Ephemeral and Persistent Personalization in Adaptive Information Access to Scholarly Publications on the Web

We show how personalization techniques can be exploited to implement more adaptive and effective information access systems in electronic publishing. We distinguish persistent (or long term) and ephemeral (or short term) personalization, and we describe how both of them can be profitably applied in information filtering and retrieval systems used, via a specialized Web portal, by physicists in their daily job. By means of several experimental results, we demonstrate that persistent personalization is needed and useful for information filtering systems, and ephemeral personalization leads to more effective and usable information retrieval systems.