Although for many of us, summer is our favorite season, there’s something to be said for anticipating autumn. Here in New England we’ve been enjoying a warmer season than past summers so I for one am looking forward to cool nights and crispness again, if not a decrease in daily light. I can tell by the upticks in correspondence and other activities that our customers are now on their way back from their holidays and are planning for the start of the academic calendar — at least in the northern hemisphere.
The bX scholarly article recommender has been having a hot summer too. We’re now numbering over 300 institutions, including several of the very top academic sites in the world. We released development which allows bX to be utilized in various library interfaces and worked with customers of Serials Solutions 360 Link to include it in their service menus. Server stats are higher than ever. Feels like there’s no stopping us!
And summer’s not always calm for students either. This week I received a comment from Adam, a masters’ student in engineering in the UK. (How many students take the time to write to the library software company?! Those engineers!)
But it was great fuel: “I have just used bX for the first time and am very impressed…I expected there to be a fair bit of repetition between the suggestions and my existing results [saved in RefWorks], but to my surprise and delight the tool returned many papers I had not yet seen…this is a very promising development and seems already quite powerful. I would love to see continued development of this tool and look forward to using it in the future.”
Well, Adam, we look forward to developing it for you!
As students return to school, this could be a prime time to run a free 30-day trial of bX and add a feedback link to the service. You just might be surprised at what they say!
August 6, 2010
