Ex Libris Initiatives Blog

Continuing the collaboration – Our First URM Solution Review Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (Ex Libris) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:12:00 +0000

On September 22nd and 23rd, members of the Ex Libris URM team were joined by over a dozen staff from our [now FOUR!] Collaborative Development Partners for a Solution Review meeting on cataloging and metadata management in the URM [Unified Resource Management]. The three original Partners – Boston College, Princeton University and KU Leuven [Belgium] were recently joined by Purdue University, who signed on as a URM Partner only a few days prior to the scheduled meetings. Welcome Purdue! We held the meetings at the Firestone Library on the campus of Princeton University during two days of Indian summer.

The Solution Review is the first of two major milestone meetings Ex Libris will be having with Partners for each of the major “tracks” we have set up for URM: Cataloging/Metadata Management, Selection/Acquisitions, Fulfillment/Patron Management and Digital Content. The second series of milestone meetings will focus on Design Review for each of the tracks.

The primary goal of the two day meeting was for Ex Libris to review with the Partners our planned cataloging solution for URM, seeking input and feedback throughout. We encouraged and received wide participation by the staff from the Partner libraries as we discussed the functionality of cataloging and metadata management, reviewed early mock-ups and analyzed workflows. The packed agenda had major sessions on:

Current metadata practices and workflows
Community zone use cases
Import – both bulk and individual – of records
Searching capabilities
Editing of metadata and resource records
Authority control and related processing
Publishing and dissemination of records to external sources and environments
The role of Registries in managing metadata
Catalog sharing within the URM.

We kicked off the meetings with a high level review of our goals for metadata management in the URM:

Centralize descriptive metadata for all resources libraries manage—print, electronic, and digital
Reduce redundant work across many institutions
Improve metadata through joint upkeep
Streamline time-consuming processes
Create a platform for meaningful management of disparate descriptive standards.

To make this more concrete, we reviewed with the Partners what we see as some of the most important questions we need to answer across the board as we develop URM:

What are the problems you need to solve?
What do you want to be able to do MORE of?
What would you like to ELIMINATE?
What are the NEW things you want to be able to do NOW and in the FUTURE?

We revisited these questions, and their answers, throughout the course of the discussions, trying our best to stay true to the goals and objectives of the URM even as we discussed quite detailed points of functionality.

Thanks to John Larson, Dana Shavit-Moscovitz and Asaf Kline of Ex Libris for the hard work they did preparing for the meetings. Thanks to the staff at Princeton who made our stay there so pleasant, particularly the hastily arranged tour of the new Lewis Library designed by Frank Gehry. And, heartiest thanks to the staff from Princeton, Boston College, Leuven and Purdue who attended the meeting and contributed so openly.

Susan Stearns
Ex Libris

New service, new reactions

noreply@blogger.com (Nettie Lagace) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:29:00 +0000

I've been spending some time over the last few weeks calling up some of our bX customers and getting their reactions to the new scholarly article recommender service they've implemented for their users. These conversations are essential to me in my job as product manager, to better understand what changes we can/should make in bX, to make it the best it can be. Definitely, everyone finds bX a fascinating concept but often they are not really sure what will happen when they implement it.

While these conversations have not been terribly long, they've all managed to bring new and unique perspectives. Different comments for sure, but everyone is looking forward to the new school term starting next month (for most places) and introducing bX to their new and returning students.

In some institutions, the reactions so far have been mainly by librarians - I attribute that to the academic calendar right now. Several of these librarians have been impressed about how easy bX is to use - the recommendations simply appear and the user may click on them. "Anyone who is familiar with Amazon knows exactly what to do." This technique is observed by the librarians to be quite intuitive and useful, particularly for new users, unfamiliar with library interfaces (and in some cases what they are actually looking for!).

One library created a small feedback form specifically for bX - it appears just above their recommendation section on the SFX menu. They passed on some feedback from PhD users (researching through the summer, ugh...) which made me smile from ear to ear for the rest of the day: "this is fabulous" came from one; another wrote a bit more: "I found exactly what I wanted. I've already found even more relevant articles in 10 minutes than I've found in the last 10 months using more traditional methods of research." Wow!

Even though bX is focused on maximizing the implicit feedback of end users (through use of SFX usage statistics), you just can't beat the explicit feedback, can you!? We can't wait for the autumn, when more students can use this.

ALA was a blast for bX!

noreply@blogger.com (Nettie Lagace) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:20:00 +0000

Last week, we proudly presented the new bX scholarly recommender service to customers and prospects at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual conference in Chicago. This was the first ALA for bX, now that it's out of development and in production at many libraries, so it was a very exciting time for all Ex Libris staff involved, to be able to show it, talk about it "for real," and inform those interested that it's immediately available.

There was a lot of interest at the Ex Libris booth -- Loralynne Evans, our North American marketing manager, had made up colorful badges in order to prompt questions, and they worked! We showed many live demos of the bX service at the booth, and even had opportunities to chat about it while standing in line for lunch at the Au Bon Pain downstairs in the convention center.

Marshall Breeding, noted library industry journalist, wrote about bX for the next issue of "Smart Libraries Newsletter." Thanks to the agreement of ALA TechSource, we were able to print copies of this article for distribution at the booth.

In addition to the booth demos, we also held a separate session, dedicated to bX, in the Chicago Hilton on Sunday morning. Many dozens of customers and prospects found their way to the "basement ballroom" in order to hear a three-part presentation which featured Bob Gerrity from Boston College and Oren Beit-Arie and me from Ex Libris.

Oren was the set-up man: he talked about the importance of user contribution in online environments; changes going on in scholarly communication; how recommender systems in general enhance discovery processes; how bX recommendations are generated and how we are really just at the beginning of more intelligent applications of aggregate usage data.

Bob, of course, spoke from the library point of view; he described Boston College's approach to its library users and how the staff fosters a willingness to experiment, as well as how the BC librarians feel that library contribution of data to aggregate data sets is important for improvement of services. He also described BC's participation in the bX alpha testing program earlier this year and how its (picky! detail-oriented!) subject librarians contributed to the test and verified quality of recommendations.

I showed screenshots and live demos of the service from various bX customer libraries as well as the steps for the registration process. Here's just a few...
Aalborg University
Boston College
Stellenbosch University
University of Calgary

Audience members were enthused and peppered us with questions covering all aspects of the system; many indicated an intention to buy in time for the new school term which is fast approaching.

We are all looking forward to continuing bX on its worldly way -- over 100 sites from Australia to China to USA to Finland to Israel to Canada to South Africa (15 countries so far) have signed up to license or trial the service since its launch!

Primo Central—more data for discovery, better service to end users, less hassle for libraries

noreply@blogger.com (Ex Libris) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:21:00 +0000

We are very happy to announce today the introduction of a new Primo component, Primo Central. Primo Central indexes scholarly materials such as articles and e-books provided by publishers and aggregators, and is seamlessly integrated into local Primo systems. Primo Central will be managed by Ex Libris as a service available to all Primo customers.

Primo is designed from the outset as a tool for libraries and librarians, focusing on the uniqueness of each library and the particular way that libraries make information discovery work for their communities of users. To support the needs of hundreds of different libraries and the varying ways in which information providers enable their data, Primo offers a range of search technologies including ‘native’ search of local and remote Primo indexes and metasearch of licensed resources. Primo Central complements the Primo searching capabilities by enabling a library to offer fast, effective, and seamless access to the entire library offering. With Primo Central, users will be able to transparently search in locally-managed collections and global e-content with the search results blended into a single relevance-ranked list. Primo enables libraries to leverage the power of the network and the community through this inclusion of shared content, while maintaining the freedom to achieve superior results for their users in the way best for them--all of this with little, if any, effort by the library.

E-content in Primo Central can be configured locally to determine the search scope, restricting this to subscribed resources only, or broadening this to extend beyond the library’s collection, particularly where pay-per-view options may enable users to reach the requested material. Similarly, search results can be filtered to show only those results for which full-text is available to the user. Real-time availability is ‘built-in’.

Ex Libris will be working with library partners on the ongoing development of Primo Central which will be in beta release at the end of 2009. For those of you attending the upcoming ALA Conference in Chicago, don't forget to attend the Primo presentation or see a preview of Primo Central at the Ex Libris booth #1015.

To find out more about Primo Central, visit the Ex Libris Website.

How does your digital preservation initiative compare?

noreply@blogger.com (mike thuman) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:17:00 +0000

Most libraries and archives who are learning about, planning or implementing a digital preservation initiative pause, at least once in awhile, to wonder; how do they compare to their peers? Are they doing better, worse; are they covering all the essential points? We’ve recently begun conducting a series of regional symposia on Digital Preservation that help in this regard. Our goal in doing this is to help libraries and archives understand the needs, challenges and possibilities surrounding digital preservation and to do so in a forum where peers can freely share information. The results have been interesting and insightful.

At a high level, the question being asked by all is: How will we guarantee the authenticity and accessibility of the terabytes and now petabytes of all of the digital content we are now creating? Steve Knight of the National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ), the lead speaker at one symposium, discussed how NLNZ had gone though all of the phases of documenting the business requirements, analyzing “build versus buy” strategies, explaining and positioning open source/proprietary/open platform solutions to NLNZ directors, training the organization on preservation standards, and through a partnership with Ex Libris, going live with Rosetta - a workflow-based digital preservation infrastructure that provides both access and long-term preservation.

Also of interest was the fact that half of the attendees believed that digital preservation is really just preservation dealing with yet another new information format. (See our previous blog post on this subject at http://commentary.exlibrisgroup.com/2009/05/libraries-choosing-to-end-preservation.html ). Digital preservation (or the ability to guarantee long term access to digital content) is a new discipline in many ways and one that comes with new questions. For instance: a) how do we create a digital preservation policy? b) how do we plan for digital preservation? c) how do we build the business case? d) how do we orchestrate a program and eventually go live with a workflow based solution? During the symposium, answers were discussed among attendees, including such things as best-practices, Web-based resources that exist, and actual experiences.

On the next topic of digital preservation standards, polling results showed that although most institutions are planning to use and follow the OAIS (Open Archival Information Systems) reference model, few had actually been formally trained in OAIS. One could spend days reading the OAIS documentation, but not find answers on how to implement a digital preservation infrastructure, how to build the policy, or how to plan each and every critical step. The good news is that there are now on-site and Web-based training classes ranging from 1 day to multi-day, interactive and/or workshop sessions (for additional information on training, please contact your local Ex Libris office.

The next question showed that nearly all libraries are digitizing and nearly everyone is putting content somewhere, most in some type of repository. Digitization is viewed as a “socially acceptable” way of preserving documents that define your institution’s reputation or possibly defend and protect your institution from legal and regulatory issues. Of course this method of preservation does not address content that is born-digital or the processes needed to authenticate and render all content in the coming decades.

The final polling question showed that many of us are still “flying under the radar” in our respective institutions. Despite all of the hard work and planning going on in the area of digital preservation, only a few of the symposium attendees could say that digital preservation was a stated priority of the senior management in their institution. Although the poll in our symposium showed about half of the attendees had already built or could build a business case for digital preservation, there was only one participant that responded positively to the question; does a written digital preservation policy exist in your institution? It is clear to us all that we need to learn how to express the need for digital preservation as a solid business case.

These symposiums have shown that there is a lot more work for all of us to do in making digital preservation a priority that will get the resources it needs. While some institutions are further along than others, most are just at the beginning stages.

How does your digital preservation initiative compare?

On community and collaboration

noreply@blogger.com (Susan S) — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:14:00 +0000

One of the concepts that is integral to the URM project here at Ex Libris is that of integrating new models for community and collaboration. Libraries have traditionally been well-grounded in collaboration: reciprocal borrowing of many flavors has existed for decades; consortia of various types have evolved to support resource sharing and to facilitate joint purchasing, particularly of e-resources. Collaboration models have expanded more recently to address the strain on libraries’ physical space through shared off-side storage repositories. And a number of libraries are putting renewed focus on expanding collaboration between libraries and museums/archives, supported by increased federal funding.

Today’s libraries are looking even more closely at extending and expanding collaborative efforts and at new ways of creating and expanding the concept of community within and across their services. We are seeing this already in the implementation of Primo as customers look to engage more closely with users, opening up tagging and reviews for user-contributed content, and focusing on the communities where users are: integrating Primo content on Facebook and other discovery spaces as well as providing apps for the iPhone and other mobile devices.

And, as Jenny Walker has described in other postings, the new bX Recommender Service from Ex Libris, which mines information from customer contributed SFX usage logs, further expands the “power of the networked scholarly community”.

As we develop the URM, we continually look to ways that community and collaboration should be integrated. This starts, of course, with the collaboration we do within the library community. Well before we wrote the first requirements documents or code, Ex Libris was engaging with customers and the community at large. Our interviews with libraries throughout the world and our discussions with customers in small groups have informed URM in more ways than we can count. We don’t always agree of course and we cannot always accommodate all of the good ideas. But, we are listening and looking to work in close collaboration with the community as we develop URM.

We are interested in hearing from you – what are the types of support for collaboration and community you believe are required of a next generation framework such as URM?

Susan

A Productive -- and Exciting -- ELUNA

kathryn.harnish@exlibrisgroup.com (Kathryn Harnish) — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:09:00 +0000

ELUNA 2009 has almost come and gone – the meeting always seems to go so quickly, probably because I keep so busy over the three days with interesting conversations about what’s happening at Ex Libris and in libraries that use our solutions.

This conference was no exception, especially since we’ve been sharing lots more about our URM plans to very positive response. We kicked the URM “thread” of the conference off with Oren Beit-Arie’s keynote address, which situated the changing world of libraries in the larger context of academic trends. Oren addressed the needs for collaboration within and outside of the library environment, focusing on the opportunities to improve traditional activities, explore “transitional” functionality, and ultimately, to provide transformational services. Tying these to “real-life” examples of URM features, Oren provided a great context for URM discussions throughout the meeting. (For some additional perspective by a conference-goer, check out Simon Bendall’s blog post on the keynote.)

My colleagues, Nettie Lagace and Susan Stearns, and I also had the opportunity to host “subject matter” review sessions throughout the conference. We were pleased to show more details about our URM plans (and even prototypes) in a number of areas – monographic acquisitions, metadata management, electronic resource management, fulfillment services, and more. We were gratified by the level of interest in these sessions – they were all filled to capacity – and happy to get very thoughtful feedback on our work to date. If you weren’t able to attend ELUNA or one of these sessions, never fear – we’ll be offering lots of opportunities to check out our plans and offer your thoughts as our efforts continue. You’ll also see some follow-up to some of the discussions that were initiated in these sessions in the coming weeks here on the blog.

We’re just about to head off for home – only a few more sessions to go, and ELUNA will wrap up for another year. In addition to my suitcase, I’ll be taking home lots of great ideas to incorporate into our thinking, amazing energy from the positive responses to our URM plans, and reinforcement that our vision for next-generation library services will support libraries in both the traditional and transformative ways necessary for future success.

Until next time,

Kathryn

bX is launched. The next 'killer app’?

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:36:00 +0000

As some of you already know, this week we launched the bX scholarly article recommender service in a public beta mode. Those Ex Libris customers attending the ELUNA user group meeting in Richmond this week may already have seen one of the bX demos and share the sentiments of one twitterer who, after seeing a demo described bX as ”It's Amazon meets JSTOR”, and further urged others to see this in their comment ”Definitely worth checking out.” This follows the recent posting to the SFX listserv by David Walker of CalState libraries ” The new bX service has a real potential to be the next killer app -- SFX was the last killer app, in case you were wondering ;-)” We at Ex Libris are really excited about this, and look forward to many libraries joining the bX community.

For the past several months we have been working with twenty prestigious institutions from around the world that have contributed their SFX usage logs and have worked with us in the testing and further development of this service. This really cool service is now available to all libraries everywhere.

To find out more about the bX service and to subscribe to bX, visit the Ex Libris Web site. Current SFX users can subscribe online via SFXAdmin.

New Framework for a Changing World

kathryn.harnish@exlibrisgroup.com (Kathryn Harnish) — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:32:00 +0000

In my role as the Director of URM Product Management, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with librarians about the changes afoot in the industry – and about the kinds of back-office managmeent systems that will be necessary for “next-generation libraries”. It’s been an exciting and informative process – at a time of unprecedented change, I’ve seen many examples of how our community is responding with creativity, innovation, and enthusiasm.

In these discussions, I’ve had the opportunity to share Ex Libris’s vision for a next-generation library services framework, which Oren introduced in a previous post, and the URM conceptual model in particular. The model illustrates many of the ways in which the framework is designed to efficiently and effectively manage the full lifecycle of all types of resources, regardless of format or acquisition method, at significantly lower costs than libraries incur today. We’ve recently published a white paper on our URM Resource Center that provides some additional details about the URM, and I’d encourage anyone with an interest in our plans for Unified Resource Management to check this out. In future posts, we’ll share more details about specific aspects of the framework – if a particular aspect of the model piques your interest, let me know and we’ll talk about it here!

As many of you know, Ex Libris has been talking with the library community about URM for quite awhile – formally at user group meetings (including this week in Richmond, Virginia), ALA, and other conferences, and research interviews; informally through our everyday conversations with staff at Ex Libris libraries. Moving forward in the design and development of next-generation services, we’ll use this blog and other channels to continue this process. So, to kick things off:

At the conclusion of the white paper, we note that the changing needs of libraries demand a new framework to support not just new ways of doing today’s tasks, but to enable new kinds of library services and functions. We suggest some emerging opportunities in the white paper, but would also like to invite you to share thoughts about the kinds of new activities on your library’s agenda and the impact these things will have on your current library practices. Specifically:

How do you see the role of the library in your particular institution changing in the next five years?
What new initiatives and services do you anticipate offering to your community as a result of these changes?

I’m eager to hear what’s on your mind and look forward to continuing conversations on this topic!

Until next time,

Kathryn

On the air. On the ground.

noreply@blogger.com (oren beit-arie) — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:57:00 +0000

Next week, Ex Libris’s North American user group, ELUNA, will convene in Richmond, Virginia, where I’ve been asked to give a keynote session on trends affecting next-generation library services and our plans in this realm. This will be a great opportunity to reflect on the transformational change facing not just libraries, but academia as a whole – and to posit some specific ideas about how Ex Libris can bring new solutions to bear in this environment. As I’ve prepared for this session, I’ve taken some time to read again a number of reports on this topic – No Brief Candle, the 2009 EDUCASE/NMC Horizon Report, ARL/CNI’s “Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future” forum, and more – which reinforce once again that it’s no longer a question of whether change is necessary, but how and what we, as a community, must do to achieve that change.

This is a question for which Ex Libris has actively been seeking answers. For several years, we’ve been engaged with the library community and other stakeholders to understand the future role of the academic and research libraries and to respond with solutions that support the processes, services, and data required for that future. In doing so, we’ve worked hard to balance future needs with current requirements, making it possible for libraries to make the necessary revolution in an evolutionary way. Ex Libris quickly understood that, in order to support this transition, libraries needed a new framework, a new model for library services that focuses on the emerging trends and needs of the future while continuing to address the needs of today. As a result, our vision includes three main components: User Services, Management Services, and Transformational Services that take libraries beyond their traditional roles.

Our first stage in the development of new library solutions was Primo, a unified resource discovery and delivery (URD²) platform introduced in 2007. With Primo, we took a critical step in defining the library systems architecture of the future by decoupling the user experience from back-end management of resources. This offers tremendous flexibility in how libraries expose the richness of their collections while also simplifying the discovery process for both local and remote resources. Primo represents an important milestone in a library’s evolution by providing next-generation services to the library’s users.

Now, we are in the process of revolutionizing the library’s administrative, back-office management of all assets -- regardless of their format, type and acquisition method -- with our Unified Resource Management (URM) framework. As a result of many conversations with librarians around the world, we know that the changing environment demands tools that support both “doing things differently” as well as “doing different things”. The URM provides the open and extensible platform necessary to help your library meet current, emerging, and future needs for library management.

Finally, I feel strongly that Ex Libris’s job will not be complete if we don’t expand our focus beyond traditional library tasks; we must continue to support innovation within and transformation of libraries by delivering services that will respond to the core mission of their parent organizations. Already, you can see clear steps we’ve take to develop new solutions in this domain: Rosetta, our digital preservation platform; bX; and more to come.

For those of you headed to ELUNA, I look forward to seeing you – and continuing these discussions – next week. But we also want to take advantage of this new blog environment to broaden the conversation, to share thoughts and to hear your ideas, about next-generation library services. These interesting times present a great opportunity to define and build our future – a future that requires active collaboration between all of the stakeholders in our community for success.

The OpenURL framework. Again.

noreply@blogger.com (oren beit-arie) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:58:00 +0000

In one of my recent bX talks, I presented the idea that bX represents a new component of the OpenURL framework. I would like to explain this a bit further.

bX relates to the OpenURL framework in a number of ways:

1. The bX repository is an aggregate of OpenURL-based usage data.

In bX, we collect usage data from multiple OpenURL link resolvers (starting with SFX). As each of these link resolver reflects activities of users in multiple information systems/environments, in effect, bX creates a “supper aggregation” of aggregated usage data.

2. Usage data transported to the bX is encoded in an OpenURL context-object format.

bX harvests (using OAI-PMH) usage data which is encoded as ContextObjects (based on the OpenURL standard). It was important for us to ensure that usage-data that feeds into bX will be designed in a way that will enable maximum participation and interoperability, hence bX’s use of the OpenURL and the OAI-PMH standards. This means that many other information resources and link servers (other than SFX) could relatively easily participate in the bX framework.

3. The bX query protocol uses the OpenURL standard.

Any client application can send an OpenURL request to bX in order to receive a list of recommendations. The ContextObject describes the article for which recommendations are requested. bX can respond in a range of XML formats (including RSS and ATOM feeds). Since the bX reflects usage patterns of multiple scholarly information environments, the articles recommended by bX will include articles from other content systems, not just the one from which the bX recommendation request was received.

Why is this important?

As we know all too well, the scholarly information space is highly distributed, with resources scattered across multiple databases, journals, article repositories, etc. - most of them vendor-controlled.

The OpenURL framework, and more specifically link resolvers such as SFX, address this issue by offering interoperability across disparate information sources. OpenURL enables the information-seeking user to traverse a universe of resources scattered across multiple platforms, systems, and vendors - in a manner that is completely agnostic to any proprietary constraints.

In effect, bX, just like SFX, presents relations between scholarly items that transcend the boundaries of their business provision. bX and SFX can both be considered as ‘overlay’ services.

bX and the Open Platform Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:19:00 +0000

Paula Hane , Information Today, Inc.'s news bureau chief and editor of NewsBreaks. writes about bX in her recent article titled ‘Ex Libris Advances Its Open Platform Strategy’ . In this same article – as the title suggests – she also talks about the Ex Libris Open Platform Program and the company’s commitment to openness as a core value.

In line with this strategy of openness, bX provides an API to enable local applications to interact with the bX server and retrieve article recommendations. Results can be returned in XML, RSS and Atom formats as preferred. The use of the bX API has already been demonstrated in a test mode by David Walker at California State University, a bX test partner. See example below showing the Xerxes interface with bX recommendations (Related Articles) embedded in the interface. Xerxes is a system developed by David Walker that leverages the Metalib X-Server, WorldCat API and other web services to create a custom search-and-link library portal.

bX at the Bielefeld conference

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 13:37:00 +0000

I read with great interest a blog posting reporting on Herbert Van de Sompel’s closing keynote speech at the 9th International Bielefeld Conference in Germany this week. The posting is entitled ‘Herbert’s Adventures in Linking’ and reports on Herbert’s review of the last 10 years of key initiatives in which he has been involved; and the resulting standards that have emerged.

Unfortunately despite the 20 minutes time extension for his presentation, Herbert did not manage to cover his work on bX, though I am assured the audience saw the slides as Herbert flipped through these! I hope that those of you attending the Bielefeld conference did manage to hear my colleague, Axel Katsche, present on bX.

bX is very much part of an Ex Libris journey (and an adventure) that started in the late 1990’s with the Ghent University Executive Lounge and Herbert’s work to link SilverPlatter databases to the Aleph OPAC. In 2000, Ex Libris acquired the SFX linking technology from Ghent University, and created the SFX product as we know it today and now installed in over 1700 sites. We also played a key role together with Herbert in the development of the OpenURL framework and its submission to NISO as a potential standard. The OpenURL became a NISO standard in 2004. All this in turn laid down the infrastructure for bX, the scholarly recommender service based on the mining of the SFX/OpenURL usage logs.

bX has already collected link resolver usage data from institutions around the world based on many years of research activity at those institutions resulting in millions of transactions. The bX scholarly recommender services will be just the start of a range of potential services derived from this data.

Ex Libris Announces bX: Usage-Based Scholarly Recommendation Service

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Walker) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 20:44:00 +0000

We are very excited to announce bX -- a first-of-its-kind service to provide library users with article-level recommendations based on collective usage data amassed from research communities around the world.

bX is the result of years of research and collaboration into advanced scholarly recommender systems conducted by leading researchers Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The bX service derives its recommendations from the analysis of tens of millions of transactions performed by users from research institutions worldwide and captured through a large-scale aggregation of link resolver usage logs. Based on open interoperability standards such as OpenURL and OAI-PMH, bX can be tightly integrated into a library’s existing user environment.

Sixteen institutions in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia have begun testing bX and are working with Ex Libris to ready the service for public launch. Early users of bX have expressed high level of enthusiasm with the service and its premises.

Marvin Pollard of the California State University consortium said: “We view this service as an extremely important piece of the triangle of the discovery/ recommendation/ fulfillment process. This is the next ‘killer app‘ from Ex Libris and follows on the success of SFX. Just as SFX has become an essential, powerful tool in connecting our researchers to the resources they need, we are confident that bX will provide our users with the recommendations they need to support their research.”

Professor Jiang Airong of Tsinghua University Library in Beijing commented that “in today’s research environment, which is characterized by exponential growth in the volume of online resources, new tools for discovery are required, as well as new methods for evaluating scholarly material. The bX recommender service is a valuable first step for our users.”

Bob Gerrity of Boston College expressed his appreciation for the “great opportunity provided for the library to participate in the building of new, value-added services based on the analysis of user behavior. We see tremendous potential in the role of recommender services such as bX in the discovery process.”

Further commenting on the collaborative nature of the project, Sue Clarke of Australia’s Monash University noted that “the bX service is a good example of how Ex Libris is working with customers to shape and develop future directions in which the system learns from users’ searching patterns.”

“bX represents an important step toward a range of new services that leverage the collective input of the vast scholarly community as well as widely deployed library tools,” said Oren Beit-Arie, chief strategy officer of Ex Libris Group. “The bX journey started with the introduction of the OpenURL framework 10 years ago and followed with SFX, which has become the most commonly used OpenURL link resolver. Now bX mines the wealth of information contained in the usage logs of link resolvers such as SFX for the benefit of users and librarians alike. We are very excited to be working in collaboration with librarians and researchers on this important and ground-breaking library service.”

ALA seminar announced: Supercharge Your Researchers with Recommendations for Scholarly Articles

noreply@blogger.com (Eran Livneh) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:30:00 +0000

If you are attending the ALA Midwinter meeting, you have a unique opportunity to find out about an exciting new service coming soon from Ex Libris. The bX Recommender taps into the power of the networked scholarly community to generate recommendations for scholarly articles based on article usage.

The session will be led by Oren Beit-Arie and Jenny Walker, Ex Libris.

Saturday, January 24
10:30 a.m. - Noon
Hyatt Regency Hotel, Capitol Ballroom 5/6

Register online to attend.