Recommender Services in Scientific Digital Libraries

Abstract

In this article we give a survey of the current practice and state-of-the-art of recommender services in scientific digital libraries. With the notable exception of amazon.com and CiteSeer which do not qualify as proper scientific libraries our survey revealed that in scientific libraries recommender services are still not in wide use — despite the considerable benefits they offer for students and scientists. This fact can at least partially be explained by mechanism design problems which exist for the basic types of recommender systems and decreased funding for scientific libraries. Next, we present the principles of four recommender services developed at the Universitat Karlsruhe (TH), namely the explicit review and rating service of the library of the Universitat Karlsruhe (TH), the implicit basic “Others also searched …” service (BibTip) of the library of the Universitat Karlsruhe (TH), the prototypes of its small sample and its adaptive variant. A discussion of the current industry trend towards social spaces and societies and its potential for scientific digital libraries concludes this contribution.