Oren Beit-Arie
Chief Strategy Officer
Ex Libris Group
bX is a new initiative at Ex Libris that aims at leveraging the usage information gathered by link resolvers (such as the Ex Libris SFX® link resolver) to provide services that assist users in discovering items of potential interest from a growing information universe. Because link resolvers record article usage patterns across multiple resources of a digital library, the resolvers’ logs are highly representative of the activities and preferences of the population served by the link resolver. The federation of usage logs across multiple institutions represents a larger and more global user community, and enables the generation of a range of interesting services. The bX recommender service for scholarly articles, based on research by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is one such service. The initial bX research was presented at the Fall 2005 Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) meeting by Van de Sompel and Oren Beit-Arie. This project briefing will provide an update on bX and will discuss the closed beta test with 17 research libraries around the world that have also contributed large volumes of usage data. The session will include feedback gathered from these sites, all of which share the desire to enhance the discovery experiences for their users.
Handout (MS Word)
