[Yulpub] Recommender services

[Bauer, Kathleen]

Hello,
The bX Recommender Service does sound very promising. Nisa Bakkalbasi had also sent to me word of a presentation by Nettie Legace of Ex Libris which she saw at the recent Electronic Resources and Libraries conference:

"Services recommending books - BibTip, LibraryThing, University of Huddersfield borrowing recommendations, and articles - bX from Ex Libris, PubMed, Synthese (CISTI) now exist in the academic context. JISC in the UK is sponsoring a major project, MOSAIC: "Making Our Shared Activity Information Count." This session will provide an overview of these recommendation systems, describe their different approaches to data mining, and discuss their role in improving information retrieval and user experience in a now nearly fully online scholarly information world."

When the Usability and Assessment Advisory Group looked at functionality needed for the next generation catalog, one of the things that we thought should be available would be ways to harness data about what patrons are using. Traditionally, scholars have used citation information to know what articles and books are influential in a field. Ejournals and services such as SFX record information about what journals and articles are being accessed: the data recorded are a potentially rich source of information that could also be used to identify key articles and journals, in a way that would be faster than citation information. This wouldn't replace citation information, but it would add to it. It's important to note that this information is also not linked to individual patrons-data are pooled, so that overall, not individual use, are being examined.

Scott Matheson and I have been looking at ways we might improve the library's interfaces by mining use data.   We've been concentrating on mining search log files from the web site. Based on the what we are hearing, we will add bX to the list of services to consider for making better use of data to improve interfaces and services.  If people hear of other promising services, please pass them along.

Thanks,
Katie





From: yulpub-bounces at mailman.yale.edu [mailto:yulpub-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Kramer, Stefan
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 4:07 PM
To: yulwww at mailman.yale.edu; yulpub at mailman.yale.edu
Subject: [Yulpub] Recommender services
Importance: Low

I attended a Library Journal-sponsored webinar about the bX Recommender Service<http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/bXOverview> today; it's supposedly based on the work of Bollen & Van de Sompel<http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/papers/jcdl06_accepted_version.pdf>.  It sounds quite intriguing ... has something like this been considered at YUL?  Other "recommendations based on other readers' choices" activities mentioned in the webinar, aside from the ever-cited Amazon.com example, included MOSAIC<http://sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic.html> and BibTip<http://www.bibtip.org/>.

-- Stefan


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