Exploring new applications of scholarly usage data.

                                  Johan Bollen
                         Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Abstract:

The lecture will focus on applications of scholarly usage data that are 
presently being explored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). 
I will first provide an overview of how existing efforts deal with the 
problem of recording, storing and aggregating scholarly usage data, and 
will outline a framework that was developed at LANL to address some of 
the shortcomings of these approaches using existing, open standards. 
Next, the lecture will focus on various applications and results 
generated on the basis of several large-scale usage data sets acquired 
by means of this framework. In particular, I will discuss the 
possibility of mapping the structure of the scholarly community for 
more accurate collection management, ranking of scholarly items 
according to novel metrics of impact, and recommender systems derived 
from large-scale usage data. The lecture will conclude by discussing 
recent results pertaining to how social network models of a user 
community can be used to track the spread of news, and how the 
demographic characteristics of these communities may yield insights 
into their perception of scholarly impact.