Using the Portal for the Discovery of Discipline-Based Electronic Resources

Abstract

Contemporary society is at once omnivorous and highly selective. People today are coming to expect to have all manner of products and services at their fingertips, and simultaneously, they want them customized for a particular individual. You can order Levi's jeans programmed to your personal body specifications and conceivably, you could choose from any textile in the world to make a totally unique pair of pants. Nick Donatiello, president of Odyssey, a marketing research firm, speaking at the JSTOR American Library Association June 2001 meeting, noted the struggle of the big TV networks to retain market share in a world in which the consumer increasingly prefers to view content he has profiled to watch at his convenience. Since we can now access hundreds of channels through cable and satellite, the consumer wants a tool to filter the diverse content available. New devices such as TiVo enable viewers to create "My channel" through a definition of preferences. The software interprets the viewer's preferences from this profile and independently identifies categories of programs which are consistent with the consumer's taste and previous selections. In the world of books, we are familiar with this feature from Amazon's "Customers who bought this book also bought.."