Leveraging the power of knowledge hidden in millions of transactions
Used by thousands of libraries all over the world, link resolvers such as Ex Libris SFX record article usage patterns that are highly representative of user activities and preferences.
Mining information from usage logs of link resolvers across a large number of institutions, bX taps into the knowledge hidden in these transactions to generate a representation of user preferences across the global scholar community.
Acquired by Ex Libris from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, bX is based on years of research work led by renowned LANL’s researchers Johan Bollen and Herbert Van der Sompel. For more background information see
bX uses industry standards such as the OpenURL context-object and the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) in the creation and processing of the bX data repository.
Click here for additional information on contributing usage data
Some Cool Stuff
What is really cool is that the link resolver usage data collected for the bX recommender can be mined to give insights into the information seeking behaviors of the scholarly community—both at a local and a global level. For example below are some interesting graphs taken from
the research article by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel.
The graphs illustrate usage trends during the course of a day and during the course of a year at a particular institution:
Usage by Time of Day
Usage by Date
The bX team continues to work towards the introduction of more options and services, beyond the bX recommender.
