metadata and use AI to deeply analyze each book without hitting external API rate limits.

What happens behind the scenes? For every ISBN, we fetch the title, author, and description from Google Books. We also attempt to pull academic abstracts and citation counts from Semantic Scholar. Then, Gemini AI reads all this metadata, writes a comprehensive summary, chunks it, and creates vector embeddings which are stored securely in PgVector.

Pending

Processing

Completed

Note: Depending on how many books you upload, this may take a few minutes. Monitor progress directly from your dashboard.

Embed the reference desk

Once your queue is processed, your AI is ready to answer questions about your catalog. You can test it out in the Sandbox, or embed it on your own website.

Adding the widget to your website

Navigate to the Intranet Integration section from your dashboard. You will be provided with a small snippet of HTML code:

HTML

<script 
  src="https://api.your-library.com/public/widget.js" 
  data-token="YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"
  data-frontend-url="https://your-library.com"
  defer
></script>

Copy this snippet and paste it right before the closing </body> tag on your website. A floating chat bubble will appear in the bottom right corner of your site, allowing your users to ask questions and instantly get AI-generated answers grounded strictly in your uploaded catalog.

Create your workspace