Title: An architecture for the aggregation and analysis of scholarly usage
data.

Abstract:

Although recording of usage data is common in scholarly information services,
its exploitation for the creation of value-added services remains limited due
to  concerns regarding, among others, user privacy, data validity, and the lack
of accepted standards for the representation, sharing and aggregation of usage
data.  The creation of services that build on collections of usage logs
aggregated across information services and communities is even more rare, as
their emergence is additionally hindered by the lack of accepted technical and
legal frameworks to share and aggregate usage logs.  This paper presents a
technical, standards-based architecture for sharing usage information, which we
have designed and implemented.  In this architecture, OpenURL-compliant linking
servers aggregate usage information of a specific user community as it
navigates the distributed information environment that it has access to.  This
usage information is made OAI-PMH harvestable so that usage information exposed
by many linking servers can be aggregated to facilitate the creation of
value-added services with a reach beyond that of a single community or a single
information service.  This paper also discusses issues that were encountered
when implementing the proposed approach, and it presents preliminary results
obtained from analyzing a large-scale usage data set obtained from a federation
of linking servers.

Bio: Johan Bollen is Assistant Professor at the Computer Science department of
Old Dominion University, which he joined in 2002. He was an assistant
researcher at the University of Brussels from 1994-1999 and held a position at
the Computer and Computational Science Division (CCS3) and Research Library of
the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1999 to 2001.  He obtained his PhD in
Experimental Psychology from the University of Brussels in 2001. His research
focuses on studies of user behavior in digital information systems with
applications to scientometrics and recommender systems for digital libraries.
He is presently on leave of absence to work on a research project at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory for the 2005-2006 academic year.