SFX Product Update
Christine Stohn
SFX Product Manager, Ex Libris
SFX version 3 (what we have):
The May 09 revision brings 3 big things:
-RSI (Rapid Service Indicator API) - replaces the JSI (Journal Subscription Index API). It's most relevant for Primo and Metalib customers, since it provides FT availability info for external systems (we don't need this feature now, but we may in the future). Features of the new API include increased accuracy, matching on other attributes in addition to ISSN, and a "Maybe" response that SFX uses when it finds more than one match to a query.
-bX (see also the post dedicated to bX)
-Support for multiple occurrances of rft.au - this sounds like Greek but is a good thing; hopefully it will address SFX's problems with transmitting multiple authors of an article along with other citation information, for example, into a RefWorks account.
Upcoming later this year for SFX version 3:
-MARCit! Customization Manager (July or August) - allows MARCit! customers to add and run editing rules for record sets, (hopefully) eliminating the need to edit records with an external program like MarcEdit.
Completed and upcoming features for the CRM:
-"Me too" function to second requests for new targets/objects/sources made by other SFX customers. They are also working with the ELUNA SFX Product Group on a voting system for ELUNA members.
-A list of vendors that provide automatic updates to Ex Libris
-A working list of new and considered targets will be available soon; they are working toward releasing a working list of targets upcoming in a KB update ~30 days in advance of the update.
In the works for SFX version 4 (a major product development):
-More frequent KB updates
-Quick, seamless injections of updated data for immediate changes
-Faster turnaround on enhancement requests
The planned release date for SFX 4 is first half of 2010. Attendees were reassured that the program's open-source foundation (MySQL) will not change, but that it will be upgraded to MySQL 5.
About bX:
Uses user contributions and user behaviors to create recommendations for scholarly articles. Users contribute information to a system in two ways: explicitly; by tagging items, writing reviews, etc; and implicitly; clicking and using materials in a particular way that can be captured by a system (also called a clickstream). bX uses implicit contributions of users of many libraries' SFX installations to create recommendations. In detailed terms, bX harvests anonymized, encrypted usage logfiles from the SFX link resolvers of customers who choose to participate in harvesting, and then builds a huge database of the article relationships it finds within that usage data. Obviously, the more customers who participate in harvesting, the larger the cumulative data set and the more refined the recommendations. Because recommendations are based on article relationships, not on citation sources, the recommendations for a given article will be the same no matter where the user clicks the SFX button.
Recommendations appear as links at the bottom of the SFX Services Menu, and usage data is available on how often users click those article recommendations. The appearance of the Recommendations section is customizable using the same SFX Admin features that control the Simplified Template.
Customers have 2 subscription options: as contributors (making usage logs available for harvest) or as users (only receiving recommendations). Pricing is the same for both options.
The service is based on research by Johan Bollen and Herbert Van de Sompel at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Their article on the research and algorithms behind bX is available for download.
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