Nettie Lagace
Product Manager
Ex Libris
Carl Grant
Chief Librarian
Ex Libris
Jeff Huestis
Associate Dean for Technology
Washington University
Marvin Pollard
Manager of Systemwide Digital Library Services
California State University, Office of the Chancellor
bX, the scholarly recommender service from Ex Libris, based on the research of Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is an example of how discovery processes in online libraries and, indeed, librarianship can be substantively extended in the future. As the richness of patron-to-librarian reference interviews have all but disappeared in many environments, bX shows how these types of one-on-one searching activities can be used to collect pattern and user behavior information (potentially including clickstreams, items utilization & actions taken), then augment these large-scale collections of usage data with algorithmic computation, data mining, and statistical analysis to form the basis of automated, social user services that will support a more scalable version of librarianship — deployable across the Web with proven benefits for end users. This session will examine some specific examples showing how some of the concepts employed in bX could be extended and used to create and support this new vision of librarianship and how new measurements for end-user satisfaction and success can be found.
http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/bXOverview
Presentation (MS Word)