Johan Bollen
Digital Library, Research & Prototyping Team
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Oren Beit-Arie
Chief Strategy Officer
Ex Libris Group
Herbert Van de Sompel
Technical Staff Member, Resarch Library
Los Alamos National Laboratory
The bX project aims at unleashing the power of usage information that is recorded on an ongoing basis by OpenURL-compliant linking servers. The project is a collaboration between the Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Ex Libris.
The bX project aims at unleashing the power of usage information that is recorded on an ongoing basis by OpenURL-compliant linking servers. The project is a collaboration between the Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Ex Libris.
Interesting things can be done with usage information that has been recorded for a specific information source from a digital library. The starting point of the bX project is that even more interesting things can be done with usage information that has been recorded by a linking server, because such a server can record activities across multiple OpenURL-enabled information sources of a specific digital library environment. As such, logs from a linking server are highly representative of the activities and preferences of a user population that requests services from that specific linking server. The bX project further recognizes that even more interesting things can be done with usage logs that are federated across multiple linking servers. Indeed, as a federation of linking servers grows in size, the federated usage log database becomes increasingly representative of the activities of the global scholarly user base.
The bX project currently focuses on two applications of linking server logs, at both the local and the federated level:
• Recommender services: A tool driven by usage information to help users discover related information.
• Metrics services: A toolset for mining usage information in order to obtain a variety of metrics. Certain metrics may be used to inform collection development decisions. The bX project, however, takes special interest in the derivation of metrics that could function as new indicators of scholarly quality.
The Project Briefing will discuss the standards-based architecture of the system that is under development, in addition to the concepts that underlie the Recommender and Metrics services. Furthermore, working prototypes of both services will be demonstrated.
Handout Page 1 (PDF)
Handout Page 2 (PDF)
