Authors: Timo Borst, Nils Witt
Since their beginnings, libraries and related cultural institutions were confident in the fact that users had to visit them in order to search, find and access their content. With the emergence and massive use of the World Wide Web and associated tools and technologies, this situation has drastically changed: if those institutions still want their content to be found and used, they must adapt themselves to those environments in which users expect digital content to be available. Against this background, the general approach of the EEXCESS project is to ‘inject’ digital content (both metadata and object files) into users' daily environments like browsers, authoring environments like content management systems or Google Docs, or e-learning environments. Content is not just provided, but recommended by means of an organizational and technical framework of distributed partner recommenders and user profiles. Once a content partner has connected to this framework by establishing an Application Program Interface (API) for constantly responding to the EEXCESS queries, the results will be listed and merged with the results of the other partners. Depending on the software component installed either on a user’s local machine or on an application server, the list of recommendations is displayed in different ways: from a classical, text-oriented list, to a visualization of metadata records.
