Library solutions provider Ex Libris Group, Israel, has announced that the bX recommender service is now available to libraries worldwide. Leveraging the networked research community, the bX service seeks to generate recommendations for scholarly articles based on the analysis of tens of millions of linking activities carried out by users at research institutions worldwide.
Libraries can use bX as a tool to offer users up-to-date, Web 2.0-type services. The recommendations are accessible through a library's SFX interface or through the interface of a local application of choice. Registration for bX, offered in a service model, is available online.
The new service is the result of years of collaborative research into advanced scholarly recommender systems conducted by the Ex Libris bX team and researchers Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on data captured through a large-scale aggregation of link-resolver usage logs, bX is an extension of the OpenURL framework. Twenty research institutions across North America, Europe, Australia, Africa and Asia have already contributed their usage data to bX and tested the service with Ex Libris over the past months through an early adopter programme.
