Ex Libris bX Suggests Articles

With the new bX article recommendation service from Ex Libris, students and scholars can now tap into the search patterns of their colleagues at more than 1500 institutions worldwide to get research suggestions.

Based on data collected from “a large-scale aggregation of link resolver usage logs,” bX offers a new kind of relevance factor derived from searching behaviors, in addition to traditional factors like keywords in the title and author fields.

The bX service differs explicitly from citation-based analysis services like those from Thomson Reuters and Elsevier. Citation data tracks only the very highest level of scholarly interaction after publication and doesn’t address the potentially much larger baseline of resource usage at the exploratory level. Putting it simply, Oren Beit-Arie, chief strategy officer for Ex Libris, told LJ at the 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver, “It’s yet another discovery tool to use.”

Ex Libris has performed analysis upon “tens of millions of transactions” recorded through its SFX link resolver service, said Beit-Arie, and is already beta testing bX at 16 institutions in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. It is expected to be commercially available in the second quarter of 2009 as a subscription service.