[Asis-l] Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web

[gerrymck]

Colleagues/

A Most Interesting Discovery This WeekEnd …

/Gerry

Hull D, Pettifer SR, Kell DB (2008)
Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next
Generation Web.
PLoS Comput Biol 4(10): e1000204.

Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information
electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation
material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described
as "thought in cold storage," and unfortunately many digital libraries
can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places.

In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital
libraries for the computational biologist, including PubMed, IEEE
Xplore, the ACM digital library, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus,
Citeseer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illustrate the current
process of using these libraries with a typical workflow, and
highlight problems with managing data and metadata using URIs.

We then examine a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley,
Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit
the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable,
integrated, and accessible places.

We conclude with how these applications may begin to help achieve a
digital defrost, and discuss some of the issues that will help or
hinder this in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in
the future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to
both humans and machines.

Graphic and Linked Contents Available At

[ http://tinyurl.com/692uh3 ]

Regards,

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu

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