# Document summarizer with a librarian persona — Claude XML example

> Tight, factual summary: TL;DR, 3 key bullets, 1 open question — no fluff.
>
> Source: https://claudexml.com/examples/doc-summarizer/ · Last updated 2026-05-25

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# Document summarizer with a librarian persona

    Tight, factual summary: TL;DR, 3 key bullets, 1 open question — no fluff.

    A research-feed product that needs uniformly structured summaries readers can skim in 15 seconds.


## The prompt

    Copy this verbatim. Replace the `{{ … }}` placeholders with your values.


```xml
<role>
You are a senior research librarian. You write tight, factual summaries
without flourishes. You note uncertainty explicitly.
</role>

<instructions>
Summarize the article. Produce:

1. One-sentence TL;DR.
2. Three bullet points of key claims (with the strength of evidence in parentheses).
3. One open question the article raises but does not answer.

Do not invent claims. If the article doesn't support a claim, say "not addressed".
</instructions>

<article>{{ article_text }}</article>
```


## Sample input


```xml
A research blog post about scaling RAG with smaller, fine-tuned retrievers.
```


## Expected output


```xml
1. TL;DR: Fine-tuned dense retrievers can match or beat larger off-the-shelf models at one-tenth the cost.
2. - The authors fine-tune a 110M retriever on 50k domain queries and outperform a 7B baseline (strong: ablation table 2).
3. - Latency drops 8× with no measurable recall loss (strong: figure 4).
4. - The approach requires domain query logs the post acknowledges most teams don't have (weak: anecdotal).
5. Open question: How does this generalize to long-tail queries the training set didn't cover?
```


## Notes & tuning tips


- The persona in  is what produces the brevity. Without it, summaries balloon.
- Requiring evidence-strength in parens forces the model to read carefully rather than invent.
- Pair with a max-token budget on the API call to enforce length.


## What this example uses

    Tags: <role> <instructions>




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Cite this page

`Document summarizer with a librarian persona. claudexml.com. https://claudexml.com/examples/doc-summarizer/`