Moderator: Mandy Stewart, Resource Discovery Projects Manager, British Library
Gillad Gal, Director of Product Management, Discovery and Delivery Solutions, Ex Libris
I will start with a general view of some of the strategies which we are covering. Customers are becoming more aware of the importance of an integrated product rather than different modules.
Primo 4.0 was released in June 2012 and there are already hundreds of institutions who use it. It was a smooth release and the number of users speaks for itself, five years after we started working on it.
Most of the discovery customers are going SaaS (software as a service) and a multiteancy solution (for example Direct and TotalCare, MetaLib+, Primo Centra and bx or Consortia). The way we do SaaS is not that everything is managed by the centre, some can be spread to institutional staff but the main administration is done centrally, that is cleaning old logs, backups and upgrading operating systems. We see a future in SaaS, without saying that's the only option, we still support hybrid solutions with or without a SaaS component.
We believe in Open Access and as a content-neutral software vendor, we are strongly committed to supporting open access. Hybrid journals is where you have subscriptions as well as articles open to everyone. The highly appreciated journals now often allow some form of open access but the problem is that you have no way of knowing which article is available to whom. We have now made open access articles in hybrid journals available to Primo customers by marking them specifically. So for example the Oxford Journals Open Access is activated by default.
If you subscribe to green Open Access for Institutional repositories, you filter by availability. We want to promote discoverability by making institutional research globally available. So we are harvesting institutional repositories' content, starting with the most distinguished ones. So in Primo Central backend you can enter details of your institutional repository, add the url and agree to terms and conditions (to ensure the data is used in the right way).
We have been developing bx (article recommender) since 2009 and in 2012 we made it available to mobile devices. In 2013 we will be developing the metrics, to show the most and least used articles for example.
We also believe in granularity, because users are interested in article, chapter or at the most book level, rather than journal or database. So we are working on creating efficient links to articles and managing the granular level. We want a fast direct access to full content with a high success rate with pre-checked links.
We also work on the basis of the concept of Provisioning, which is the process of preparing and equipping a network to allow it to provide (new) services to its users. It is easy to activate Primo Central because of this concept. "Provisioning often appears in the ocntext of virtualisation, orchestration, utility computing, cloud computing and open configuration concepts and projects" (wikipedia). We believe we can industrialise this and we will be doing this to your benefit.
A/B testing is a way of representing the fact that various users see various things. It is important to reduce things and leave only what people actually use, this is a known technique in software development to make things more pleasant to the user. This is based on usage patterns.
In summary, our objectives are:
- Ease of administration and TCO (SaaS, multi-tenancy, provisioning)
- Open access (Gold - enabling open access from hybrid journals / Green - institutional repositories discoverability)
- Future directions: new metrics, item level services, A/B testing
Tamar Sadeh, Director of Marketing, Ex Libris
I will give you an update on some of the things I've been working on.
Ranking: This is about subtelties and balance. It is a complexe process and to decide what is more important at a certain point in time. We try to take everything into account. The whole point about ranking is the tuning. When we speak to each other we tune in. There are 3 things to look at in ranking: the query, the document, and the user who gives the context of the query. So we look at the match between the query and the item. We also know that not all documents are the same, some are more significant than others. Finally we look at the user and take into account their discipline and their academic degree. That may say something about the in-depth quality of items looked for. The query shows the broadness of the topic.
So in Primo 4.0, we have been working on tuning the parameters, dealing for example with recency and the significance of the materials types (analysing the kind of material we have and ranking more the ones that we consider more significant, for example journal articles compared to newspaper articles etc.). We have developed personalised ranking, which as mentioned takes into account academic degree and disciplines, but users have to agree to that. We felt it was important that users are aware of that.
Example: a query "memory AND efficiency" would mean something different to a psychology student or a technology student. So we have made a list of disciplines but this may still change in the future (more will likely be added). We have also made sure people can use more than one discipline (check boxes). At the moment, institutions can't change this list, but you can change or translate the names or remove some. In the future we will also allow a default discipline to be selected.
Next on our agenda:
- We want to improve full-text searching
- Special handling of pecularities, e.g. very short metadata
- Add other impact factors
- Enhance linguistic capabilities
In the long term:
- Add PageRank measurements
- A/B testing
- Develop searching for formulas (mathematical)
Ido Peled, Primo Product Manager, Ex Libris
I want to give you an update since the last IGeLU meeting. Primo continues to grow at the same pace as last year. We have more than 1000 institutions using Primo and a lot have already upgraded to version 4.0. We also have a voting process (NERS) which has allowed the discussion of enhancements. We are moving to an agile development methodology. This means we can improve functionalities in a rapid way and you can constantly upgrade, instead of having one-shot bigger and slower changes.
Primo Version 4.0
Based on what we promised to do in May 2011, we are happy to say that all of this has been achieved. Examples:
- Improving support for consortia and multi-tenant environments
- Personalised ranking
- Multi-facet selection: we have added options and features, for example the possibility of excluding or including various facets. This provides more choice
- Exporting formats
- Sharing results in Facebook: so this is not only about "liking" things but making them more usable
Beyond the scope of version 4.0, there are examples of integration of other functionalities, for example Cardiff has integrated syndetics and links to the content where available. We also provide the option of searching WorldCat within Primo. Those options are available on EL Commons.
MetaLib+
We've added the option of customising MetaLib+ using CSS and html. We have also provided options to deep linking which means you could start your search from your library and have all the pre-set options available. We also have multiple personal quicksets, so users can define their own quicksets, combining different databases etc.
Browsing
We will soon provide browsing functionalities over four different entities: subject headins, call number, author and title. Initially this will be in Alma, Aleph and Voyager. But for Aleph and Voyager, the call number browsing will need a few extra adjustments so that will be available in 2013. In Primo, this will be available next month.
Enhancement resulting from the NERS voting system
- Enhancing the display of FRBR groups: we will enable this option
- Linking sign in and location tabs, so users can continue their work with no interruption
- Better page navigation
- Bx Hot articles in Primo: this will be set as default but can be removed
Primo back-office demo: We have made short videos providing explanations on the walk through the back office tasks. This is in the pipeline and will be made available soon.
Primo Central
The number of institutions continues to grow. The searching depends on the time of the year. We are also intending to add more content, including for example Credo Reference, GeoRef, BL Ethos, Emerald e-books and e-journals, etc. We have already a strong focus on research data but we will extend this by adding institutional repositories.
We will add Wikipedia in Primo Central. This is a controversial subject so we made a survey to ask ussers what they would think about this. 1/3 of the responses were positive and English the favoured language. So we thought we would add wikipedia but make it optional.
There is content not indexed directly in Primo Central but we receive a list of databases whose content is available when activated in Primo Central so those also provide extra options and content.
Finally we encourage you to participate in the NISO Open discovery Initiative (ODI) survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QBXZXSB . We also encourage you to upgrade to version 4.0 and to give us your feedback.
Questions and Answers
Q: About registration of institutional repository, can we define the format used, for example complexe xml?
A: We'll start with simple DC standard but afterwards we'll be looking at extending the options
Q: Call number browsing: how are you going to normalise the data for call numbers, as there are so diverse?
A: We'll be adding normalisation in the out of the box version
Q: Can you make the Primo back office easier to use? There is walkthrough and A/B testing, but it's very time consuming, things need to be changed in more than one place etc.
A: We received enhancement requests so if you want specific things let us know. We are putting a lot of development efforts in improving things and are listening to your suggestions but in the last NERS voting, there was nothing about the back office. We hope the walkthrough videos will assist. A lot of the request about the back office are about making cleare how to do things and describing how to do a task and that's why we've made those videos.
Q: What about searching chemical formulas?
A: The keyboard with mathematical formulas can be switched to chemical formulas
Q: Will you make service pack applications safer?
A: There are a few instructions. You can make a lot of changes in Primo, it is a challenge on our side as well when changes are made. We need to find appropriate procedures. We definitely take this into account.
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