ALA was a blast for bX!

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

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.