EEXCESS – How does it work?

As we are entering the new project phase, the prototype tools deployment, we would like to present these prototypes in a series of blog posts. We will describe what they can do for you during your online research and what makes them so special.

Update: The browser extension is available now in the Chrome Web Store.

#1 The Browser Extension

The Chrome extension is the most feature-rich prototype and serves as the main development and demonstration channel. The source code is available at github.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

 Imagine, you are researching a topic on Wikipedia, for example “Women in the Workforce”. Just click on the EEXCESS button on the right and the results from scientific and cultural databases related to the the issue are shown. Small icons indicate the data source.

Preview pictures are shown, if available.

If you click on one of the results, a new tab opens showing the original place of the metadata set, here: EconBiz online database. Here you find all the information you need about accessibility, availability and copyrights.

An example from the Europeana database.

You can rate the results by marking them “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, to receive better results in the future.

There also is the possibility to put in search terms manually in the search slot.

Also, when you mark words on the current website, a new search is triggered, shown by the number of new search results above the EEXCESS icon:

If you then click on the EEXCESS button again, the new results with items related to the marked passage are shown:

You can filter the results with the innovative FacetScape feature. It is already available online as a beta feature of EconBiz here. Try it out!

You can edit your user profile with some demographic data to receive better results.

You can also add your personal topics of interest.

Control your privacy settings and decide, what information is sent to the recommender!

Of course, the extension works with any website, not just Wikipedia. So far, we have integrated recommendations from Europeana, EconBiz, Mendeley and KIM BL. More databases will follow soon.

This is work in progress and we depend on your feedback. There will be a direct contact link in the application to report bugs or leave a comment.

There will also be a WordPress plug-in and a Google Docs plug-in, which we are going to present in upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned! Or subscibe to our newsletter here.